Blue-Eyed Breather

Dear friends and family,             Hello!   I hope you all are having a wonderful start to 2016. It’s hard to believe another year has come and gone and here I am again, writing my yearly CF letter. Since my last letter, I graduated Summa Cum Laude from Baylor University with a bachelor’s degree in communication sciences and disorders, a minor in linguistics, and BIC Honors. If you recall from my letter last year, only 30% of CF adults graduate college, and I am so proud and thrilled to officially be in that minority! Over the summer, I had a port replacement surgery. My pediatric port just wasn’t cutting it anymore; it was finicky and didn’t like to draw back blood.   My new port sticks out more obviously than the pediatric port, but it works so much better! In August, I started graduate school at the University of Texas at Dallas for speech pathology. UTD has one of the best speech-language pathology programs in t...

Exactly four years ago today, I began my blogging journey at Blue-Eyed Breather. I started the blog at one of the lowest times in my life. In January of 2012, I had a severe bout of depression. Between the newness of college fading away, being alone in a single dorm room for health reasons, having some trust issues stemming from high school friendships gone awry, dealing with the reality of CF in a city far from family, and then starting a new medication for digestion called Reglan that can have severe neurological side effects, my body couldn't take it anymore, and I broke down. As a fierce, independent, intelligent woman, I thought I had to push through and stay strong. I thought if I prayed hard enough, everything would return to normal. But the harder I tried to remain steady, the faster I seemed to fall. I would cry on a regular basis and not really know why (this coming from a girl who cries maybe once a month...maybe). I longed for home, and when I would leave Austin, I woul...

Tomorrow, I'm going in for a bronchoscopy at 8am. I have to be at the hospital at 6am, no food or drink after 11pm. For those of you who don't know, a bronchoscopy is a procedure where a doctor goes in via the oral cavity and through the throat to get to the lungs so he can take pictures of the lungs and get good, deep cultures of what bacteria is growing. It's helpful to make sure we aren't missing treating a bacteria growing in my lungs and causing me problems. I will have to have general anesthesia, which means there is the chance of complications related to that. If you would, please be sending prayers and good thoughts tomorrow, that the procedure is successful and that I don't have any complications. Thank you for your love and support!

Today's topic on the blog: complacency. Most CF people go through a phase of not being compliant with all their treatments. It just happens. There are so many therapies to keep track of, and it can get overwhelming. Many people with CF have a moment when they want to forget about their CF and just be "normal". This uncompliant phase lasts varying amounts of time, but usually it lasts until the person is hit over the head with the fact that they're only hurting themselves when they refuse to keep up with their treatments and that their health will go downhill fast without the help of current medications. In my life, I've never really had a moment when I've flat out refused to be compliant. No, I'm not saying I've never skipped a treatment or never forgotten to take pills. But I've never deliberately chosen to ignore the advice of doctors and prescribed therapies. I guess I've always had a feeling that my doctors truly want what is best for m...