Jo Franco still remembers the moment she realized that her nose worked. Growing up in Wilmington, a Los Angeles neighborhood dotted with oil refineries and next to one of the largest port complexes in the country, she’d always assumed she had a fever, or allergies: “I could never breathe through my nose at all,” she told me. But when she moved away from the city for college, her breathing suddenly got easier. “It was this wonderful surprise,” she said. “I could smell lemons.” Franco can still map Wilmington’s refineries, and still remembers the chemicals they’d release into the sky. At 28, after moving back to California, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer.
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