February 2026

CARTHAGE, Miss.—You can’t keep a good man down, the old H adage (and a really excellent Alabama song) tell us. Want an example? Look no further than Lee Powers, owner of Powers Timber, LLC. Powers, 36, was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis when he was just nine weeks old in 1989. “They didn’t know what was wrong,” Powers says. “I was having a lot of reflux and I was coughing. Out of the blue they said they wanted to do a sweat test to test my salt. Lo and behold, I had CF.” He wasn’t expected to reach age 21, but he’s already 15 years past that. But making it this far wasn’t easy… not by a long shot.

Even with CF, Powers played sports growing up: basketball, football and baseball. He played in two state championship games in basketball as a point guard. He was a skilled athlete who got a lot of playing time and never let his condition stop him. And after high school, he wanted to serve in the military—in special ops, even. “I tried to join at 18 but they turned me down due to my CF.” After graduating and going to work in the woods, he came to realize how much he’d been benefiting from playing sports. Sure, he’d always had to have treatments, but the daily exercise, all the running, helped him, he believes. “I didn’t really start getting sick till I started sitting on a machine 10 hours a day.”

Back then, when he still worked on his dad’s crew before branching out into his company, the younger Powers endured a grueling daily regimen: before getting on the job site by 6 a.m. every morning, he’d have to spend an hour in treatments that involved putting on a special vest while breathing in three antibiotics to break up the mucus in his lungs, which CF made too thick. The vest would further vibrate and shake his lungs up to break the mucus up smaller. “So I’d get up at 3:30 every morning to do the treatment before work, and sometimes wouldn’t get home till 7:30 at night, and have another hour of treatment then before bed.” He did that every day and still worked. “A lot of people have excuses on not coming to work,” Powers has observed. “If I could, then you can if you want to.”

Still, he actually considered himself very healthy until about five years ago; that’s when his health got really bad. “My lung function went down almost to 50%,” he explains. “Once you get below 50, you’re starting to look at lung transplants.” But just at the right time for him, a new drug called Trikafta had been developed, a treatment for cystic fibrosis. Within the first six months of starting on that drug, his lung functions improved from 52% to 85%. In place of the old pre-work and pre-bed regimen, he just has to take pills, two in the morning and one at night. “I haven’t had to do a breathing treatment in five years,” he declares. “I’m like a normal person now.”

Insurance covers some of the cost but Powers still has to pay a lot out of pocket. “It’s a lot of money but it’s well worth it in the end.”

Some people can’t find their way to a positive attitude, but not this guy. “I’ve been blessed, I can tell you that,” he insists. “I thank the Lord every day.”