By: Kyley Maynard
Cheyenne Maynard, age 5, of Antwerp Ohio is still too young to understand what Cystic Fibrosis is, and what it does to her body. All she knows is having CF means 35+ hours of breathing treatments a month, along with a vest that shakes her and knocks her mucus loose. It also means, hundreds of enzymes (pills to help digest her food properly, hundreds of vitamins, and far too many hours spent at doctor appointments). At the doctor’s, she get throat swabs (a long Q-tip that scrapes the back of her throat until she gags/coughs), PFT tests (test to measure the capacity of her lungs) chest x-rays and blood drawings.
Cystic fibrosis is a life-threatening (inherited) lung disease. The body of a CF-er creates thick, sticky mucus causing problems in both the lungs and digestive system. CF is not a very common disease, an estimated 30,000 children and adults in the United States have CF. Currently, the median predicted age of survival for people with CF is in the early 40s. Everyone who has CF is born with it—some find out right away, and others don’t find out for years, sometimes even 20+ years. Thanks to the newborn screening test, now everyone who has CF is diagnosed at birth (Cheyenne was two weeks old when her parents found out) and they can start getting the proper care needed to live a healthy life, with as little damage to the lungs as possible. They started putting the CF gene into the newborn testing in 2008.
The most common symptoms of CF are:
• Very salty-tasting skin
• Persistent coughing, at times with phlegm
• Frequent lung infections
