Constable: Northwestern next for Plainfield author with cystic fibrosis
A top scholar and published author who recently won a scholarship she'll use in the fall at Northwestern University, Ravina Thakkar spends four hours a day doing something more important than academics.
Every morning and every night, the Plainfield 18-year-old runs through a medical regimen that includes exercises, inhalers, nebulizers and a vibrating vest to help her live with life-shortening cystic fibrosis and all the issues related to her disease and its treatment.
"Sometimes I'd study before and tell myself I'd study after, but then it would be 11 p.m. and I'd just go to bed," admits Thakkar, who suffered through a difficult senior year that involved two hospital stays and still managed to graduate from Plainfield North High School with honors.
"My greatest challenge with CF was not spurred by one isolated incident, but rather a culmination of many: slowly, CF started stripping away the one thing I was sure would remain strong and intact: my sanity," Thakkar wrote in an essay that won her one of Vertex Pharmaceuticals' "All in for CF Scholarship" $5,000 awards. "My days started feeling like the gaps between medical problems, these little pockets of artificial happiness followed by a sense of impending doom, and my nights, even worse."
Admitted to Rush Medical Center in Chicago for nearly two weeks in March, and a couple of days in April, Thakkar says she recovered enough to attend her prom in May without having to accessorize her dress with a stash of medical supplies. And she discovered she won the scholarship while she was in the hospital, "so that was nice," Thakkar says.
An inherited chronic disease that clogs the lungs with a sticky mucus, CF makes it difficult to breathe and also attacks the pancreas, preventing enzymes from properly absorbing food.
In the 1950s, children with CF rarely lived past grade school. A generation ago, people with CF often died in their 20s. The life expectancy for people born with CF now is in their 40s. Thakkar says she'll focus on graduating from Northwestern during her 20s and making the most of her life after that.
"I have a terminal illness, of course," Thakkar said on her 14th birthday, when she used her "Make-A-Wish" moment not for a trip to Disney World but to get her first novel published by Sourcebooks of Naperville. Her 128-page book, "The Adventure of a Lifetime," is still selling, earning the teenager the occasional royalty check for several hundred dollars.
The only child of Bhavesh (a computer programmer) and Krishna (a mortgage underwriter) Thakkar, the teenager developed her love of reading and writing as a child whose CF forced her to spend a lot of time sitting still. Ravina avoided CF-related diabetes, but she recently was diagnosed with a steroid-induced diabetes caused by drugs she takes for her condition. She was sick most of February and lost 12 pounds to drop her weight to 105 pounds.
"It's just a lot of upkeep," the teenager says, noting that she makes the trip to Rush every other week and sometimes needs to see a doctor every week. "I have a team there," she says of the seven doctors, from an allergist to an infectious disease expert, who treat her.
Her parents admit they'll worry about their daughter on her own at Northwestern and still don't know if she'll be granted a single room because of her medical condition and daily treatments. But Ravina Thakkar has a history of meeting her lofty expectations. "I've always had big aspirations," says Thakkar, who will study creative writing in college and hopes to write novels and maybe screenplays.
She's already done some homework about the life around Northwestern.
"In Evanston," Thakkar says with a grin, "there are three bookstores."