For Bob
When I first met Bob C——, he’d had a hard go of it: in less than a year’s time, he’d had a heart attack and watched the company he’d moved overseas to work for sell his job out from under him. Things didn’t improve much for him after that. He bounced between unemployment and temp jobs and between high-turnover telemarketing gigs and unemployment right up until the day last September he was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a disease whose only current treatment is a lung transplant. Thanks both to the primary disease and to severe complications from his treatment, he has spent more time these past four months in the hospital waiting for that transplant than out of it.
Bob had good news tonight. Tomorrow, he and his wife and daughter will be transferred by ambulance to a waiting airplane and delivered to Pittsburgh, where he will finally be placed on a transplant list.
This is for you, Bob. If anyone has earned a Joban recovery—blessed in the latter end more than the beginning—you have.
Update
Soon after Bob arrived in Pittsburgh, his already bad condition worsened, and he was placed on a ventilator. This also moved him to the top of the transplant list, however, and on Valentine’s Day, he got new lungs. He’s had them ever since, in fact. After months of immobility, his recovery has required he relearn things like walking, but in an email Friday he said it’s going well, and he will return to Iowa in about a month. The difference between the Bob who left here on oxygen and barely able to walk and the Bob who sent that email? An entire life.
