Team Jacob's Heart

My son is 1 in 100.  He is also the strongest, bravest and most courageous person I will ever know.  He has taught me life lessons in the small amount of time that he has been on this earth, that I am positive I would have never learned if he wasn't given to me.  Every day I thank God that I am blessed to have him call me “ma-ma”.  Jacob was born with a serious, very complex congenital heart defect called hypoplastic left heart syndrome.   Because he was born with a non-functioning left heart, he has undergone two heart surgeries.  The first one was at 7 days old and the second at 4 months old.  He will require at least one more surgery to reconstruct his heart.  The series of three surgeries will not cure his heart defect, but rather re-plumb his heart so that the right side will take over the entire workload.  We don't know how long this “half-a-heart” will efficiently pump and he will most likely require a heart transplant at some point.  Not so many years ago, children born with this heart defect had no hope for survival.  But medicine has made so many advances.  There is HOPE for Jacob and so many other children born with CHD's.  There is hope because of the research funded by foundations like the Children's Heart Foundation.   Because my son needs and will always rely on new research and medical advances, our family decided that we needed to do something to help raise awareness and funding.  So, we decided to recruit family and friends to form Team Jacob's Heart and walk in the Fargo Marathon's 5K run/walk.  With the help of CHF, we set up a fundraising page to start collecting donations.  Not really knowing what to expect, we set an initial goal of raising $500.  To our surprise, the donations kept coming and coming and as this point we have raised over $2000.  It is so touching to see the support that we have received towards our mission. We know we cannot control the fact that Jacob was born with this special heart, but we can control what we do with the situation that we have been given.  So we choose to do what we can to help spread awareness of CHD's.
Team Jacob's Heart's Fundraising Page