Raising awareness for Atrial fibrillation has become my passion. Because one of the ways that we can wiped out a fibrillated strokes is to let people know about a A fib and then that’s a problem. So, there have been a number of things. One of the very first that I tackled was that I felt like we needed them at for atrial fibrillation. We have heart month, we have stroke month, we have breast cancer awareness month. We have so many months other things—we needed an atrial fibrillation month.

So as I started thinking of that, you know September is a perfect months, stress often goes along with atrial fibrillation and September is kind of a stressful month. Back to school, foot ball games, starting to think about the stress of the holidays, stressful month. It’s such a 1:06 that needs to be our awareness month.

So we declare it September as atrial fibrillation awareness month and got it registered in the official register and then started promoting it publicizing it, getting word out to the media, doing stories about it, doing interviews about it. Anything we could do to get the word out. It was only after the fact that I realized, wait a minute, September is when I had my minimal surgery. That’s when I got my life back. September is the perfect month for it. But I really wasn’t even thinking of it at the time.

It’s important that we get the word out in every way possible. So we’ve celebrated A fib month for the couple of years, but there’s so many more things that we could do, so we kind of put together a coalition of organizations who have an interest around A fib. It’s been introduced in the House of Representatives and we have one being introduced in the senate any day now.

Every time I ‘m in the Washington DC, I’m up there on Capitol Hill drumming up support among representatives and senators. Sharing with them my story and the story of others who have Atrial fibrillation. So that we can get an official A fib month designated by congress. We’re also approaching it from a lot of other ways. We have over the past year put together a coalition focused on raising A fib awareness through the media for medica organizations and through a number of ways.

We started with just a very few organizations and it’s grown to 24 organizations. And so[ we kicked off this A fib awareness initiative back in May of this year. And we’ll be doing lot of media about A fib in order to raise awareness. We have doctors, We have nursing organizations, we have patient advocacy organizations, we have caregiver organizations, many organizations involved in this initiative.

Also looking at working with organizations in other countries as well to raise awareness of A fib—many, many ways that we will be approaching this. We have to raise awareness around the globe. It’s an international condition, it’s not just you as. So we have a number of initiatives that are in the very early stages kind of on the drawing board at this point. but we want to raise awareness all around the globe.