Nothing in life can be explained perfectly. That’s one of the first things that you learn in a statistical analysis class. You can add as many variables as you like, and you still will never explain the full phenomenon. Why am I the only one with Cystic Fibrosis in my family? Well, you can start by pulling out science and a Punnett square, explaining how traits are passed down through generations, etcetera, but you still never know the full explanation. Why did I make it twenty years before being hospitalized, when so many other kids with CF are admitted frequently? How is it that I am seen through other people’s eyes as perfectly healthy?

If you can’t tell already, I love my statistics. That’s my favorite thing about college – statistics courses, especially ones relating to economics. My name is Michelle Thrun, I am a twenty-one year old female studying economics and math at the University of Colorado, and I have Cystic Fibrosis.

I was diagnosed with CF when I was born. As you would imagine, my parents were really scared, with me being their first child and all. And I believe that played a really big role in the way I grew up.
 

Growing up, there was always a routine. Wake up at 6 AM, drink a chocolate scandishake and watch the news or SpongeBob SquarePants while doing my therapy. Then my mom would wake up my sister and brother and we would get ready to leave to drive the half an hour down the mountain to school. Our pets lived outside because I couldn’t live with them in the house – which in the end probably led them to live a happier life. They got to live free and chase squirrels, what else could you want! Play-dates occurred at my house for the most part, sometimes because it was easier to bring kids to my house then have my parents drive all the way to town (I grew up in the mountains in a small town in Colorado named Glenwood Springs), but mostly because my parents knew our house would always be clean and sanitized and I wouldn’t be exposed to unnecessary germs. My parents would hound me everyday with “did you do your huff coughs today?” or “you can’t do therapy tonight you have to do it in the morning before you go to school.” As annoying as it was at the time, I am deeply and eternally grateful for that. 

Even to this day, I still have a similar routine. Granted, moving to college and learning to be self-sufficient, while also having SO much freedom to do whatever I want was a serious challenge, but after a while I got the hang of it. Every morning now I wake up, go and get my Pulmozyne and Hypertonic Saline and do therapy on the edge of my bed, scrolling through Facebook, Tumblr, or reading the Economist to pass the twenty minutes of therapy by. After that, I take my inhalers and my medications and I go about my day!

Something that always struck me as strange when I was younger was that people didn’t have a routine. When I went to CF checkups every few months in Denver, the doctors always asked me “How many times a week do you do your therapy?” “Seven” I would reply, wondering what kind of question that was, why would anyone do it any less? For me, there was no alternative; I did what I had to do to stay healthy.

For me, my health has never been an option. Whenever I got sick, my thought process would never boil down to “what am I doing this for?” Yes, being sick was always hard, especially when it limited me in things I enjoyed. Running cross-country and having to walk the rest of the 3.1-mile course because I couldn’t catch my breath was never a good feeling, yet I had to push through it. Quitting has never been an option for me, not just with my CF, but life in general. When the going gets tough, the tough don’t say “nah, I’m gonna sit this one out.”

On my 20th birthday I was put in the hospital for the first time in my life. I can blame it on a lot of factors; living situations for the first year of college being too unsanitary (if you have ever seen a dorm community shower, you know what I’m talking about), or from stress trying to adjust to living on my own, or simply just because I didn’t take good enough care of myself as I once did. Being in the hospital was hard; I was in the middle of the third semester of college, in a hospital 200 miles away from my parents and nearly 40 miles from my friends. For the first time in my life I felt truly helpless. It was hard to see how this minor road bump was going to affect the rest of my life. 

In the end I think it was my saving grace. It put a lot of things into perspective, things I think I had begun to lose sight of. It showed me just how much my family cared about me, who my real friends were, where I wanted to see my life in the future. I realized that, while I had always been the healthy child with no visible evidence of a chronic illness, I was one. And I had to take care of myself as such. I got back on track on my schoolwork, and since then I found a major and a career path that I am not only good at, but one that I love as well. I made some major lifestyle changes in terms of the people that I wanted to associate myself with, and I took my health more seriously than I ever had. Six months after getting out of the hospital, I ran my first half marathon in Aspen, Colorado.

I believe having my health as the end goal has made a huge impact on the way that I live my life, and why I am as healthy as I am today. I cannot explain it 100%, because it’s statistically impossible (obviously). Regardless of the answers and explanations to my questions, and to how my life has turned out, in the end you have to learn to live with the cards life has dealt you in the best way possible, and I believe that I have done just that. Keep living, and keep loving.

I have Cystic Fibrosis; it doesn’t have me.

Michelle Thrun is a 21-year old female from Glenwood Springs, Colorado. She currently resides in Boulder, Colorado studying quantitative economics and math at the University of Colorado. She enjoys reading nerdy math books, being outside, running, snowboarding, curling up in bed with a cup of tea watching Gossip Girl, cheering on the Colorado Buffaloes and the Colorado Avalanche, and spending time with those whom she loves. She can be contacted at Michelle.Thrun@colorado.edu, or followed on Facebook or Instagram at michellethrun.

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