“It’s time for your treatment!” Chimed the nurse. She always looked overly cheerful, perhaps it was to distract from the fact she was exhausted every hour of everyday.

“Do we have to do that today? I’m more than happy rotting here,” I responded

The nurse smiled, she had been treating me for years and was more than educated on how to deal with me and my terminal patient humour. Being hospitalised for more time than I’d been at home seemed daunting to the general public but to me this was my home and my nurse- Edna- made it that much more welcoming.

“No you cannot just rot here! What happened to our New Year’s resolution?” Said Edna with a huge smile on her face.

“The one which we both know was made to make ourselves feel better about being in hospital on New Year’s Eve?!” I retorted, trying to keep myself from reciprocating her inviting grin.

Edna laughed, a sound so rare to hear in this place but was so present where she was.

Vest and wires in hand, she strolled over to my bed and began preparing me for my ECMO, a vibrating vest said to aid people with CF in breathing. I struggled to believe this, I knew all the science behind it since I’ve been vibrating for 15 years now but I’m sure doctors just issued this as treatment to have some amusement in their jobs, an opportunity to laugh in a place so full of sadness.

“So remember, take your ..”

I put my hand out to stop her speaking

“You make have a degree in this but I’ve been living it for 15 years, inhale my nebuliser while the ecmo is running, that was what you was going to say wasn’t it?’ I said, voice venomous yet light hearted in essence

“ Wow, look at you, the patient becoming the doctor. It’s quite impressive Jack” Edna responded, genuinely full of glee and not in the slightest irritated at how I’d gone about demonstrating my knowledge.

She gave me one last look and then left the room, leaving me alone with nothing but a vibrating vest and my thoughts.

I sat there for a while, trying to just breathe alongside my thoughts. My chest rose and fell yet it felt as though there was a ton of bricks chained to my chest stopping it from fulfilling its purpose. Breathing was easy I thought to myself, even babies can do it, yet I have to be violently shaken to even get semi good at it. A chuckle escaped my mouth, it was an amusing thought I’d conjured, something so simple to the majority was the thing that would kill me. I wasn’t naive, I knew that every breathe I took would take me closer to my last and not in a way that sarcastic, flippant people go on about as in ‘each day we breathe we get closer to our last’, in a way that the simple art of breathing would simply be my death. One day a breath I take will not be sufficient and the subsequent one the same, until i eventually am no longer breathing at all. Well no longer semi breathing. Life for me was borrowed time, borrowed from the various medical equipment that sat around me in the hospital room, stolen from the various researchers working tirelessly night and day to come up with some cure for this awful disease and taxed from those around me who don’t want to see my take my last breath. My last semi breath. Memories of before constant hospital visits came rushing violently to my head and danced in a flurry of the past’s simplicity and bathed me in my ignorance and lack of gratitude. If I had know then how thankful I would be to inhale a deep breathe and fill my lungs with the vibrancy the world offered and exhale everything my body couldn’t soak up, if I only I could go back and let my chest know each time it rose and fell without hardship how thankful I was for it and how much it meant to me then maybe I’d be living in such simple times now.

The violent shaking from the ECMO vest dragged me back to reality, away from the land of health and back to the reality of semi living. Edna walked in just as a tear rolled down my face.

“I wish I could just breathe” I said between sobs.