Trading Cold Showers for Sarcoidosis: From Caribbean Surf to Upstate Snow

The alarm went off before sunrise—which should be illegal on a winter morning in Upstate New York, especially when you’ve got multiple doctors’ appointments to attend and lungs that don’t always play nice. I dragged myself into the bathroom, still half asleep and fully freezing, but then the shower cranked alive, steam filled the room, and suddenly I was eight years old again, back home in the Caribbean, facing a very different kind of cold.

Growing up, we didn’t have hot water like civilized people. No hot and cold running water. All the pipes fed cold water. We had a showerhead with an electric heating coil that might as well have been held together with coconuts and duct tape. It heated the water instantly—assuming the element hadn’t burned out. You only discovered that the element was toast when you stepped in, shivered, and asked the universe what you did to deserve such betrayal at 6:00 a.m. Luckily, Caribbean mornings were already humid enough to feel like you were standing inside someone’s mouth, so you never fully froze. But, when you are accustomed to daily temps of 95°, 70° first thing hits you differently.

Life back then was obnoxiously simple. One TV station. It came on at 9 a.m., which meant no mindless pre-breakfast cartoons. Just birds chirping outside. It signed off for a siesta at 12:30 p.m., came back on at 4—with a news anchor sweating through his suit—and ended at 11:00 p.m. We weren’t coddled with streaming. No curated playlists. No Netflix asking if we were “still watching.” We went outside. Used our imaginations. Got sunburned. Came home covered in sweat and mosquito bites. No one tracked us with a GPS watch. If you wanted to find your friend, you biked to his house, yelled his name, and waited for a head to pop out of a window. That was our social network.

Now, decades, diagnoses, and heart complications later, doctors think I’ve probably had sarcoidosis since childhood. It tracks. Looking back, I was never really sick, but I was never not sick, either. Always wheezing, coughing, feeling tired, and being told it was bronchitis or “just a cold.” The cure? Go swim in the ocean.

And honestly? Nothing compares. If you have lung issues, floating in the ocean feels like being hugged by God. Salt water holds you up. Warm air clears you out. It’s better than any spa treatment or $3,500 therapy machine. Better than all the prescription bottles sitting on my nightstand right now. Somehow science hasn’t packaged that feeling yet. Maybe Big Pharma hasn’t figured out how to patent the Caribbean Sea.

So there I stood last week, leaning into the spray on a cold New York morning, and I was flooded with the memories of childhood. Of gentle trade winds. Of water that should’ve been cold but wasn’t. Of a body that still worked most days. Of not knowing the word “sarcoidosis,” let alone “heart failure.” I miss that version of life, even if I didn’t understand what I had.

Living with chronic illness is a bit like living in two places at once—your body is here, begging for mercy over a flight of stairs, while your mind is floating face-up in a warm ocean, elbows bent behind your head, watching cloud stories in the sky. Every so often, a too-hot shower in New York turns back the clock. And I’m glad for it. Even if the trade winds are now swirling through my imagination instead of my open kitchen window.

I can’t physically get back to that shoreline—at least not without a doctor’s note and an air purifier. But those memories still warm me up sometimes, in a way even the fanciest electric heater never could. So on that bitter morning, while waiting for results and hoping my lungs were behaving, I let the steam do its best imitation of ocean air. And I whispered “thank you” to the kid who survived cold showers and lived to tell the tale.

And if that kid had known that one day he’d be standing under a medically necessary shower, chasing those warm Atlantic memories all the way back to his lungs? He’d probably just shrug and say, “Better go swim now while you still can.”

After all, life isn’t always simple. But sometimes, it sure is beautiful.

So …

If this trip down memory lane warmed your thoughts—or reminded you of your own nostalgic haven—drop a comment below or subscribe to get more stories like this. Your words help keep this little blog breathing, even when my lungs don’t always cooperate.