Doorway to a Cure

摘要

For the first time in over a decade, a striking silence fills the Cheevers' barn-style home in North Andover, Mass. The deep, rumbling cough that plagued sisters Laura, 14, and Cate, 12, every night of their lives, leaving them exhausted and weak, has finally stopped. Their bodies are almost free of the life-threatening lung infections - requiring hospitalization and harsh organ-pummeling intravenous antibiotics - which end the lives of so many children with cystic fibrosis. Now calories once spent fighting disease add weight on their dainty frames and give them energy to play soccer and dance. "And," says Rob Cheevers, Laura and Cate's father, "they don't taste salty anymore."