If laughter really is the best medicine, Tucsonans can fill a prescription to support the Southern Arizona Office of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation on April 23.
The Fill Your Lungs With Laughter fundraiser will be held at the Tanque Verde Guest Ranch.
“We really just wanted this to be a time for people to come together and have a lot of laughs and we want to thank everyone for all of their support without emphasizing the difficult parts of cystic fibrosis,” said Cheryl Nichols, who is spearheading the fundraiser with her husband, David, and in-laws, Patty and Ross McCallister.
The two couples hope the evening of comedy dinner theater, which will feature LaughingStock Comedy Company, will raise at least $15,000 to support the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in its mission to find treatments and a cure for the life-threatening disease.
The mission has become a personal quest for the couples: Their granddaughters, Jolene and Cecilia Nichols, are living with cystic fibrosis.
When Jolene, now 9, was diagnosed as an infant, Cheryl had never heard of the genetic disease.
“We were all stunned. We immediately began researching and it was quite a learning experience to find out how devastating the disease is and all that is involved with it,” she said.
CF, which can be caused by more than 1,800 gene mutations, primarily affects the lungs and digestive system. The defective genes result in a build-up of thick mucus in the lungs, pancreas and other organs. Common symptoms include persistent coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, frequent lung infections, poor weight gain and digestive problems.
More than 30,000 people nationwide receive medications and treatments from 120 CF Foundation care centers across the country, including the Tucson Cystic Fibrosis Center at Banner-University Medical Center. Treatments typically include a combination of airway clearance therapies, inhaled medications and pancreatic enzyme supplements and supplemental feeding treatments, all of which Jolene and Cecilia, 5, receive.
Both girls have to wear a device similar to a life vest that uses mechanical compression to prevent mucus from settling in the lungs twice a day, take breathing medications, enzymes before they eat anything and between 15 and 25 pills a day, Cheryl said.
The girls, who are both on feeding tubes, have also received “tune-ups” which require hospital stays due to a drop in lung function.
“It is quite normal for children with CF to go in at least once a year or more for a tune-up to receive more medications and additional treatments with the vests ... the girls handle it all right, but it is never easy,” Cheryl said.
In spite of the sobering realities of CF, Cheryl and fellow volunteers said the community support for the CF Foundation and its research is uplifting.
“Since my siblings were born with CF in the 1960s, life expectancy has increased exponentially for those born with CF. The research the foundation is doing now is so advanced and so specific ... a cure is in the line of sight and it is just awesome to be part of something like this,” said Greg Coleman, a long-time member of the Board of Directors for the Southern Arizona Chapter of the CF Foundation.
LaughingStock Comedy Company shares that sentiment and commitment to find a cure for CF, according to comedian Lesley Abrams. She said that she and her colleagues, Dean Steeves and Brendan Murphy, are excited to be headlining the upcoming fundraiser.
“They talk about a cure on the horizon, and while the challenge with CF is that there are different strains of the disease so it manifests differently in different people, generally speaking you know that when they make progress in one area, it fuels progress in all areas. We are very optimistic at this point,” Abrams said.
In the meantime, she thinks that Fill Your Lungs With Laughter will offer an upbeat evening of improvisational comedy for everyone in attendance.
“It is very interactive and the audience is invested in the outcome. It is very exciting and refreshing to have something that is on-the-spot and spontaneous. We don’t see that very often anymore since everything is very scripted and rehearsed. Our comedy can get goofy, witty, physical, farcical, high-brow and low-brow: It is really up to the audience,” she said.
