There is no greater instinct than a mother's need to protect, and I have had to willfully disregard it countless times in my journey with CF.
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As a hospital administrator, I try to apply what I've learned from receiving care as a person with CF to provide better health care for my patients.
Hospital stays are hardly a party. But since they're a part of life with CF, let's get the most out of them and help ourselves make them fewer and farther between.
A few years ago, CF started to take its toll on me. I kept getting sick, going on and off IVs, going in and out of the hospital. But through it all, I found a silver lining.
When I was young, my parents tried to increase the appeal of hospital stays by calling them “sleepovers.” But as I got older, I realized that these two things are, in fact, not the same.
The only thing that is certain in my life is the uncertainty of my teenage daughter's next hospital stay. Despite this, she has somehow managed to supervise her own academic life from a hospital room.
I never had the luxury of time to reflect on the hardships that I experienced fighting cystic fibrosis because I was too focused on that particular day’s struggle. Still, there are two experiences that have stuck with me even though they were more than 10 years ago.