INDIANAPOLIS -- This week is CHD Week, meaning there is extra focus on babies born with congenital heart defects.
It impacts eight out of every 1,000 babies. About 25 percent of them have to go through invasive surgeries and battle health complications for the rest of their lives. The objective of CHD Week is to bring awareness and hope that one day, technology will find a solution.
But 8-year-old Mackenna Casebolt also wants to remind families to keep on smiling.
"I like to dance and I like to sing and draw," Mackenna said.
She's already undergone 10 surgeries, three of them open-heart. The first at 9-days-old, then at 10 months, then at 2 years for a congenital heart defect.
"They said 'We don't know what's going on, we just know there is something wrong with her,'" Mackenna's father Kris said.
Mackenna is basically operating with half a heart, but you can't really tell.
"For having a physically deformed heart, she has a really big heart," Kris said.
The next step for her is a transplant.
"It's still your baby," Tiffany Casebolt, Mackenna's mother, said. "You're still sending somebody in to cut her chest open and it's just terrifying."
