My Cough

I've never liked the connotation that coughing gives. It connotes sickness, contagion, it's never "oh that cough sounds quite pleasant...." it's always "ick, that sounds AWFUL." The looks, the comments, the joking shhh's, and the "God Bless You's" (when my cough is always mistaken as a sneeze), have become second nature to me. I always smile when someone sorrowfully asks me if I'm getting sick after I hack up a lung, and say "oh... nope.... I just cough a lot." Until someone notices, I forget how gruesome my cough must sound, how, if you didn't know me, you might mistake me for having a bad case of pneumonia or bronchitis. These are things that common every day people deal with not when they are healthy, but when they are at their worst. Sometimes, frankly, I don't like being associated with someone who feels gross and disgusting, someone who people don't want to be around for fear of contamination, because most days (with the exception of when I have a cold or an exacerbation), that's not what I feel like.

On days where I'm feeling healthy, to me, my cough isn't a bad thing, and that can be hard for the greater public to understand sometimes (and reasonably so). I love the feeling of coughing up whatever is hangin' out in my lungs some days (sorry... its gross I know). My mom and a select couple friends are the only ones who can recognize a good "loose" cough over a tight painful cough. My mom will comment some days "Your cough sounds great!" There's a reason why people with cf shouldn't use cough suppressants... our coughs are a way to release the mucus in our lungs... suppress it, and that mucus is stuck there. Its like trying to breathe after you've inhaled a gulp of water at the beach. The only way to get it out is to cough.

My cough has become a part of who I am. My roommates know when I get home because they hear me coughing when I walk through the door. It tells them.... "HONEY I'M HOME!" My friends hear me coming wherever I go (though its tough to sneak up on them in that respect). To me, some days, my cough isn't something gross and disgusting, its just something I do every day. It's as natural as breathing.

CF awareness has come so far, yet some people who have heard of it only know of it because they heard of someone who it has killed. While this is a sad, unfortunate, and harsh reality of CF, it isn't everyone's reality who are still living and breathing and coughing today. CF awareness needs to be spread as something that is plaguing the living. That's why I write this blog. If I can educate just one person on the nature of my illness, on the ways in which it affects my day to day life, it makes it a lot easier for people to understand what it is people with CF might go through. The CF Foundation describes CF symptoms as having a "persistent cough" but its one thing to read about it, and another thing to see how that persistent cough is interpreted by the world, what that cough means to the persistent cougher.

Sometimes, it's tough when people in my life misunderstand my cough. In high school, I had a teacher during my study hall who wouldn't quit telling me how awful my cough sounded each day in study hall. One day, he brought in cough drops and told me to eat them because my cough was so annoying. He didn't know I had CF, and I was too infuriated and embarrassed by that point to tell him. So I packed up my things and just walked out of the class. Looking back, I wish I could have been stronger and just told him that cough drops wouldn't cure the genetic illness that was causing me to cough. But instead, I roamed the halls, teary eyed, for the rest of the class period hoping that maybe some day, more people will know about CF, and may think, some people have coughs... just like some people have a limp, or a wheelchair, or glasses. Or maybe someday, with a lot of hope, people with CF won't have a cough, and we can go on living without disrupting anyone :)