Blog
Musings on Living and Laughing with Cystic Fibrosis
Basketball and Life
My partner and I broke out of the learned helplessness built up over the last year and a half of COVID craziness and attended a Stanford Women’s basketball game last weekend. It was not a huge risk. Both of us are triple vaccinated and wore masks the entire game. Only...
Revulsion
Maybe you know the sound of the “CF cough.” It is wet and has a gurgling quality. And when you have seen with your own eyes what is actually doing the gurgling, it can be a repulsive sound. It can cause you to gag, because you know at a cellular level what the sound...
Why I Practice
These days I spend about an hour in a daily sitting meditation practice. There are other times during the day when I meditate, but these are shorter and much less ‘formal.’ I may be out walking, listening to music and looking at nature, just enjoying myself and at...
Jean
Jean was a traditional mom. Born 98 years ago in a small town in Nebraska, she was never one to buck convention. When she married her high school sweetheart, she converted to Catholicism to please her husband, and proceeded to churn out babies. I was the last of...
Library Days
Library Days were the best part of summer. This wasn’t just because I loved to read and the excursion to the city library resulted in six (the maximum number allowed) new books. It was more than this. It was my own version of therapy that was necessitated due to the...
The Hot Seat
When I did my surgical pathology fellowship many, many decades ago, I did a two-month stint at what was fondly named, the ‘Hot Seat.’ The Hot Seat duty was not pleasant. In fact, for a person with performance anxiety or any sense of perfectionism, it was brutal....
Julie Desch
JulieDesch@gmail.com