Bronchiectasis

Your bronchi have widened — permanently, irreversibly. What should be firm, elastic airways has become bulging, slack, chronically inflamed. In these pouches, mucus collects that can no longer drain. Bacteria settle in. A cycle of inflammation, congestion, and infection establishes itself and keeps itself running. Medically, this is called bronchiectasis.

But there is a level beneath the medical that asks a different question. Not: How do I treat the inflammation? But: Why has something in me stretched so far that it has lost its form? Why does what should flow instead stagnate? And why does this happen precisely where the breath — your flow of life — must pass through?

Bronchiectasis is not coincidence, but a reflection of something that has long been stretching and stagnating within.