There Is a Reason That People With CF Used to Move Near the Beach

Can winter kill a person?

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Can winter kill a person?

There is a reason that people with CF used to move near the beach, if they could, because salt is such a huge part of our treatment.

We breathe in hypertonic saline and flush it through our sinuses like we are living by my Mom’s constant cure called out throughout childhood. “Just go in the ocean,” she’d say (we the great fortune of growing up along the beach until my teens), “The salt water will help.”

The salt water would give me sea lice, Man o’ War stings and rip tides, yes… but it was better than the chlorine eye infections of pools and the heat stroke of others on dusty beaches without war to temper their warmth.

I live “in the mountains” now, or did… and wish to always be near water or looking at a peak somehow. “Water or mountains,” I say, as wars are carried out around the world and I demand certain scenery for sanity like a Veruca Salt of spoiled disposition (Not the band but… I wish I was in a band as much as I long for salt).

My health almost always tanks in the winter: one CF exacerbation after the next. But I’ve also had a major surgery for literally every single summer for the last few years. So, I feel scroll-jealousy, frequently, for all carrying on with life like it used to be. Seasons that change like latte flavors; The idea of being spoiled as simple as a life with a weekend to say, “What do you want to do today?” I haven’t known that for so long, but it’s so easy to forget what a gift it is that we are alive for any season at all. So many of my friends long parted…. Children gone forever… And we think, “I didn’t get as much beach time this year,” or something of that kind.

I know that almost every getaway, beautiful meal, or new outfit we see online is likely laced with side squabbles, bad moods, and stress.

As a new season is beginning, I start to mourn the last (always, always, summer) and wonder dramatic things out loud like “How many more winters do I have in me?” while my northerner partner wishes to move to Canada (can’t blame him) or the arctic, and I feel an ache in my bones just imagining the lack warmth, the salt, the heating pad of it all.

My life is like an Aeschylus play: most of the violence takes place off stage. I hate detailing the negatives because, though I appreciate a good tragedy, I don’t need to write one. But that can feel dishonest too. If you see someone’s “vacation” or “summer” images, no one would know that I was having massive stomach bleed that day, or infections, or nerves on fire like heat on heat. It was actually Aeschylus himself who said, “He who learns must suffer”…. And maybe the biggest lesson we can learn in life is that the only way to understand is to know, and knowing hurts. Maybe it’s better to believe that every beautiful photo and season change is just warmth and salt and wellness.

The tragedy of life is not the ever-present tragedy but the fact we see through only one lens.

“Why fight so hard for life when you can’t afford to live it?” I used to think.

It’s hard to see every side to every scroll, but at the end of the day, remember that we never know when we could be wishing for the chance to suffer that season again.

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