The fourth floor of the PICU at American Family Children's Hospital was a world of its own—a place where time bent and reality felt suspended. The room was small but packed with life-saving machines, their steady hums and rhythmic beeps creating a soundtrack to the waiting—my waiting—waiting for modern medicine to swoop in and do what it had always done: give me more time.
Life there was tethered by tubes and wires. A ventilator breathed for me when my lungs couldn't keep up, its mechanical sighs filling the space where my own breath should have been. My chest rose and fell in sync with it, a reminder that even the most basic act of living had become something I could no longer do alone. Monitors blinked in green and red, tracking every beat of my heart, every drop of oxygen in my blood, broadcasting my fragility to the entire floor.
Outside the window, the world carried on. When the nurses adjusted my bed, I saw it in glimpses—cars winding through the streets below, families walking in the crisp Wisconsin air, and people living their lives unburdened by the weight of a failing body. It felt impossibly far away, like a place I used to know but could no longer reach.
The doctors and nurses came and went, their voices low but their presence constant. They were warriors armed with syringes and charts, wielding science in a battle my body had lost for years. They explained the treatment plans, the tests, the next steps—but I already knew the stakes. Cystic fibrosis was a relentless enemy, and my lungs were its battlefield. I was there because it was winning.
Being confined to that room was a strange kind of limbo. There were no tomorrows there, only a string of todays stitched together by the hope that something would change. That the medications, the machines, and the collective brilliance of modern medicine would somehow pull me back from the edge. But hope was a fragile thing. It whispered instead of shouted, a quiet reminder that the fight wasn't over yet.
Sometimes I imagined what it would feel like to breathe again on my own, to walk out of that hospital without a cannula in my nose or a PICC line in my arm. I thought about the taste of fresh air, unfiltered and free. I thought about laughing so hard it stole my breath, instead of every breath being a struggle to keep.
But for then, I was there. Confined to the fourth floor, to that bed, to that life tethered by tubes and machines. I was waiting—waiting for modern medicine to work its magic, waiting for my lungs to hold out a little longer, waiting for the miracle I needed just to keep going.
