Meet the 2021 Scholars

"Living through a global pandemic with a chronic illness, what is one piece of inspirational advice that you would give to other students with CF who are in the same or similar position?"

Living through a global pandemic is hard for everyone but add on fighting a chronic illness with a pandemic is even harder. All my life I have been fighting CF and right when I thought everything was going really well, I was just getting healthy enough to play soccer again and school started to go really well especially after missing so much for being in the hospital everything came to a halt. I was really getting down on myself because I thought that this was going to be a set back in getting back to soccer and getting my grades back to where they usually are. I decided to take this opportunity though to make it for the better. I started to focus on my running, my dribbling, my juggling, and school. I took something that could have been bad and changed it to make a positive outcome. I am now running with people who are the fastest on my team, my grades are amazing, and I have no problems breathing now since I was able to focus on the little things. The best lesson I learned and now that I give as advice to anyone fighting CF or who has a chronic illness is to take every little set back as an opportunity because when the time is right everything will fall in place. It just may take a global pandemic to show you that.