Front Cover

The first time I stepped outside of the hospital building and walked down the street for a breath of fresh air, I was overcome with a very strange feeling.  It was as if I came down from another planet to visit Earth.  The streets were bustling with traffic.  Sirens broke through the noise of the city.  Pedestrians scurried about the sidewalks to their destinations.  But no one knew about the gravity of the situation that my family and I were immersed in.  Our lives were somewhat stalled yet life went on without us.  How I wished I could have traded problems with any one of the people on that street – even if it were just for one day.  Then an important lesson began to sink deep into me. Don’t take life or the people around you for granted.  “Don’t sweat the small stuff,” as they say.  Many of the worries that the people on that street were dragging around with them could easily have been left behind.

Six years later we were walking in the American Heart Association’s annual Heart Walk.  The Walk had a very special  twist to it, however.  Over one hundred advertising banners had been hung all over the city along the Walk route.  There, on every banner, larger than life, was a photo from last year’s walk of my daughter sitting on my shoulders!  The front cover of the book shows one of those banners.

Seeing the banners brought back the vivid memories of that walk down the street near the hospital six years earlier.  Here were all of these photos of my daughter and me, yet no one was paying attention to them.  Life was going on all around us just like it was six years earlier.  It was a good reminder of the lesson learned earlier.  Although during this year’s Heart Walk, a sense of inspiration came over me.  Despite the fact that people weren’t  really paying attention  to  the banners, there were thousands of people walking past them who cared enough to raise money for the cause and take time out of their weekend to make a difference.  We are not alone.  There are many families out there like ours and even more that want to help.