A Chance Meeting with Life : Inside an Intensive Care Unit, and Out

(editor: Lisa Canfield book designer: Jeremy Vaughn Fleming) If you, my reader, are drawn to stories about mountain peaks and tidal waves, wilderness and deep-down medical binds, this is such a story for my daughter and I, together, surrounded by others, found our way out and I am here to tell you how. As it begins… “This is a story about things that should not happen to a person but sometimes do and this time did.” Jacqueline Price was born with cystic fibrosis and lived through childhood with memorable slumber parties, snow days, beach trips, and hospitalizations. She graduated on time from both Robinson High School and Radford University, majoring in Finance, in spite of medical interruptions. Jackie was working for the German grocery, Lidl, and living among friends in the Mosaic District, a mixed-use community along the D.C. Metro subway system. Then something terrible happened due to the cystic fibrosis. As it happens, her childhood hospital not far away, Fairfax Hospital, and specifically their Heart and Vascular Institute and more specifically the doctors and nurses within the CardioVascular Intensive Care Unit, saved Jacqueline’s life. Doctors and nurses and teams of teams, of specialists, remarkable people with the medical skills did remarkable things. I remained there from morning to night every day for weeks focused solely on the survival of our daughter, except I was able to write. Every day, I wrote about what I witnessed and what was going on in my mind. I wrote about our daughter’s medical tidal wave and recovery. You may think I love our daughter the most because this story is about her, but my husband and I also have a son we love immeasurably. Down on the list yet close to the top, I love writing. I am a writer only in that I have a story to tell. By profession, I taught young children to read and taught older children who were in trouble, from elementary school to alternative high school. By profession and in my personal life, I have been a problem solver. I have not been a writer by profession. My personal life has made me a writer. Forgive my fragmented sentences, terms not well explained, the parts that may fumble along, as I fumbled along in this complex matrix. Stay with me. As a person who watches and thinks and makes sense of this world, I answer the question, “What happened to Jackie?” and give you a chance to witness through words my raw interpretation of being her mother. You can follow Jackie' story further at Priceless Breaths.