Chilblains

It begins with an itch. Then comes the burning. The skin on your fingers, toes, sometimes ears or nose, turns reddish-blue, swells, becomes hard, and feels both numb and hypersensitive at once. The cold has hit something in you to which your body doesn't just respond with shivering — but with a full-blown inflammation.

Medically speaking, chilblains are a misdirected response of the fine blood vessels beneath the skin. In the cold they contract. When warmth returns, they open only hesitantly, unevenly, in a disturbed way. A congestion forms, a quiet inflammation, a tissue that can be neither properly cold nor properly warm. The circulation is there — but it stalls at the surface, exactly where you touch the world.