Last Thursday, I had a contest to give out a $250 grant and Danielle Sterling won for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation of New England. I asked her to write a guest blog about her cause. So today, I’m turning it over to Danielle so she give y’all the details of another great cause that Operation Jack is supporting. Have a great weekend!

My name is Danielle Sterling and I am a Registered Respiratory Therapist at Southern Maine Medical Center in Biddeford, Maine. After graduating from college in 2003, I did social work/therapy with teenagers in the juvenile justice system and in 2006, started taking classes while awaiting acceptance into nursing school. Shortly after starting school (quite literally a week into it), I met my future husband, Tyler, and later on down the road I met his family. Specifically, his brother, Aaron. I learned he had a lung disease called “Cystic Fibrosis”, and had undergone a double lung transplant in 2003. Ty had already told me about the transplant but the whole story became complete once I met Aaron. The only thing I had ever known about CF was that a friend of mine growing up had lost her best friend to the disease when we were in grade school. Now it became all too real for me as well as I continued to get closer to the Sterling family.

Aaron was born with CF, but was not diagnosed until the first few months of life. The doctors told his parents he most likely would not make it to attend school. He was in and out of the hospital throughout his childhood for this treatment and that treatment, which is the norm for kids with this disease. Cystic Fibrosis is a progressive disease where thick, sticky mucus builds up in the lungs. Over time the body just cannot absorb the mucus and it takes over the areas where oxygenation and gas exchange takes place. This causes infection in those areas, and essentially the lungs become unusable. Early detection of this genetic disease is essential in order to start on proper medications, and in the state of Maine it was recently made a law that every baby born is tested before they leave the hospital. Both the mother and father must be a carrier of the CF gene in order to have the 25% chance of their unborn child to have CF, so you can also get tested before having a baby as well. [Read more…]