Competitive swimmer - using grit and a lung transplant - winning life time battle against cystic fibrosis

San Jose Mercury News | Bruce Newman

SUNNYVALE -- When the call came -- finally, after Anna Modlin had spent 119 days wondering whether she would live or die -- she was preparing to have her boyfriend pound on her. Again. He had already started the treatment when the phone rang.

Modlin had endured such pounding thousands of times -- sometimes as many as five hours a day -- since being diagnosed with cystic fibrosis when she was 1 1/2. "I would never skip a treatment," she says. "It was so ingrained in me that it took a good six months after that not to have the urge to do one."

But that November night in 2010, with new lungs being flown to Stanford Hospital for a transplant Modlin, now 32, had been uncertain she would survive long enough to receive, she decided she was done with the leathery gray lungs that had betrayed her for so long.

"I'm not going to do it," Modlin thought, defiantly giving the back of her hand to another pounding, and then began packing for a life she had never known before. One in which she didn't spend each moment gasping for breath. One her mother called a miraculous "reincarnation," in which she would become a gold medal-winning national and world swimming champion.

When Anna Modlin's parents were given the diagnosis of their child's disease, it was accompanied by a death sentence: The average life expectancy for someone born with cystic fibrosis in 1981, they were told, was 21. "That," says Anna's mom, Robin, "was devastating."

But even as a sickly little girl, Anna remained upbeat. "It wasn't in the forefront of my mind that CF was going to get me one day," she says. "You can't live like that, so you're in fighting mode all the time. Until you get to the point where it overwhelms you." That moment arrived in 2010, when she was close to drawing her last, labored breath.

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