Cystic Fibrosis Steals Time and Breath from Me

I'd like to share with you a poignant quote by C.S. Lewis, one of my favorite authors and theologians:

He wrote: "The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is."

In other words, our lives are bounded and measured by time; none of us knows how much time he or she has. After all, any of us could be hit by a bus at any time, right? Wrong! I looked up those statistics once. Did you know that the odds of being struck and killed by a bus are only 1 in 10 million?

By stark contrast, the odds of a person with Cystic Fibrosis dying before reaching age 37 are 1 in 2.

I have cystic fibrosis. When I was first diagnosed, the doctors told my parents that I may not live to celebrate my 10th birthday. As you can clearly see, I've beaten that statistic, but I'm still in a fight for my life, and it's a race against time. In order to give you a better picture of what this fight looks like, I'd like to describe some of the ways that cystic fibrosis not only steals my breath, but literally takes away the precious hours of my life.

My fight begins each morning before I even get out of bed. As I lie there beside my husband, my breathing sounds like crackling cellophane because of all the mucus that has collected in my lungs during the night. I spend the first 5 to 10 minutes of my day just coughing-coughing so that I can breathe well enough to get dressed and get moving.

Then of course there's all the medication I need just to function as well as possible. Medications like:

I take no fewer than 11 separate medications to manage my CF. I wish this meant that I only had to take 11 pills, but that's not the case. I take approximately 50 pills each day.

Each enzyme, each multivitamin, and especially each inhaled medication, is a brazen reminder that my body is held hostage by a disease that has no cure. And even with all this, there's more. Inhaled medications can take up to 3 hours total during my day.