Teenagers and Cystic Fibrosis

Question: My 15 yr old granddaughter. She has rebelled at times on treatments.Drs say it is age she will get better as she gets older. Were you always as good about it? Any feed back on this will help.

The doctors are correct in saying that it will get better with age. Teenagers in general are rebellious with or without CF. CF only exacerbates the problem as there is nothing more important in a teen's life than status and friends. Having CF and doing treatments can unfortunately at times interfere with these two things. I'm guessing that she has said more than once "I just want to be like my friends," or "I hate CF". Both of these are very common and very valid responses to having CF as a teenager. What she's going through is tough and is not at all fun.

What we must realize however that, "being like our friends", includes having the ability to do what they do. Whether we like it or not, this is made possible by our health. Not being at a good place with our health inhibits our ability to just be "one of the guys" (or in this case girls), but it's hard to see that as a teen.

We often think about treatments as a means to an end when we're sick. I encourage people to think about treatments as a means to an end when we're healthy. What I mean is this - we must be willing to do everything necessary when we're healthy to put ourselves in the best position not to be sick. Treatments need not be a response to sickness, but used in conjunction with wellness.

I use the analogy of a scale. On one side we have someone "sick" with CF and on one side we have someone "healthy" with CF. Now, if you had a rock that represented doing treatments, which side of the scale would you put the rock? Who do we as a community instinctively think about as "doing more treatments" than the other person? I would put forth that most of us would put the rock on the side of the scale with the sick CFer. This certainly isn't true for everyone, but from my experience, that would be my hunch. Now, each one of us must answer why we put the rock where we did and that will generally tell us about our view of CF, control and treatments.

As for me, I put the rock on the side of the healthy CFer. When I was a teen? Not so much. I thought only "sick people" did a bunch of treatments. Granted, I was doing two a day, but it was rarely willingly and not something that I looked forward to. In many ways, I fell into the trap of being "too healthy" with CF. See, in high school; my FEV1% was around 110. I felt and acted just like everyone else. The only time I thought about CF was during said treatment times and when I required a hospital stay due to an exacerbation (about twice a year). Apart from those times, CF never entered my mind. I felt some relief from my treatments, but I didn't feel THAT much.

What really made my lungs feel like a hundred bucks was football practice, or any other physical activity like basketball, baseball, running etc. That's another thing to point out - until I started playing sports year round, my FEV1% was nowhere near that 110% that I mentioned earlier. So in essence, I was doing a ton of treatments, 2-3 hours per day to be exact, just not the traditional treatments (nebs, vest) that we think about. I was doing additional treatments in the form of sports and exercise. To this day, nothing makes me cough more or produce more mucus than running, be it on the treadmill, street or football field.

My family supported me in many ways regarding treatments and CF care. I think a lot of the credit has to go to my mom for being quite possibly the biggest reason that I took such good care of myself growing up. She had quite a “unique” strategy – My house, my rules (I’m of course kidding when I say that it was unique). One thing I’ll say however is she delivered this strategy with complete love. I never doubted for a second that I, and in turn my health, was the single most important thing to my mom when I was growing up. I was an only child for quite some time, so my mom was able to focus all of her energy and time on making sure she did everything necessary to put me in the best position to succeed. This included running me around to practice, supporting me when I wanted to try a new sport and most of all, holding her line when it came to treatments. 

Here’s the deal though, she balanced that with great freedom. I had a very normal childhood. I could do just about anything I wanted to do in terms of sleepovers, extra curricular activities, etc AS LONG AS my treatments were done. And when I stepped out of line, she didn’t waffle or give me another chance; I faced consequences for not following the rules. She only had to keep me out of football practice one time to show me she was serious after I chose to rebel against treatments that particular morning.

All teens have something important to them. All parents find their children, including teens believe it or not, important. In my opinion, effective parents mesh what’s important to them with what’s important to their teen. There is one key thing to remember though – one is the parent and one is the teen. In a perfect scenario the parent and the teen can come to a mutual agreement about treatments and expectations. But, and this is a big but, perfect scenarios aren’t the majority. At some point, the parent must decide what’s more important to them, a perfect scenario or their teen doing his or her treatments.

There is hardly a fool-proof strategy when it comes to convincing teens that treatments are important or implementing a system that results in few missed treatments, there is however a great reward for parents, and teens, that manage to do so.