Saying goodbye to Cam

3 years ago, I posted on Facebook about my friend Cam’s successful double lung transplant. And now, 3 years later, I need to come to terms with the fact that he’s gone.
 
I met Cam in the CF server on Discord. He was a teenager at the time, and had a LOT of struggles in multiple areas of his life. We all basically adopted him into our weird but loving Discord family, and quickly became his primary support system. Sometimes I was his cool aunt, sometimes I was his unofficial therapist, and sometimes we were just friends being ridiculous together. He was unusually sick for such a young CFer, and at just 17 years old he had a double lung transplant.
 
Cam definitely had his struggles after transplant, but over the last year or so he worked hard on starting a photography business and getting into film school despite his ongoing health issues. He was a talented artist, and we were always impressed with his work. All the while, however, he kept struggling with rejection and repeated hospitalizations, and his lung function continued to decline. In December he was hospitalized again and quickly became extremely ill. His team finally started talking about a second transplant, but he had a lot of hurdles to overcome just to get healthy enough to even be listed. Just over a month ago, after fighting valiantly and undergoing multiple painful procedures and treatments that really weren’t getting him anywhere, Cam let me know that he didn’t want to keep working towards a second transplant and that he was ready to rest. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to go home, but they did what they could to make him comfortable during his last weeks. Over the weekend he took a turn for the worse, and he passed away on Monday night. Ironically, he died on his transplant anniversary.
 
As a friend from the CF server pointed out, the sad part about being a long-lived CFer is having to see others go before us. I’m pretty much an elder in the CF community. No one expected me to live anywhere near this long when I was a child, and I’ve always said that I’ll never hide my age because I am proud of every hard won year. But I’ve lost so many friends along the way. Losing Cam is particularly painful because he barely even had a chance to live. I had such high hopes for his post-transplant life. I wanted him to go to school, and start a career, and move out and live independently like he so desperately wanted. Even when things started going downhill, I had hope that one day he would get a second transplant, and that it would be wildly successful, and that he would get to fulfill his goals and dreams. Watching his plans get derailed by his health again and again, and then losing him at only 20 years old, is just excruciating.
 
Cam’s best friend was Eve, another unusually sick young CFer from the Discord server. She had her transplant at 13, and passed away just a couple years later at 15 years old. Losing Eve was absolutely devastating for Cam, and he missed her terribly. I take some solace in imagining her waiting for him on the other side, and them being reunited in the great beyond.
 
Rest easy, Cam. Your life was far too short and had way more suffering than any one person should have to deal with. You deserved so much better. I miss you.