Author's Introduction

Hello, my name in Ana, I’m a 21 year old university student. I manage A’s, I play Tennis, I write, I read fantasy, historical, and mystery novels, I play tennis, and I was born with 4 Congenital Heart Defects. These are structural or electrical problems with the heart and major arteries.

Congenital Heart Defects effect around 1 in 100 live births across the world, in the United States, this rounds out to 40,000 babies each year on average. The truth is that CHD effects and kills more than twice as many children than all forms of childhood cancer combined and receives less than 10% of the research funding from the US government that childhood cancer does.

Until the late 80’s hardly anyone with a serious form of Congenital Heart Disease survived long enough to tell their story. In the last 20 years however, the mortality rate for CHD has fallen from 50% to about 35%, this significant improvement in the survival rate means that for the first time in history, there are more CHD survivors who are now adults, than we have CHD babies being born.

The improvement is still young however, which is probably why I can find blog and blog, and website after website talking about CHD from a parent’s and activist’s point of view, but find it almost impossible to find this story told from the perspective of the child, the survivor themselves. I hope this blog will change all of that.

I was born at the beginning of the shift, in 1994, when I was 1 of the 40,000, the chances of me seeing my 18^th birthday were 50/50, and I almost died more than once along the way. I have seen the inside of at least 5 different Pediatric wards in three different states, I was medivacked from one hospital to another at least once, and endured 3 heart surgeries over my first 11 years of life.

I am one of the fortunate, I am not in a wheelchair, I did not suffer severe brain damage, I am now healthy enough to participate in the sport of my choice…I can live a fairly normal life. Because of my good fortune, I am able to share with you now, the long road it took to get to this point.