Hello, my name is Elizabeth Ditto.

About a month before my third birthday, my beautiful baby brother, Robert, was born. At first he seemed like the most incredible and perfect brother in the whole world, but within the first twelve hours of life his skin and lips started turning blue; the tell tale signs that something clearly was not right. He was ripped away from my family and flown as soon as was possible from our small town hospital to the University of San Francisco pediatrics unit to be tested for Congenital Heart Disease. He was then diagnosed with a hypoplastic right ventricle, pulmonary artreasia, and a double inlet left ventricle which, in the simplest terms, means he was born without his right ventricle and was getting no oxygen to his blood, thus causing him to turn blue. He underwent four open heart surgeries before his third birthday and is now living a relatively normal life, as normal as he possibly can seeing as he only has half a heart. As horrible as it sounds, Congenital Heart Disease is a disease that often goes undiagnosed prior to the child's birth and nearly 9 out of every 1000 children are born with it, robbing nearly 192,000 lives yearly. It's the number one killer of children born with birth defects, killing about 30 percent of them as infants. 

Although everything about this disease seems to be horrifying and down right depressing, there are little silver linings. When I was nine years old, during one of my brother's many doctors appointments, my mother picked up a brochure for a camp called Camp Taylor and began reading about a little boy named Taylor who was born six years before my brother with the same birth defect whose incredible mother had founded a camp for kids with Congenital Heart Disease. When we got home, my mom went on the internet and looked up Camp Taylor and she immediately signed our family up for family camp and me and my brother up for summer camp because one older sibling was allowed to go with the "heart camper" as we call them. On that day she didn't know she had discovered more than just a camp for my brother to meet other kids like him, but she had found me a second family. She had found me my best friends who were ready to walk the rest of their lives by my side. she found the camp that taught me who I'm supposed to be. The camp where I found the people who I'm so very proud to call my best friends, my second halves, my future brides maids. The people I would spend all my money to fly half way across the United States twice a year just to see their beautiful faces. The people that remind me everyday no matter how hard life is right now, this is just a dark chapter of my life and i still have the rest of my book to write. 

When I was ten years old, and I walked into the dinning hall at camp for the first time, I sat by two girls named Lizzy and Sami whom I knew nothing about except that somehow they had some relation to Congenital Heart Disease. I didn't know I was sitting next to the two people who to this day are my everything. I didn't know that one day Sami's little sister was going to pass away and that Sami, Lizzy, and I were going to find out what it's like to have a piece of ourselves die, too. I didn't know that somehow when our whole lives were breaking and ripping at the seams from the loss of somebody we loved with all our hearts, we would use each other to sew, glue and mold each other back together. I didn't know that every single person from Camp Taylor would always be there when I needed somebody to talk to, or even something as simple as a hug. Johann Schiller once said "it is not flesh and blood, but the heart which makes us fathers and sons" and that's what I've found in Camp Taylor. I've found the family I wasn't born into by blood, but the family who will be in my heart forever.

Donating to Camp Taylor would help so many other children to find that they aren't the only people who are living with this terrible disease. Donating to Camp Taylor would help other children to find their second family, the family who will be in their hearts forever, too. Every penny helps, thank you so much for your support.

Much love and gratitude,

Elizabeth