They call it the Purge.
You have experienced, in a modest way, something like it in the
waning days of a bad cold, when your lungs finally expel their
accumulated gunk. The rattle in your chest quiets. Your sinuses
clear. You smell again: the animal sweetness of your children’s
hair, the metallic breeze stirring a late-summer night. Your body,
which oozed and groaned under the yoke of illness, is now a
perfectly humming machine. Living is easy—everything is easy.
How wonderful it is to breathe, simply breathe.
Imagine, though, that you had never been able to simply
breathe. Imagine that mucus—thick, copious, dark—had been
accumulating since the moment you were born, thwarting air and
trapping microbes to fester inside your lungs. That you spent an
hour each day physically pounding the mucus out of your airways,
but even then, your lung function would spiral only downward,
in what amounted to a long, slow asphyxiation. This was what
it once meant to be born with cystic fibrosis.