ABOUT
Hi, I’m Carissa.
A heart mom, a CHD advocate, and someone who has spent a decade inside healthcare. I'm here to make the unseen realities of congenital heart disease visible and to walk beside the families facing them.
MY STORY
There is something wrong with his heart…..
What no one tells you is how much of this journey happens where the world can't see it. The monitors in the middle of the night. The appointments you learn to translate. The way you become fluent in a language you never asked to speak. From the outside, everything can look fine and inside, a family is holding its breath.
Our story doesn’t just end at the bedside.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped just surviving the journey and started doing something about it. The things I wished someone had told me, the questions I learned to ask, the shortcuts through a system that isn't built to be understood. What began as notes and research for myself became something bigger: a handheld out to the next family standing where I once stood.
Today, that's my whole purpose making the invisible visible, translating the overwhelming into the understandable. Working for organizations like Conquering CHD and volunteering for organization like Every 100th Heart, The Cardiac Neurodevelopment Outcomes Collaborative, The Pediatric Acute Care Cardiology Collaborative, and The Congenital Heart Public Health Consortium.
It began with words no parent is ever ready to hear.
What Makes My View Different
I've stood on both sides of the curtain.
Most people in this world know one side or the other. I've lived both and that's where everything I do comes from.
The Parent
I've lived it.
I've been the parent in the waiting room, learning the vocabulary of cardiology in real time and holding a family together through it. I don't reassure from a distance I've felt the fear I'm speaking to.
The Professional
I understand the system.
I've spent ten years working in healthcare, in administration so I understand how care is organized, how the machinery moves, and where families tend to get lost. That's the map I share.