How We Got Here.
Strangers who will never know my name spent their careers making my life possible. That’s not lost on me.
I was born with Cystic Fibrosis. Diagnosed at birth, I needed surgery immediately and spent the first six months of my life in the hospital.
That’s how I came into the world.
I don’t remember any of it. I only know it because people told me. And that’s kind of how Cystic Fibrosis worked for a long time. It was always there, but it was background noise. My normal.
The Routine Nobody Saw
Every morning, before school, before anything else: an hour of treatments. Nebulizer. Pulmozyme. Saline. Physical therapy to shake loose the mucus that Cystic Fibrosis causes your lungs to produce. Then the same thing every night before bed. This was my routine from childhood all the way through college.
I fought about it every single day. I couldn’t feel the difference without them. Couldn’t connect the inconvenience in front of me to some benefit happening inside my lungs. So I complained. Every day. Didn’t matter.
I played sports. I kept up with my friends. For a long time, you wouldn’t have known. And that was exactly how I wanted it. I didn’t want people looking at me differently. Didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for me. So I hid it, minimized it, and moved on.
When Reality Caught Up
I did my science fair project on Cystic Fibrosis in seventh grade. It was the first time I actually learned what CF was.
I remember thinking: this is pretty bad.
I was old enough to understand what life expectancy meant. Old enough to do the math. And somewhere around then, I stopped letting myself think too far ahead.
Around the same time, I started noticing it physically. I’d always been competitive in sports, genuinely competitive, and then suddenly I wasn’t. More tired. Harder to breathe while running. I could still keep up, mostly, but it cost more than it used to. By high school it was even harder. To actually be competitive would have taken a level of work I couldn’t justify. So I stopped trying. Told myself I didn’t care.
That wasn’t entirely a lie, either. Here’s the thing about me: when I commit to something, I get it done. When I’m motivated, I’m great at what I do. I’ve always known that. And because I knew it, I could use it as a crutch. Tell myself, if I really cared about this, I could fix it. But I don’t need to fix it right now.
School got harder. Other kids were grinding. I stopped. What was the point of building toward a future I wasn’t sure I’d have? So I focused on what made me happy in the present. Friends. Watching sports. Whatever brought me joy today, not ten years from now.
The Drug That Changed My Life
The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation had been funding research on targeted therapies for years. I participated in early trials as a kid, probably between ages 10 and 13. It was just part of the doctor appointments. Blood draws, tests, data. I didn’t fully understand what I was contributing to, except that it was experimental, next generation.
The first version didn’t do much for me. The second, maybe a little, nothing I could really feel. And then came Trikafta.
There was a lot of buildup. People called the first few days the purge, because your lungs finally release the mucus Cystic Fibrosis has been trapping in there. I remember coughing up more than I ever had. And then, a few days later, it just stopped.
It didn’t hit me in one moment. It crept up on me. I just started feeling better. Healthier. Like something fundamental had shifted that I didn’t have a word for.
Eventually I stopped doing the vest treatments. Stopped the daily nebulizer routine that had been the first and last thing I did every single day since I was a kid. I went to a doctor’s appointment, and my results were so good that my doctor told me I should be saving for retirement.
I still didn’t really think about it. That’s just how I’m wired. I don’t dwell. But something in me was changing.
The Person Who Changed Everything Else
Dominique came into my life right around the same time as Trikafta. Six months earlier or later, I think things would have looked very different.
She didn’t know the full weight of Cystic Fibrosis at first. She learned it over time. But what she could actually see, before she knew everything, was someone who was getting better. Gaining weight. Stopping the coughing. Becoming, physically, more like everyone else.
Dom gave me a shot. She’s hardworking, passionate, caring, and she accepted me, which isn’t easy. But more than anything, she gave me something to work toward. A future that felt worth building.
I’ve never been a planner. I make decisions fast, don’t look back, figure it out as I go. But with Dom, I started to see something ahead of me. Not in detail, I still don’t do detail, but something. A life. A family. A reason to stop telling myself it didn’t matter.
The timing of Trikafta and Dom arriving at the same moment is something I’ve thought about a lot. It seems crazy, a coincidence I can’t explain. I’m grateful for it every day. And I’m grateful to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation for the decades of research and funding, to every patient who donated their time and data in clinical trials, to the doctors and scientists who worked on something they believed in. Strangers who will never know my name spent their careers making my life possible. That’s not lost on me.
Harder Than the Movies Made It Look
When Dominique and I talked about starting a family, I knew IVF was part of the picture. Cystic Fibrosis affects male fertility. I’d first learned that in seventh grade, same science fair project that scared me about the life expectancy. At the time, I was more worried about the other thing. The fertility piece registered, but it didn’t devastate me. It just meant it would be harder.
I didn’t do a ton of research going in. What I knew from movies and TV was that IVF is hard. I assumed it was going to be hard. I just didn’t know how hard.
The hardest part, for me, wasn’t any single moment. It was watching Dom. She’s the one going through the medications, the procedures, the physical and emotional weight of all of it. Hospitals don’t rattle me, I’ve been doing this since I was born. But watching someone you love go through that, and not being able to do much about it, is its own kind of hard.
I never considered stopping. It wasn’t really a question I asked myself. We were going to keep going.
Building Something That Matters
For years, I’d talked with my closest friends, Jon and Matt, about starting a business together someday. We all had the drive for it. We’d just also built careers that were going well, and the timing never quite lined up.
When Dom and I started talking about the foundation, it became clear pretty quickly that we wanted Jon and Matt to be part of it. Not just because we’d talked about building something together for years, but because this was the kind of thing worth doing together. Something that wasn’t about making money. Something specific. Something that mattered to us personally.
Cystic Fibrosis and fertility is a new frontier. The science is moving fast, and families are navigating it largely on their own. We weren’t seeing resources filling that gap in a direct, personal, community-driven way. That felt like something we could build.
What I Want You to Know
If you’ve ever felt the way I did growing up, like the future was too uncertain to bother with, don’t assume everyone feels that way. Not everyone with Cystic Fibrosis checks out the way I did. But if any part of this sounds familiar, I want you to know that it can change. It changed for me.
If you’re a Cystic Fibrosis family thinking about fertility: it’s not black and white. Don’t just show up to a clinic. Do your research. Understand what you’re walking into. Reach out to us. It’s a learning process, and you don’t have to start from zero.
And if you’re the partner in the room, trying to hold it together and not sure what to say: you can do it. It’s hard. But you can do it.
The Fox Family Foundation exists because Dom and I lived this. We’re building a community that invests real resources into family planning and the mental health side of fertility challenges in the Cystic Fibrosis community, because that work is new, it’s untapped, and it matters.
I never thought I’d be here. Not because I didn’t want it, but because I stopped letting myself imagine it. A family. A foundation. A future worth planning for.
Trikafta changed my lungs. Dom changed my life. And this foundation is what we’re building together.