Columns

I went to bed hungry last night, and I woke up scared of food. This is my new reality. Although this is an old-new one I’ve lived (and lived to forget) time and again, I still don’t have it mastered. Years ago, I couldn’t eat more than mashed potatoes and…

I recently saw a meme in which a person is smiling or laughing in the first panel, then looks utterly dismayed in the second. The second panel’s overlay reads: “Tfw [that feeling when] I realize I’m being perceived by everybody else who ever interacts with me.” This meme is one…

I am going to write something no one wants to hear: Honesty is best when it’s pretty. Sometimes I am that person. I can smile through the suffering. I can point my toes while pieces are ignored. I can pretend that the realities of fighting for this life aren’t less…

Two of the most powerful words in our vocabulary are “me, too.” Many of us tend to isolate ourselves when our circumstances are challenging. We turn inward rather than outward because we feel shame about what we’re going through. When we find that person or group of people that gets…

I am in a bathroom feeling sick, writing about being sick, not wanting to be sick. I don’t want this to be my life or what I’m writing about. I get sick of saying it. You must get sick of reading it, or associating me with it, or scrolling…

I’ve often written that “the disease itself isn’t the worst part, rather it’s the …” The medication side effects, the childhood trauma, the dread, the blah, blah, blah. Today, it’s the social exclusion. Post-transplant, I’m not very excluded. Sure, I can’t eat sushi with my friends, and most…

I used to be ashamed about my insecurities. I believed that as a man, I was supposed to be strong. I was supposed to silently hate myself, my appearance, and my body, while projecting an immutable air of confidence. That was the “manly” way. My masculinity, my…

Staying 6 feet apart is not new to me. It’s not new because I have atypical cystic fibrosis and have been doing it for years. Most people know about this rule by now. They’ve either lived it, heard it (backwashed in this very column), or seen it in a…

Hearing the words “blood transfusion” still sends chills down my spine. The emotional response my entire body felt when I heard those words for the first time from a doctor is still traumatic. “I wasn’t supposed to get one of these,” I thought. I had just had a double-lung transplant…

At the start of November, I was infected with COVID-19. My heart rammed repeatedly and rapidly against my sternum, which had been broken four years earlier by lung transplant surgeons. I was dizzy, reeling from the local health department’s phone call informing me of my exposure to a person with…