Thank you for visiting my fundraising page for the Cleveland Congenital Heart Walk. Raising funds for CHD research is critically important to all Heart Warriors and Heart Angels, and personally very meaningful to me.

On July 13th, 2020, our little warrior Dakota came into the world. We knew he was going to be born with a heart defect but what we didn’t know was the extent of challenges we would all endure. While we did get a chance to hold him briefly before he was whisked away to the PICU, it was still a hard pill to swallow that we wouldn’t have our newborn near us and would have to make what seemed like a never ending walk to get from the maternity ward to the PICU to see our sweet boy. He was born with CC-TGA, sub pulmonic stenosis and multiple holes in his heart. The next morning when we went to see him, he had multiple IVs, umbilical lines, was on oxygen and we couldn’t hold him. He had declined overnight and they needed to step in. 

For the first 15 days of his life we spent it in the hospital where during that time he went for a procedure to have a stent placed to ensure enough blood was reaching his lungs. Over the course of the next 1 1/2-2 months, he seemed to be doing really well, until he wasn’t. A day after he turned 2 months old we were rushed back to the PICU at Cleveland Clinic Children's Hospital where we found out due to outgrowing the stent, he was essentially drowning from blood being in his lungs. 3-4 times the amount of blood was being pumped to his lungs than there was supposed to be. This caused his organs to begin shutting down, he had gone unresponsive while waiting on the ambulance. His battle with his congenital heart defect has been a scary one. Needing open heart surgery and a pacemaker by 3 months old while having many scares that we could lose him along the way during our 2 month hospital stay.

To date, Dakota has had 6 procedures and he isn’t even 2 yet, 3 cath procedures and 3 surgeries.