( Photo Credit ) I was born with a broken heart. It wasn't the kind you may be thinking.  I had a congenital heart defect called an atrial septal defect.  It's a hole between the two upper chambers of the heart.  Mine was about the size of a fifty cent piece. Today with all of the advances in technology it's quite easy to repair, even on infants. But in 1953 when I was born, it was a different story.  After all, the heart lung machine had only been in use for a short time.  The risk of complications and death was quite high.  So the cardiologis…

Have you ever met any of your blogging buddies in person?  I've had the pleasure of meeting about a dozen over the course of my blogging life and I have to say ...I've never been disappointed. Today was no exception!  Guess who was crazy enough to be vacationing in Phoenix in the middle of summer?  Barbie of My Freshly Brewed Life Besides having the pleasure of meeting Barbie for breakfast at Paradise Bakery (a favorite of mine), I also got to meet two of her closest friends Laura and Kristin.  So now I have two more wonderful friends. When the…

If you've followed Heart Choices for any time now, you probably know that I'm Norwegian.  Yes, I was born in the US and so were my parents.  That's my mom in the photo above.  But both sets of grandparents were immigrants from Norway.  There's even a town north of Trondheim that is called Sumstad, which is my maiden name.  It was common to take the name of the town as a last name when people left their homeland to go to the US.  That's what my grandfather did. Some of you may know Sonja from her blog bits & pieces ... Her mother w…