Days earlier, life was ordinary—no, more than ordinary. It was soft, steady, familiar. And then it wasn’t.
July 19, 2000. Lynn walked toward me and said, quietly, “Bruce… I’m having trouble breathing.” I could hear it but I couldn’t understand how it was possible.
Then she added, “I’ve been having trouble keeping weight on me.”
My throat tightened. The feeling of unreality set in, that surreal sense that things cannot possibly be going wrong when life has been so good. She had seemed so strong just recently when we went roller skating.
I tried to find words. I failed. “Wha… what should we do?”
She called her CF clinic.
While she talked, something in my mind reached for imagery—for shape, for metaphor, for anything to help me comprehend what was happening. I remembered an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where a fevered Buffy sees a demon lurking in a hospital corridor, a monster killing children. Her friends think she is hallucinating because she needs something to fight—but in the story, the monster is real.
I understood that feeling. As a therapist, I help people after injury. Not during. Not at the source. But CF was a different kind of monster—one that didn’t lurk, didn’t threaten, didn’t posture. It simply stepped out of the shadows one day and stood in front of us.
July 21. I cleared my schedule, and we made the two-hour drive to UNC in Chapel Hill.
In the exam room, the doctor showed us the oxygen saturation readings, and then the chest X-ray. I didn’t need medical training to understand what I was seeing. Dark streaks. Clouded patches. Words like mucus, infection, scarring.
Her doctor said, gently, that she needed to be admitted for IV antibiotics. Within minutes, we were no longer in an outpatient clinic.
We were in the admissions area, waiting to head up to the pulmonary wing.
While we waited for a room to be assigned, there was a brief lull— forms, clipped voices, the sound of carts rolling past.
I turned to Lynn and said, “I’ll be right back. I’m going to get a hotel room for myself.”
I walked down the hall and found a pay phone near the elevators.
I flipped to the hotel section and started calling. One place after another. I fed coins into the slot with hands that didn’t quite feel like mine, asking the same question each time—did they have a room, could I check in late.
My wife was being admitted to the hospital.
When I finally found a vacancy, I took it. I didn’t ask about price. I just needed to be close.
I returned, and we waited a little longer.
One moment: fluorescent lights and a waiting room. The next: Lynn in a hospital bed, looking smaller than she had ever looked.
I heard the nurse explain that the IV needed to run from her arm toward her heart. I heard, but I wasn’t fully present. There is a kind of dissociation that arrives not as fear, but as overload. That was the beginning of mine.
I stood beside her, trying to be steady, trying to be the person she needed. But a part of me felt like I was betraying her by allowing anyone to pierce her skin, as though my role was protection and I had somehow failed.
I leaned close to her ear. “I know they need to do this,” I whispered. “But it’s taking everything in me to let them.”
It wasn’t a joke. It was an admission—and a prayer.
She squeezed my hand. She knew.
When the needle went in, she cried. I cried with her. This wasn’t her first time receiving IV antibiotics, but this time felt different—heavier, more ominous. I could feel my legs go weak. I didn’t faint, but I had to step away, walk once around the wing, breathe, come back.
Trauma doesn’t always shout. Sometimes it whispers: This is too much. This is too fast. You are not ready.
I returned to her bedside and held her hand. The only sentence I could say without breaking was: “I’m here.”
“What can I do?” I asked.
She told me she wanted the latest Anne McCaffrey novel from the gift shop. A small request. Something normal. Something I could still do.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I clung to that task like a lifeline.
The full weight of what was happening had not landed yet. Not for me. Not for her. Not even for the doctors.
We didn’t know that this was the beginning of the month that would unravel everything.
CF was no longer background illness. No longer something monitored and managed. No longer a ghost.
It was the room. Every corner. Every breath.
And we had just stepped inside.