Growing Up with a Chronic Disease

Growing up with Cystic Fibrosis was a challenge but my parents and family helped me live a very happy and vibrant, young life.

At a very young age, my body was dependent on many medications to help me battle against the inward physical deterioration that was taking place in my lungs. I was also dependent on enzymes that I learned to swallow to help my body digest my food. But most of all, I was dependent on my parents and family who so awesomely took on this challenge and placed it in God’s hands. Each and every day they so creatively found ways to allow me to live my life as a normal little girl with such abnormal routines.

Now, as the parent of a child with special needs I am so grateful for all the sacrifices my parents made on my behalf. Having a child with a chronic disease; your constantly in thought of medications, equipment, learning new medical lingo, huge expenses, hospital stays, doctor visits, limitations, emotional needs, and what their future may hold. I am sure the list could go on.

I would love to hear a perspective from a child with a chronic disease or parent and how they can relate to these sacrifices. How they look upward, when your world comes crashing down on you. What creative methods you have used, that have helped your child. And what good have you seen from such a terrible fate?

As I look back on the many wonderful things that my Heavenly Father has done in my life and think of how He used my CF and certain life circumstances, I can only be amazed and thankful for how He has used these burdens and turned them into blessings, both for me and for those around me.

“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” {Psalm 139:13, 14}