Welcome to CHD Warrior! We’re excited to have finally launched, and are so grateful that you’ve made the few necessary clicks to find us. As we begin this blog, we feel it would be helpful to give our customers some insight into who we are and how we came to be launching a website to sell CHD Awareness apparel. A brief version of our story can be found on our about page, but if you’re the type that would like to know the fuller account, you’re in the right place.
For starters, it might be good to offer some bit of an introduction. My name is Quinten, and my wife Barbara and I are the parents of two incredible little boys. Our youngest son, Asher, was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect in February 2015, three months before he was born. The story of his diagnosis is long enough to be a blog post of its own, but suffice it to say that Asher is now almost 2 ½ years old, has had two open heart surgeries, and has recently been diagnosed with Shone’s Complex.
When we were first told that Asher had CHD, we honestly had no idea what that meant. I, for one, had never heard of congenital heart disease, and my wife and I were both searching all over the internet to see what we could learn about it. We were surprised to learn that an estimated 1 out of every 100 children born in the U.S. has some form of a congenital heart defect. This has helped make it the #1 birth defect worldwide, and, as of this writing, there is no definitively known cause for why children develop CHD.
During the three months before Asher was born, Barbara and I often found ourselves answering questions and explaining to people what CHD was, and what that meant for our little Asher. We soon found that our friends and family knew just as little about CHD as we did when we had first learned of Asher’s diagnosis. It was probably the combination of this fact as well as the “proud parent” side of us that prompted us to see if there were any shirts or other apparel that we could wear to help raise CHD awareness and show our support for our little heart warrior. Of the two of us, Barbara is definitely the one with the keen ability for sense of fashion (and thank goodness she has it, as I am often reminded that my clothes don’t match). As she searched Amazon.com, Ebay, Etsy, and many other online sites, she ultimately decided that there was no “heart mom” or “heart dad” shirts out there that met her taste. I remember her saying at one point “we may just need to make our own,” but at the time, that was just a casual thought.
Fast forward now, to this past August. Asher’s heart function had significantly decreased since his last OHS in February, and he was now considered a heart failure patient. They wanted to install a new pacemaker and additional leads to his heart in order to help his ventricles work in sync with one another. The open-heart surgery that he was meant to have instead turned into a simple surgery in the catheter lab at Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City, and we were very pleased that they wouldn’t have to open up his chest a third time. However, his previous surgery in February had required Asher to begin taking Coumadin, a blood thinner, for the rest of his life, and the trickiest part of his entire hospital visit in August was balancing out the Coumadin dosage to get his blood coagulation levels just right.
It was during this hospital stay that Barbara and I decided to finally get serious about designing a few shirts that we could wear. After creating a few mock-ups, we thought to ourselves that maybe there were others out there who had had the same issues in finding a CHD awareness shirt as we did. That’s when we decided that maybe we could launch a site to share some of our shirts with other heart moms, dads, warriors, and other family members who wanted to help raise CHD awareness. Neither of us had ever worked in retail, nor had we ever run our own website. But, after reading through many online tutorials and tips, we officially organized CHD Warrior LLC, launched our social media pages on Facebook and Instagram, and officially opened up our site, www.chdwarrior.com yesterday, September 22, 2017.
Obviously, we’re just getting started, and more designs, site tweaks, and more will be coming in due time. With that being said, if you ever have any comments or suggestions on how we could improve, please feel free to let us know. We want to make your shopping experience with us as enjoyable and hassle-free as possible. As for now, we are so excited that you’ve stopped by to visit our new site, and we hope to be able to offer CHD awareness apparel for you and yours for years to come!
Cheers!
Quinten and Barbara