04/27/2026
I want you to think about the last time you complained about going to the doctor.
The wait time.
The copay.
The inconvenience of rearranging your day for a routine appointment.
Now I want you to think about this.
There is a mother who would give anything for a routine appointment.
Who has not had a routine anything since the day her child was diagnosed.
Whose appointments come with echocardiograms and cardiac monitors and conversations about surgical options and survival rates and quality of life projections for a child who has not yet lost their baby teeth.
There is a father who has not slept through the night in years.
Not because his child won’t sleep.
Because he is afraid to.
Because the last time everything felt fine it wasn’t.
And his body has not forgotten that.
There is a sibling who learned what a defibrillator was before they learned their multiplication tables.
Who grew up knowing that some days Mom cries in the bathroom and you just pretend not to hear it.
Who became quieter than they should have had to be because the house was already carrying too much noise.
There is a marriage that is held together by love and exhaustion and the shared understanding that falling apart at the same time is not an option.
There is a bank account that never recovered from the first hospitalization.
Or the second.
Or the third.
There is a mother who googles symptoms at 2am not because she is paranoid but because she has been right before when everyone told her she was wrong and she cannot afford to miss something again.
There is a child.
Hooked to monitors.
Covered in wires.
With a scar down their chest that tells the story of everything they survived before they were old enough to understand what surviving meant.
Smiling anyway.
Fighting anyway.
Living anyway.
With more joy than most people twice their age.
More resilience than most people will ever need.
More proof that the human spirit is something that cannot be broken by even the hardest of circumstances.
That child is a CHD warrior.
And that family —
the exhausted sleepless financially broken beautifully resilient family surrounding that child —
is a CHD family.
1 in 100 babies is born with a congenital heart defect.
That means someone you know is living this.
Right now.
Today.
In silence.
Because CHD families get very good at functioning in ways that make the outside world think everything is fine.
Everything is not always fine.
But they show up anyway.
Every single day.
They show up.
