“Make a wish!” people often say as a child gets ready to blow out the candles. For one little girl, a wish was granted and her dream came true. Thanks to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, eight-year-old Kelsey Snider was transformed into Princess Kelsey.

Kelsey was less than a year old when she was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis (CF). At the time, doctors weren’t able to determine what was wrong with Kelsey and she spent weeks in the hospital before the doctors reached a diagnosis.

“The day changed our lives,” Janet Snider said of the day her little girl was diagnosed.
According to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, CF “is a life-threatening disease that causes mucus to build up and clog some of the organs in the body, particularly in the lungs and pancreas. When mucus clogs the lungs, it can make breathing very difficult. The thick mucus also causes bacteria (or germs) to get stuck in the airways, which causes inflammation (or swelling) and infections that leads to lung damage.”

CF is a genetic disease that approximately 30,000 people in the United States have. An additional 10 million people are carriers of the CF gene but are not sick, the CF Foundation says.

Kelsey, a Christmas baby, was diagnosed by July. Janet said that babies are now checked for CF right after they’re born, “something that would have saved us so much trouble,” she said.

To read the rest of the stry, see BDN's May 9 print edition.