Monday, October 18, 2010

Grief... and the lack of Awareness...

In the last couple of weeks, several children with congenital heart defects have passed away. Each and every single one of these precious ones fought valiantly for their lives, but it was not enough.

Congenital Heart Defects do not care how much money your family has, they do not care if your family has support, they do not care if you were a star athlete and took care of yourself during pregnancy. CHDs strike randomly. Occasionally there is some sort of link, but with statistics in the United States with 1 out of every 100 births having some variation of a congenital heart defect? It would make perfect sense for there to be others in the same family to have a defect also.

Not only does my mother's heart grieve for the 13 publicized heart babies that are now in heaven, it grieves for those that do not get public recognition.

I was reminded the other day about a statistic that surprised me considering the awareness surrounding it. Did you know that Downs Syndrome occurs at a rate of 1 in 800-1000 live births? Autism is estimated to be 1 in 120 children. Why doesn't Congenital Heart Defects get the same awareness?

 How can this be so?

While there have been GREAT strides in the improvement and development of procedures for correcting CHDs, there could be even more breakthroughs with more funding and more awareness.

Need More Information? Check these Websites.
To visit other sites trying to bring attention to Congenital Heart Defects, please go here.

1 comment:

Hartley said...

Hi,

I stumbled onto your blog today and wanted to leave a comment.

I encourage you keep working towards awareness! Did you Sensory Processing Disorder affects 1 in 6 kids? Yet, we struggle to get awareness for SPD every day. Keep pushing, using your voice and your story to spread the word!

Good luck, and thanks for sharing!

Hartley Steiner
Award winning author of
This is Gabriel Making Sense of School
www.hartleysboys.com
@ ParentingSPD