Before she started taking Trikafta, in 2019, Jenny Livingston hoped more than anything to survive long enough to se her daughter graduate from high school.
You have experienced, in a modest way, something like it in the waning days of a bad cold, when your lungs finally expel their accumulated gunk. The rattle in your chest quiets. Your sinuses clear . You smell again: the animal sweetness of your children's hair, the metallic breeze stirring a late-summer night. Your body, which oozed and groaned under the yoke of illness, is now a perfectly humming machine. Living is easy everything is easy.
How wonderful it is to breathe, simply breathe.
Imagine, though, that you had never been able to simply breathe. Imagine that mucus-thick, copious, dark-had been accumulating since the moment you were born, thwarting air and trapping microbes to fester inside your lungs. That you spent an hour each day physically pounding the mucus out of your airways, but even then, your lung function would spiral only downward, in what amounted to a long, slow asphyxiation. This was what it once meant to be born with cystic fibrosis..
Then, in the fall of 2019, a new triple combination of drugs began making its way into the hands of people with the genetic disease. Trikafta corrects the misshapen protein that causes cystic fibrosis; this molecular tweak thins mucus in the lungs so it can be coughed up easily. In a matter of hours, patients who took it began to cough—and cough and cough and cough in what they later started calling the Purge. They hacked up at work, at home, in their car, in bed at night. It's not that they were sick; if anything, it was the opposite: They were becoming well. In the days that followed, their lungs were cleansed of a tarlike mucus, and the small tasks of daily life that had been so difficult became unthinkingly easy. They ran up the stairs. They ran after their kids. They ran 10Ks. They ran marathons.
Esta historia es de la edición April 2024 de The Atlantic.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición April 2024 de The Atlantic.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 8500 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
THE AIRPORT-LOUNGE ARMS RACE
Inside the ever more extravagant competition to lure affluent travelers
Hypochondria Never Dies
The diagnosis is officially gone, but health anxiety is everywhere.
Miranda July's Weird Road Trip
The author's midlife-crisis novel is full of estrangement, eroticism, and whimsy.
The Wild Blood Dynasty
What a little-known family reveals about the nation's untamed spirit
The Engrossing Darkness of The Crow
Can a cult hit point the way forward for the beleaguered comic-book movie?
The Godfather of American Comedy
The funniest people on the planet think there's no funnier person than Albert Brooks.
The History My Family Left Behind
A gun, a lynching, and an exodus from Mississippi
Ozempic or Bust
America has been trying to address the obesity epidemic for four decades now. So far, each new \"solution\" has failed to live up to its early promise.
THE ART OF SURVIVAL
In living with cancer, Suleika Jaouad has learned to wrench meaning from our short time on Earth.
DEMOCRACY IS LOSING THE PROPAGANDA WAR
AUTOCRATS IN CHINA, RUSSIA, AND ELSEWHERE ARE NOW MAKING COMMON CAUSE WITH MAGA REPUBLICANS TO DISCREDIT LIBERALISM AND FREEDOM AROUND THE WORLD.