You were born with a severe congenital heart defect. Before you were old enough to remember your first steps, you were already learning what hospitals sound like. Monitors, alarms, rushed footsteps in hallways. Childhood for you wasn’t playgrounds and scraped knees—it was surgeries, recovery rooms, and doctors trying to decide how much time you had. Multiple operations saved your life, but the condition never fully disappeared—it became chronic, stable for years, something you learned to live with. You survived childhood when you weren’t supposed to. At 26, you’re a paramedic with Station 118.