New lungs

It is 4am and I have been at University Hospitals in Iowa City for 14 hours. By the time the sun comes up my brother-in-law will emerge from a random operating room, the proud owner of a completely new pair of lungs. He is a 29-year-old transplant patient, and these new lungs offer so much hope and promise that it's hard not to think about what the rest of us take for granted as my mind wanders over how very much his life is about to change. He will no longer cough repeatedly trying to break up the mucous that engulfed his original lungs. He will no longer have to be on oxygen almost 24/7. He will be able to breathe. Sometimes I think about how I wish I could go back to "simpler" times, back when I was a kid and the world wasn't overrun with the technology obsession we're now so used to. Today however, I have never been so thankful for that technology and what it is doing for one very deserving person.