The luckiest man alive: Loving a woman with CF

I’m one of the lucky ones to be born without a nonsense CF (CF) gene mutation. In fact, I was lucky to be born without a CF gene mutation at all. Until a few years ago, I had never heard of CF, let alone met a patient. CF had no meaning to me then. That is, until I met and quickly fell in love with a beautiful young woman named Mallory Smith who had both: one common CF gene mutation, and one nonsense one. At that point, CF gene mutations took on a whole new meaning, since loving Mallory made me feel like the luckiest man alive—but having a girlfriend with deadly mutations threatened our future.