For more than two years, Johann Heuchel—a French high school student in his final year, living with cystic fibrosis—keeps a diary. He writes about long months in the hospital and the time spent at home and at school. But it is the hospital that commands his attention. It is where his treatment becomes ever more necessary, where his loved ones surround him, where suffering and hope collide. There he waits for a lung transplant, something he desperately wants despite knowing the risks. The hospital has become his extended family, his community, his "home." Through suffering, medical care, endless waiting, the cycle of hope and despair, love and friendship, Johann discovers what those of us caught in our hurried, relentless lives can only glimpse in fleeting moments. He is a boy who lives each day with death at his side: the death of friends who slip away one by one (while others receive transplants and survive the crisis of rejection), the possibility of his own death, and the death of donors—which for him and his companions means life. Johann has many friends among the hospital patients.
He writes: "Friendship 'keeps me warm,' as Renaud sings. And that warmth is the most beautiful thing there is. Because the hardest thing is to endure your own pain." Talking with friends becomes his most intense activity: it deepens his understanding of others and expands his vision of life. Despite his age, he shows a maturity and positivity that astonish us adults who read him. In this diary he lays himself bare in ways he could never do with anyone else. For him, writing is learning to know himself—without pretense, in truth. It is like a therapy. The story moves toward the transplant: possibility and hope for life, then the crisis of rejection, and finally death.
Reading this book gives us a deepened respect for life itself, for the human person, and for an inner journey like Johann's—one moving toward ever greater awareness, reflection, and gratitude for the small and large gifts that, despite everything, fill our lives. We want to say to the author: "Thank you, Johann."
— Natalia Livi, 2000