Ironman athlete Emma Fontaine near Major's Hill Park on Friday. July 31, 2026. Photo by Spencer Colby /POSTMEDIA

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Emma Fontaine used to tell her parents she didn’t want kids.

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But the 24-year-old from Montreal said that, even though she’d joke about it, it wasn’t really a joke.

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“I didn’t want children to grow up knowing their mother was going to die young. The future is not certain for someone with CF. I wouldn’t want to put a child through that,” she said.

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CF is cystic fibrosis, which Fontaine’s parents found out she had when she was two months old.

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The genetic disorder causes mucus to build up in the lungs, pancreas and other organs, according to Cystic Fibrosis Canada’s website, which also states that, as of 2024, about 4,400 Canadians are living with the disease.

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It is a lifelong illness. More than half of Canadians who died from it in 2022 were younger than 40.

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And for her entire life Fontaine hasn’t been sure whether she’d be one of them.

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“There’s no cure for CF. That’s always been the backbone of the disease for me. Your condition is going to deteriorate, and you just have to know that, just live with that fact.”

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But, after the discovery of a new medication called Trikafta — which was only first approved in 2021 — Fontaine can now expect to live a full life.

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“Before taking it, I was in and out of the hospital. Since I’ve been taking this medication, I haven’t been hospitalized once,” she said, adding that has been since 2022.

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Ironman athlete Emma Fontaine near Major’s Hill Park on Friday. Photo by Spencer Colby /POSTMEDIA

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This means, for example, Fontaine can now look confidently towards a future in mining engineering, which she’s currently studying at the University of British Columbia.

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But it isn’t the only treatment that has changed her life.

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Soon after she began running during the COVID-19 pandemic, Fontaine realized physical activity was another kind of treatment for CF.

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Now, ever so humbly, after chatting about her plans for visiting Ottawa for the first time, she was set to compete in the Ironman Canada-Ottawa marathon on Sunday.

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Although now she’s an advocate for those with CF, until the end of high school Fontaine would try her best to hide the fact that she was sick.

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“I didn’t want anyone to pity me, but, on the other hand, I was often out of school because I was hospitalized, or I had episodes where I had a feeding tube. So, eventually, people knew. But I didn’t want it to define me at all, so I would never talk about it,” she said.

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She remembers being 11 or 12 years old during a time when she had a feeding tube that she had to wear to school.

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“It was the first time where everyone would see that I was sick. So that was a tough moment for me,” Fontaine said.

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It then became harder for Fontaine to hide her condition when, at 15, she was diagnosed with CF-related diabetes and had to routinely give herself insulin shots at a school lunch table.