This book shows the power and purpose of revisiting books. I first read it as part of my GCSE curriculum way, way back in the late 90s, and haven’t really thought about it since. It made almost zero impact on me other than vaguely remembering something dystopian about it.

Re-reading it, especially in today’s climate, showed me just how much I missed from it because either a) I was a teenage boy who couldn’t connect with the first-person narrative and so dismissed it, or b) I was taught it really badly. It’s probably a combination of the two, to be honest.

“There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from.” p24

“When we think of the past it’s the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.” p30

“The red is the same but there is no connection. The tulips are not tulips of blood, the red smiles are not flowers, neither thing makes a comment on the other. The tulip is not a reason for disbelief in the hanged man, or vice versa.” p34

“This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.” p34

“Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.” p56

“You can wet the rim of a glass and run your finger around the rim and it will make a sound. This is what I feel like: this sound of glass. I feel like the word shatter.” p103

“His face is beginning to fade, possibly because it wasn’t always the same: his face had different expressions, his clothes did not.” p104

“I didn’t much like it, this grudge-holding against the past.” p201

“Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some.” p211

“People will do anything rather than admit that their lives have no meaning. No use, that is. No plot.” p215

Amazon link.

More about my reading list.

This book had a genuinely profound impact on me. Having heard it talked about so often, I finally decided to give it a go and I have to confess I almost gave up after the first few chapters and it’s not the kind of storytelling I really engage with. Much like life, however, the power of the lessons in the book and the wisdom that it imparts is genuinely transformative.

This book is often mentioned in the same breath as Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, but where that book totally failed to connect with me, Siddhartha is already a book I know I’m going to read and reread time and time and time again. These highlights don’t do it justice at all, but are useful reminders for me of what I took away from the book.

Most importantly, a deeper understand of the value of everything in our lives, whatever it is. They are all a part of us, who we are, what we believe and how we see the world. Nothing and no one should ever be dismissed.

“That was how everybody loved Siddhartha. He delighted and made everybody happy. But Siddhartha himself was not happy.” p4

“We find consolations, we learn tricks with which we deceive ourselves, but the essential thing — the way — we do not find.” p15

“The rumours of the Buddha sounded attractive; there was magic in these reports. The world was sick, life was difficult and here there seemed new hope, here there seemed to be a message, comforting, mild, full of fine promises.” p17

“Opinions mean nothing; they may be beautiful or ugly, clever or foolish, anyone can embrace or reject them.” p27

“It is not for me to judge another life. I must judge for myself. I must choose and reject.” p28

“Meaning and reality were not hidden somewhere behind things, they were in them, in all of them.” p32

“It was beautiful and pleasant to go through the world like that, so childlike, so awakened, so concerned with the immediate, without any distrust.” p37

“Why should I not attain what I decided to undertake yesterday?” p44

“From the moment I made that resolution I also knew that I would execute it.” p49

“He is drawn by his goal, for he does not allow anything to enter his mind which opposes his goal.” p49

“Everyone can perform magic, everyone can reach his goal, if he can think, wait and fast.” p49

“He only noticed that the bright and clear inward voice, that had once awakened in him and had always guided him in his finest hours, had become silent.” p61

“I am not going anywhere. We monks are always on the way.” p72

“Now, when I am no longer young, when my hair is fast growing grey, when strength begins to diminish, now I am beginning again like a child.” p74

“I had to experience despair, I had to sink to the greatest mental depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace,” p75

“Was it not his Self, his small, fearful and proud Self, with which he had wrestled for so many years, but which had always conquered him again, which appeared each time again and again, which robbed him of happiness and filled him with fear?” p77

“The water continually flowed and flowed and yet it was always there; it was always the same and yet every moment it was new.” p79

“The eternity of every moment.” p89

“‘You have suffered, Siddhartha, yet I see that sadness has not entered your heart.'” p90

“Siddhartha began to realize that no happiness and peace had come to him with his son, only sorrow and trouble. But he loved him and preferred the sorrow and trouble of his love rather than happiness and pleasure without the boy.” p91

“Could his father’s piety, his teacher’s exhortations, his own knowledge, his own seeking, protect him? Which father, which teacher, could prevent him from living his own life, from soiling himself with life, from loading himself with sin, from swallowing the bitter drink himself, from finding his own path? Do you think, my dear friend, that anybody is spared this path? Perhaps your little son, because you would like to see him spared sorrow and pain and disillusionment? But if you were to die ten times for him, you would not alter his destiny in the slightest.” p94

“Perhaps you seek too much, that as a result of your seeking you cannot find.” p108

“‘When someone is seeking,’ said Siddhartha, ‘it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal.'” p108

“Many people have to change a great deal and wear all sorts of clothes. I am one of those, my friend.” p108

“Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom.” p109

“The world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Sansara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.” p110

“Every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people — eternal life. It is not possible for one person to see how far another is on the way; the Buddha exists in the robber and dice player; the robber exists in the Brahmin. During deep meditation it is possible to dispel time, to see simultaneously all the past, present and future, and then everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman. Therefore, it seems to me that everything that exists is good – death as well as life, sin as well as holiness, wisdom as well as folly. Everything is necessary, everything needs only my agreement, my assent, my loving understanding.” p110

“This stone is stone; it is also animal, God and Buddha. I do not respect and love it because it was one thing and will become something else, but because it has already long been everything and always is everything.” p111

Amazon link.

More about my reading list.

Having started the year with some Graham Greene, the next stop on my ‘books/authors I really should have read by now’ was Huxley and his rightly-lauded Brave New World. I found it hard going to start with, but it gets better and better as it goes on.

“A man can smile and smile and be a villain.”

“One’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.”

“One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies.”

“Stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”

“Happiness is a hard master – particularly other people’s happiness.”

“Providence takes its cue from men.”

“The tears are necessary. Don’t you remember what Othello said? ‘If after every tempest come such calms, may the winds blow till they have awakened death.'”

Amazon link.

More about my reading list.

A Counterintuitive Approach To Living A Good Life

I adored this book1, and it’s one I really needed to read. I’m a people-pleaser by nature, always looking to take the path of least resistance and steer myself away from conflict because I’ve been terrified of people not liking me. This book helped me realise how pointless, absurd and unhelpful that is as a way to go about living life.

I want to be really clear for anyone reading this who thinks it sounds like a big, brash, “don’t give a sh*t about anyone” kind of American self-help book that it’s very much not that. Instead, the big lesson I took from this book was simply that you have to choose what you want to care about in life, and then follow up on that by not attributing disproportionate weight to the things that aren’t important.

“It’s what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law”—the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.”

“Albert Camus said (and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t on LSD at the time): ‘You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.'”

“You must give a fuck about something… The question, then, is, What do we give a fuck about? What are we choosing to give a fuck about?”

“You can’t be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others.”

“It then follows that finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the most productive use of your time and energy. Because if you don’t find that meaningful something, your fucks will be given to meaningless and frivolous causes.”

“Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy.”

“We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change.”

‘Don’t hope for a life without problems,’ the panda said. ‘There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.'”

“To deny one’s negative emotions is to deny many of the feedback mechanisms that help a person solve problems.”

“An obsession and overinvestment in emotion fails us for the simple reason that emotions never last. Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more.”

“What determines your success isn’t, ‘What do you want to enjoy?’ The relevant question is, ‘What pain do you want to sustain?'”

“The true measurement of self-worth is not how a person feels about her positive experiences, but rather how she feels about her negative experiences.”

“This flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism is the new normal. And because we’re all quite average most of the time, the deluge of exceptional information drives us to feel pretty damn insecure and desperate, because clearly we are somehow not good enough.”

“The Internet has not just open-sourced information; it has also open-sourced insecurity, self-doubt, and shame.”

“The rare people who do become truly exceptional at something do so not because they believe they’re exceptional. On the contrary, they become amazing because they’re obsessed with improvement.”

“People who become great at something become great because they understand that they’re not already great—they are mediocre, they are average—and that they could be so much better.”

“You will have a growing appreciation for life’s basic experiences: the pleasures of simple friendship, creating something, helping a person in need, reading a good book, laughing with someone you care about. Sounds boring, doesn’t it? That’s because these things are ordinary. But maybe they’re ordinary for a reason: because they are what actually matters.”

“Freud once said, ‘One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.'”

“Some examples of good, healthy values: honesty, innovation, vulnerability, standing up for oneself, standing up for others, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility, creativity.”

“We should prioritize values of being honest, fostering transparency, and welcoming doubt over the values of being right, feeling good, and getting revenge.”

“Growth is an endlessly iterative process.”

“We cannot learn anything without first not knowing something. The more we admit we do not know, the more opportunities we gain to learn.”

“The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible.”

“It’s worth remembering that for any change to happen in your life, you must be wrong about something. If you’re sitting there, miserable day after day, then that means you’re already wrong about something major in your life, and until you’re able to question yourself to find it, nothing will change.”

“We can be truly successful only at something we’re willing to fail at.”

“The problem was that my emotions defined my reality. Because it felt like people didn’t want to talk to me, I came to believe that people didn’t want to talk to me.”

“If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.”

“Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.”

“Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.”

“Absolute freedom, by itself, means nothing.”

“Ultimately, the only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one’s life is through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or (gulp) one person.”

“Acts of love are valid only if they’re performed without conditions or expectations.”

“We’re all driven by fear to give way too many fucks about something, because giving a fuck about something is the only thing that distracts us from the reality and inevitability of our own death.”

“Without acknowledging the ever-present gaze of death, the superficial will appear important, and the important will appear superficial.”

“Our culture today confuses great attention and great success, assuming them to be the same thing.”

“You too are going to die, and that’s because you too were fortunate enough to have lived.”

Amazon link.

More about my reading list.

1. The number of highlights/notes in any book (especially non-fiction) is usually (but not always) a good barometer of my feelings about the book as a whole. [↩]

I’m trying to read more of the ‘golden oldies’ or at the very least more works by the kind of authors who are thought of or talked about as greats. I’m a bit embarrassed to say that Greene is one of those authors whose work I’ve never ventured near, so I thought I’d pick something (pretty much at random) to get started with.

I enjoyed this – it lulled a bit in places and isn’t quite what I’d call a page-turner, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Here are my highlights:

“Cynicism is cheap – you can buy it at any Monoprix store – it’s built into all poor-quality goods.”

“We have standards to which we do not always rise.”

“The confused comedy of our lives.”

“This is one of the pains of illicit love: even your mistress’s most extreme embrace is a proof the more that love doesn’t last.”

“Distance lends enchantment to the view. Mr William Wordsworth.”

“We have failed – that’s all. We are bad comedians, we aren’t bad men.”

“In port (she was the only ship there) the Medea seemed oddly dwarfed. It was the empty sea which gave the little boat her pride and magnitude.”

“I flung myself into pleasure like a suicide on to a pavement.” Dark humour at its best.

“I felt the premonition of jealousy like the first shiver which announces a fever.”

“We can’t even talk to you, can we? You won’t listen if what we say is out of character – the character you’ve given us.”

“There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?”

Amazon link.

More about my reading list.

If you’ve followed anything I do online you’ll know I’m somewhat inconsistent in my publishing schedules, so I carry no illusions that this place will be updated on any kind of dependable basis, but I do promise I will try to keep it updated regularly.

2017 was a bit of a year of stagnation for me, it didn’t carry a feeling of moving forward, just of doing the same thing. Don’t get me wrong, I love what I do for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust and I have no intention of stopping, but I know there is a creative itch I need to scratch.

I have a head filled with possibilities and last year I didn’t manage to make any of them come to pass, probably because I couldn’t narrow it down to one thing I could focus on enough to gain a bit of traction and get it over the starting line.

Laughter for Life in November proved that I can still make things happen. The entire gig came together over the course of just a few short months and was a roaring success, so I just need to be able to find that intensity of focus and delivery that I adopted there and apply it to the other things buzzing around my head.

So in 2018 I’m going to be trying to focus more directly on the things that I know I can do, and pushing myself to make them happen. I’m letting go of the more whimsical, overly-ambitious stuff (maybe more on that in another post) and embracing the still-ambitious but achievable side of the things I want to see in my life.

I’m also going to be paying more attention to my mental health and making time for myself: time to recharge, to properly rest when I need it, and to not let myself slip into the black cloud that descended at times in 2017.

I believe 2018 can be a great year, but I also know that great things don’t happen on their own, so I’m gearing myself up for the hard work and hustle that’s going to be needed to make this all come about.

For years now (more than a decade, in fact), I’ve lived by the Smile Through It mantra. No matter what happens in life, you can always find one thing each day that makes you smile and hold on to that one thing as a sign that things will get better.

This week, for the first time in a long time, that mantra no longer reigns. For the first time in a long time, I’m not OK.

And this is something I need to share because  in this world of heavily filtered, idealised lives that we all share online it’s too easy for me to pretend everything’s OK and that I’m coping and that I can still smile. I’ve been through mental health battles before, both with my own head and those of several of my loved ones, and it’s hypocritical of me to advocate the need to talk about the difficult times if I’m not prepared to do it myself.

I need to share this because I need people to realise that it’s OK to not be OK sometimes.

Empty chairs at empty tables

On Friday, K and I woke up at 5am to drive to Exeter for Kirstie’s funeral, which was amazing. It was the very definition of a celebration of life and I’ve never had so much fun or laughed so much at a funeral in my life. It was everything Kirstie wanted and it was delivered beautifully.

Twelve hours after leaving the house in the morning, we were back home again, and as I sat on the sofa I realised something that made me crumble: I’m the last one.

More than a decade ago, as I was starting my journey towards transplant, in the days before Facebook, Twitter and other instant-connection platforms that we all now have, there was a band of merry lifers with CF doing what we could to jockey each other’s spirits, connecting on forums, via text message and in some cases living fully-retro and sending stuff to each other in the post. With stamps and everything.

As I sat on the sofa on Friday night, I realised that Kirstie was the last of that group for me. She was my last connection to that world of support, shared experience and shared hopes for the future. Every single one of that group I had stayed in touch with has gone.

In that moment, thinking of the fact that when things get tough in the future — which we all know they will for me some day — I won’t have anyone to turn to who’s been through it, I broke down.

So what happens now?

The next few days passed in a haze of the most intense grief I’ve felt for years. Nothing made me smile, nothing motivated me to get off the sofa, out of bed or out into the world. Things I’d always enjoyed became the last things I wanted to do.

On Monday I went into work and rapidly realised that my mind simply wasn’t there. So I did one of the hardest things I’ve done for a long time: I sat down with my boss and I said, “I’m not coping,” and I left the office (with his blessing) four days early for my Christmas break.

Things are getting better. I can smile again, I can laugh, I can hear all my friends getting angry with me and laughing at me for moping about. But the grief is still present, it’s still pervasive, intrusive, destructive. It comes in waves and I’m just learning to ride those waves.

I can see that things will get better. I know that I will recover, that I’ll feel joy again in the same way I did before. I know I’ll feel the desire to create memories in honour of that amazing group of people, rather than languish in the sadness of what’s been lost.

But right now, I’m not coping and I don’t know how to cope. I don’t know how to regulate the waves of grief, the bouts of sadness or the depths of despair that my brain sinks to at regular intervals.

Bring on tomorrow

What I do know is that everything I’m feeling right now is OK. That it’s OK to not be OK. That it’s important for me to talk about this, to share this, to be open, honest, vulnerable and fragile about it.

Because it’s not OK to hide it. It’s not OK to think I can just bravely plough through it and present my happy face to the world like nothing has happened. Because that helps no one: not me, not other people experiencing the same thing, not my friends and family who will think that everything’s fine.

Because losing this many friends, going to this many funerals, struggling to remember all of them and when they happened and what their faces looked like and sometimes even their names, is not OK. And will never be OK. And shouldn’t be OK.

There are two people who define my transplant journey: one went through the process about six months ahead of me and the other three years after. I have outlived them both.

No one can say I’m still here when neither Emily or Kirstie are, but they will always live on in the hearts of the many, many people they touched.

I didn’t know Kirstie before her documentary was broadcast, but through the amazing CF community and the work we both did to raise awareness of cystic fibrosis and organ donation our paths began to cross and we became friends — or, I suppose, correspondents.

We would text each other when either of us was admitted to Harefield hospital and we’d share morale support when we needed it. We were by no means best buddies, but did what we could, when we could.

As with Emily (and frequently including Emily), we shared tales of transplant, recovery and the strange pressures of the “What Next?” of life after transplant. We had a rarified shared experience.

My abiding memory of Kirstie will be her bounding into my room in Harefield one day when I was waiting for my lift home after an admission. She had been in clinic and had popped up to the ward to spread some sunshine and she lit up my room in a second.

Despite feeling exhausted from a rough few days, I couldn’t help but smile and chat and have a giggle with her.

Kirstie had the same gift that Emily had: of being able to raise people to her own level of energy and enthusiasm for life. She was the dictionary definition of effervescent and she showered others in her pure and simple joie de vivre.

Not since Emily left us almost three years ago have I felt so lost at the death of a friend. I’ve not felt so keenly the delicacy of the balance I live in. I’ve not thought so much about when “my time” will be.

Kirstie will be missed by people she has inspired around the world. But she will be missed most by her devoted husband, Stu, and her ever-loving family who surrounded her to the end.

I’m incredibly blessed to have counted Emily and Kirstie as friends and to have had them in my life. I’m blessed to have seen the joy they brought to others and how much they revelled in doing it.

Alfred Lord Tennyson once said, “I am part of all that I have met.” If I can be one tenth of the people Emily and Kirstie were, I know I’ll have made my donor proud.

It may seem strange to some people, but I’m genuinely grateful for having cystic fibrosis.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t wake up in the morning, leap out of bed and proclaim to the world, “What a wonderful morning,my lungs are going to kill me!”

But the most formative and transformative experiences of my life have happened only because of this condition.

CF has taught me the true meaning of friendship

When I was at school, probably only 11 or 12 years-old, and I told a new person I’d met that I had CF, she went away to the library (yes, I’m so old she couldn’t Google it) and researched what it is, what it means and how she could best support me. She’s still one of my closest friends.

Friends like the ones who stood by me at school and through everything I’ve experienced, missed out on and enjoyed since, have shown me what true friendship really means.

CF taught me how not to take life too seriously

It taught me the Smile Through It principle, which I still live by today. Even on our worst days, if you can find one thing to make you smile then it’s been a worthwhile day — and you’d be surprised how easy it can be to find just one thing.

CF has taught me that nothing in life is guaranteed

It showed me that what’s true today may be false tomorrow; what’s working now may not work next week. It’s taught me to enjoy what we have while we have it, and to be grateful to have had it when it’s gone.

CF has shown me that there is more to life

People spend their time getting uppity about everything these days. Everything seems to cause offence, indignation or outrage. People barge to the front of a queue, cram onto a tube or get angry at the people around them, but it’s just not worth it. I’ve learned to be happy to wait for the next train, be five minutes later than planned and not get upset about it.

CF has taught me the meaning and value of love

It’s taught me how to love and support my wife, it’s taught me how to value time with my family and friends, it’s taught me gratitude for their presence in my life and how they help shape my outlook.

CF has connected me to so many wonderful people

I’ve met famous people, become friends with people I’d never have met had it not been for CF or transplant, and enabled me to meet some people who truly inspire me, both with CF and without. I’ve been introduced to new worlds of people, places, things and experiences that I would never have enjoyed were it not for CF or transplant.

CF has taught me compassion for other people’s problems

Before my transplant I remember the effort that used to go into not getting angry when people say “Oh, yeah, I’ve got a bit of a cough, too,” or that they had also been waiting for ages for their knee/hip/elbow operation and wasn’t it just the worst?

Now, I can see that everyone has problems and nothing is big or small unless you make it so. Compassion lets you see things and not judge them, but rather support people when they need it.

How can I possibly look at this list of things and not be grateful?

There are so many people in my life I miss. So many people I’ve been connected to through CF or through transplant and who are no longer with us. And that’s deeply, deeply upsetting.

But they are people I had the chance to know, people I had the chance to learn from, people who helped make me the person I am today because they were a part of my life.

So thank you to Gary, Rich, Emily, Jo, Toria, Katie, Anders, Pete, Gareth, Theo, Jayne, Alice, Jess, Lucy, Jack and so many others for being part of my life. I know we’ll meet again — hopefully not too soon — and we’ll have one almighty party in a place where cross-infection poses no risks.

Cystic fibrosis has made me the man I am today, and you know what? I quite like me, actually.

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This post first appeared on Medium as part of a five-part series for CF Week 2016.

People with cystic fibrosis spend an extraordinary amount of time in hospital, either visiting briefly for a quick once-over in out-patients, or for longer in-patient stays for intensive courses of treatment.

And whatever anyone else says about the NHS, I can confidently say that my medical team are some of my best friends in the world.

There were periods of my life when I spent more time with my CF team than with my friends, when the people I confided in most were my nurses and physios, and when I felt like they were the only people who understood me.

Of course, it goes without saying that without the healthcare they provided, I’d be dead. So that’s also a plus.

When I was 18 I transferred to adult care from my paediatric team in Northampton to the adult unit in Oxford. They call it “transition”, which implies a smooth and calm process, but mine was here one day, there the next — sudden, brutal and very discombobulating.

I knew things would be fine from my first appointment, though: the physio had the same birthday as me (albeit a few years earlier than mine!) and she treated me like an actual person.

She asked how much physio I was doing (correct answer: two to three sessions a day) and when I said, bluntly, “None really,” expecting my head to get chewed off with a lecture about how important it was, she just nodded and made a note. That was it.

When I was going downhill rapidly, I remember sitting in my hospital room with my CF nurse and telling her, “I’m going to have to think about transplant soon, aren’t I?”

She put down my notes, pulled up a chair and we sat and talked about life, death, transplant, treatment options, end-of-life care and a whole load of other things for well over an hour without her once looking at the clock or answering her bleep. She knew what I needed then more than anything was to talk. Three weeks later I was referred for transplant, knowing it was the right move fro me.

“I am part of all that I have met.”

Alfred Lord Tennyson

I’ve grown into the person I am today because of the love, support and overwhelming kindness I’ve been shown by my medical teams since I was a child.

The team at Oxford, two of whom are still there almost 15 years on from when I first met them, have played a massive part in shaping my outlook on life and my health, and have managed it all without ever “telling” me what I should be doing.

My CF nurse once asked me four times in a row how I was one day, knowing each time I was putting a gloss on things because I honestly didn’t know what to say. When I finally relented and just said, “Sh*t,” she was able to help me talk through everything I was worried about.

These people are the true heroes of cystic fibrosis.

Living with CF we have no choice but to fight our battle each day. I don’t see that as brave, it’s just life. But these are people who have chosen to dedicate their lives to helping people like me stay alive.

They’ve seen more people pass through their doors and pass away than I care to imagine, and yet they still smile, they still encourage, they still push us to be the best we can be.

Here’s to the doctors, the nurses, the physios, the dietitians, the social workers, the psychologists and everyone else who helps make the NHS such a special place. There aren’t enough boxes of chocolate in the world to adequately say thank you for what you do, or what you have done for me.

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This post was first published on Medium as part of a five-part series for CF Week 2016.