Mallory Smith was a young woman who, in her own words, had “big dreams and big goals.”

When she was in high school, she set her sights on going to Stanford. After college, she hoped for a career where she could help people and “move the needle on something that’s important.” She wanted to write about the world and all its beauty. She wanted a life filled with travel and adventure. She wanted to fall in love.

But most of all, she just wanted to live a normal life. A life with normally functioning lungs that wouldn’t hold her back from excelling at her favorite sports, volleyball and water polo, and from doing all the things that healthy teenagers and college kids get to do. A life without bouts of hemoptysis (coughing up blood), a peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC line), nebulizers, countless hospital stays, and the constant threat that Burkholderia cepacia—the family of deadly, antibiotic-resistant bacteria that clogged her lungs—would end her life before she could achieve those dreams.

Read the article in CIDRAP