I am charing this team to support my friend Kambe.  Here is her story.

My story started at birth, unbeknownst to my parents I was born with a heart defect ASD (atrial septic defect) which is a hole in the heart. In most cases the hole can close on its own, in my case the hole got bigger as I was growing. I was sick all the time and my parents would take me to the doctor where they were told time and time again "she has the flu, it's going around" except my parents would not accept that as me being their 6th kid, they knew what flu symptoms were and I didn't have them. By the time I hit junior high and then high school, I was often called a "faker and that I just wanted attention" that came from other kids, teachers, some family members. I tried to hide the symptoms but my skin color turning grey, my lips blue, and not able to breath became unhideable. In high school, my cross country coach called my parents to come watch me at practice, you see my coach had to hold a brown bag over my mouth as I would hyperventilate at any exercise especially running up a hill. With my parents advocating and desperately searching what was wrong with their daughter and pushing doctors to throughly research what was going on, at the age of 17 years old, I had open heart surgery in Seattle. Insurance declined paying as they said it was a pre-existing condition. I didn't really understand as a teenager what that meant, I was never diagnosed until I had the surgery.

I learned from my parents to acknowledge that what I was feeling and going through was valid and not in my head, I never in my wildest dreams thought as a child I had a heart condition nor do I ever hold bad feelings to those that thought I was faking as it was a unconceivable thought that I was actually THAT sick.

To fast forward to the past 10 years, I went back to the cardiologist because I knew something was wrong and just didn't know what, the cardiologist thought maybe it was in my head as I had just gone through two family deaths. He put me on a heart monitor that led to once again not in my head but to my first heart ablation. To date I have had:

1 open heart surgery, 7 heart ablations, 1 pacemaker implant

At this moment in time I am still having issues with my heart and am in heart failure. I have made it my mission to advocate for not just myself but to help as many people to have awareness about heart disease, the attitude if it won't happen to me, is frightening as it can affect not just the elderly, not just men, not just women BUT little children. Heart disease has remained the number one killer and my hope is that one day there will be more technology, more cures, more knowledge to take this disease down, even if I have to be a guinea pig on tests, medications, surgeries as I really hope that one day soon there will be not only a fix for me, but a preventable way to protect our hearts.

I am glad we can walk together to help save lives.