In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. – Anne Frank.

The other day, my five-year-old daughter and I found ourselves doing the pitty-pats, of all things. She was in day one of a nasty respiratory infection and said that the pressure of the vest was hurting her. So I fished out the old pastel pink and blue percussors from her memory box and brought them down to the couch. For the next fifteen minutes, I gently tapped on my daughter’s coughing body as I told her stories of the pitty-pat days gone by. 

I remember my daughter’s first pitty-pat respiratory therapy session as a five-week-old. 

I’ve recently been looking back at where technology was when I was first diagnosed with CF Related Diabetes (CFRD) in middle school. I likely had diabetes for a solid year before actually getting diagnosed. It wasn’t until after I had diabetes that I could then pinpoint and match the symptoms of what I had been feeling for the majority of 6th grade. I had constant headaches, was moody, didn’t want to do anything active, always sleeping and had blurred vision but I was told that was all puberty. At one point in 7th grade, I was put on a steroid called prednisone for a lung infection.

I first learned about the dire situation of cystic fibrosis (CF) in Guatemala when Dr. Andrew Colin of the University of Miami asked the South Florida collaboration of CF centers to include the article below in the quarterly patient newsletter. This situation struck me as painful and scary to even consider a life in which common treatments of CF could not be accessed for financial or other reasons. The fact that so few patients ever live past the age of 18 is just horrific in a world where such advanced treatments exist just beyond the geographic horizon.