Columns

In 2013, miles above the Pacific, flight attendants and passengers stared silently as a man yelled — literally yelled — at me for coughing too much. In meltdown mode, he didn’t care for my explanations that I have a noncontagious lung disease, nor that cough suppressants make me sick.

September is Self-improvement Month. It’s a timely reminder to stay woke on my growth game. Stagnation is not an option for me. It often leads to complacency, which then leads to murdered dreams. With my new lease on life, I do not have the luxury of staying the…

“I want to take my mask off.” I said these words to my daughters two days ago in a Barnes & Noble bookstore, even though I have pontificated novels to the contrary since this novel virus hit. In a world besieged by terms like “anti-masker” and “pro-mask,” I can’t help…

“Do you have an advance directive?” This is something most of us with CF have been asked before. For someone with a chronic illness, this question becomes as familiar as answering my name in one giant run-on sentence — “Bailey-Anne-Vincent-September-17th-1986” — and knowing what’s coming next. My name and…

Life is hard, ain’t it? Sometimes all you need is a long cry session over hibachi in Toronto. And so that’s exactly what I had with fellow Cystic Fibrosis News Today columnist Lara Govendo. She has a mental health counseling degree, so she carries those good life-altering words. Over…

Transplant anniversaries are hard for me. And they’re wonderful. They’re sad, then great again. Up, down, and all around seems to be the cycle of my emotions. These anniversaries affect my body, too. It’s as if I’m reliving the days leading up to my transplant all over again. I…

“I’m worried about your health.” I have heard this more times than I can count. It’s normally a guise for criticism of how I’m eating, how I approached my pregnancies, or how I look. For a long time, I tried to appreciate the concern. That’s how we show love, right?…

Being a parent sucks sometimes. We talk about how we “don’t talk about this enough,” but then we sort of do through rose-colored glasses and funny and frustrated columns such as these. “How come you never write honestly about what it’s like to be a sick person raising kids?”…

“I wish I had that problem!” If you’re pancreatic insufficient, you know what that dreaded joke is in response to. Gaining weight ain’t easy when your pancreas doesn’t function properly, your lungs and heart pump much too rapidly, and you’re slammed by side effects like appetite loss or nausea.

After a monstrous letdown, we need a win. Those of us with chronic illness need reminders to keep on keeping on. The glimmer of hope for better days is necessary to move forward. Rarely do we have a whole day that is good, so when we do, we cling…