Born with cystic fibrosis, Yvonne Hughes was lucky to survive her teens. She definitely didn’t expect to make it into her 50s. The comedian talks about the years she spent struggling to breathe – and the ‘miracle’ drug that turned her life aroundYvonne Hughes was 19, and attending the funeral of a friend with cystic fibrosis, when she realised: “Oh shit, I’m going to die of this.” She had met him during shared hospital stays in childhood, and although Hughes had always known she had CF, she had never understood her illness as terminal until that day in 1992, when she stood at the back of the crowded chapel in Glasgow. For three days afterwards, she couldn’t stop crying. “I had a kind of meltdown. That’s probably the first time I thought that this thing I had was going to kill me.”Over the next few months, Hughes, who was studying at the University of Glasgow, listened to her mum, dad and older sister chatting during family meals as if she was a ghost at the table. “I pulled back from them. I deliberately didn’t talk or include myself,” she says. “I wanted them to get used to sitting and chatting without me, so that when I died, they wouldn’t notice I wasn’t there.” Continue reading...