Every day, our team walks into BIDMC and does something extraordinary: we fight heart disease, one patient at a time.

We are surgeons, nurses, physician assistants, and healthcare professionals who have dedicated our careers to cardiac care. We're in the operating room during someone's most vulnerable moment. We're at the bedside explaining what recovery will look like. We're the ones who see, firsthand, what heart disease does to a person and to the people who love them — and we're also the ones who get to witness the relief when a surgery goes well, when a patient walks out of the hospital, when a family gets more time together than they thought they'd have.

That experience is why we walk.

The CABG Patch Kids are a small group who decided that treating heart disease in the hospital wasn't enough — we wanted to help fight it everywhere else too. What started as a handful of coworkers signing up for the American Heart Association's Heart Walk has grown into a team that has raised over $75,000 for research, public education, and community outreach that reaches far beyond our own operating rooms.

We know what this money does. We've seen the outcomes of better research, earlier interventions, and public awareness campaigns that catch problems before they become emergencies. Every dollar raised moves that work forward.

This year, our team is walking not just as professionals who treat heart disease, but as people who have watched it touch our own families, our friends, and our patients in ways that stay with us. Some of us are walking in memory of someone we lost. Some of us are walking because we've watched a patient beat the odds and want to help more people get that chance. All of us are walking because we believe the work doesn't stop when we leave the hospital.

We'd be grateful for your support — whether that means joining us on October 24th at the Boston Common, or contributing to a cause that funds the research and care that lets us keep doing what we do.

Thank you for helping us take care of hearts, on and off the clock.

— The CABG Patch Kids