Who We Are

So who are we?

We’re 1 out of every 120 people... there’s a new one of us every 14 minutes. We are both genders and we are all ages. A million of us are adults, and about 800,000 of us are children.

We’ve made it through surgeries, hospital stays, infections, Endocarditis, pacemakers, and Heaven know what else. We’ve given gallons of blood, one vial at a time. We’ve fought back against tremendous odds. We’ve been so sick that we’ve scared the world’s best doctors witless… and then amazed them even more when we recovered.

We aren’t related by blood but we are a family. We call ourselves the Cardiac Kids and Heart Warriors. We have an amazing inner strength, but we are terribly fragile at the same time. We know that most of us shouldn’t even be here and so we live every moment as if it is our last. We’ve celebrated our victories and we’ve mourned our losses. Our heroes include a Flying Tomato, a golfer, and a former movie star, because we are them and they are us. Our parents are Heart Dads and Heart Moms, and we consider those titles as Badges of Honor. They deserve it; they were the first ones to discover that a heart defect doesn’t just break one heart... it breaks three.

We work, we play, we pay our taxes and we live our lives. We’re in your community, in your church, in your school, in your office, and quite possibly in your home. We move a little slower, do some things a little differently, but we usually get along without causing a fuss.

We are people living with Congenital Heart Defects.