This story was produced by Grist and co-published with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation . It is part of the Grist series  Vital Signs , exploring the ways climate change affects your health. This reporting initiative is made possible thanks to support from the Wellcome Trust. They never thought the fires would reach them. They lived in cities, after all, far from the parched, combustible wilderness. There’s the woman who never expected to have to grab her 1-year-old out of her bed in the middle of the night, shielding her soft head from a hailstorm of flaming embers as she dashed to the car. Or the mom of two who wound up on the beach holding her youngest, a 9-week-old baby, wondering how she would swim if the fires bearing down on her from the hills above forced her into the ocean. Or the pregnant asthmatic who had to decide where to put her air purifier as suffocating smoke blanketed her neighborhood — in her own bedroom, or the bedroom of her eldest child.…