Conner Hill's son Dawson was practicing spoon dips of puree when he stopped breathing and turned blue. Conner threw him in the car, drove as aggressively as he could to the nearest ER, and watched his blood oxygen drop from 80 to 50 on the monitor. He saw fear in the nurses' eyes. Fear in the doctor's eyes. Fear in his wife Kali's eyes. He thought they were going to lose him that day.
They didn't. It was a rotavirus that sent Dawson's tiny body into acidosis. Four days later, they were home. But that moment, and the months of emergencies that preceded it, became the foundation (literally) for what Conner and Kali built next.
The Diagnosis That Changed Everything
Dawson was diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome ("HLHS") during a 20-week anatomy scan. HLHS means half of the heart is doing a whole heart's job, and it requires three open heart surgeries over the first few years of life: the Norwood, the Glenn, and the Fontan.
The Norwood happened three days after Dawson was born. That one was planned. They had housing lined up. Backup housing arranged. They knew what they were walking into. What came between the Norwood and the Glenn is called the interstage, and it's the most dangerous window for a single-ventricle baby. That's when the life flights started.
The first came when Dawson's airway restricted suddenly during a video call with one of his nurse practitioners. She told Conner and Kali to get to the ER immediately. He was stabilized and life-flighted to the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia ("CHOP"). The second was the day he turned blue. Kali was nearly performing CPR in the backseat while Conner drove. The local ER team was on the phone with CHOP's cardiac ICU, doing things they hadn't done in years, pushing medications just to keep him alive.
After that second life flight, sleep became a different thing entirely. Dawson has some tracheal compression from his surgeries, so his breathing is audible. When it went quiet at night (because he was breathing fine, not because he stopped), both parents would bolt out of bed. That hypervigilance didn't ease until after the Glenn.
What Stronger Hearts Foundation Actually Does
Conner and Kali started Stronger Hearts Foundation in April 2025 while Dawson was inpatient at CHOP for his Glenn procedure. They filed the paperwork in May and expected the typical months-long wait for 501(c)(3) status. It came in August. They set an arbitrary goal of raising $20,000 by year-end to fund their programs. They hit it by October 12th.
The foundation fills a specific gap that Conner and Kali experienced firsthand. When your child is life-flighted to a hospital two hours from home, the last thing you're thinking about is where you're sleeping tonight. Ronald McDonald House is often full. Hotels in cities like Philadelphia are expensive. Some families don't even have a card to put a room on. Conner watched social workers struggle to arrange something for those families, and he watched the families struggle right alongside them.
So the foundation provides emergency housing assistance (48 to 72 hours) for families in cardiac ICUs, care packages with food, rideshare, coffee, and Amazon gift cards, and supplemental support like holiday meals and Scent Heart kits. Those kits are small cloth hearts that help newborns bond with parents who are separated immediately after birth in the cardiac ICU (which is almost always the case for babies needing surgery in the first days of life). Conner connected with a former NICU nurse on Etsy who manufactures them at a reduced cost so the foundation can distribute them widely.
By November 2025 they had delivered 30 care packages with thousands of dollars in gift cards to CHOP, 50 Scent Heart kits, and 50 to 60 coffee gift cards for Thanksgiving. They've expanded to Johns Hopkins (years ahead of schedule) and are building out a community-based peer support program that connects inpatient families with other heart parents within 24 hours.
Every dollar they raise turns into something tangible, fast. That matters. A lot of organizations do good work, but donors don't always see where their money goes until a research paper publishes years later. Conner posts everything: every care package delivered, every gift card distributed, every piece of support received. The transparency is deliberate and it's working.
What CHD Does to a Relationship (and How to Survive It)
Conner was direct about this: CHD will either break a relationship or force it to grow. He and Kali chose growth, but it wasn't passive. It was intentional, and he gave specific examples that are worth hearing.
Before Dawson's diagnosis, the plan was simple. Kali takes maternity leave, Conner takes parental leave after, six months with the new baby. They're both healthy, active people who took care of themselves. Then the anatomy scan happened and every expectation they had about pregnancy and parenthood shattered.
Kali eventually changed careers to work closer to home because the old arrangement wasn't sustainable. Conner works from home in consulting, and on days packed with meetings, Kali might have Dawson for four or five straight hours while he's teething and miserable. Conner's rule for himself: don't wait until she looks burnt out. Go tell her she did great. Recognize the work. Acknowledge it out loud, even when she probably already knows.
The practical framework they use is "tagging in." You don't wait for your spouse to hit a wall. You watch for the signs and step in before it spirals. If one parent burns out and the other has to overcompensate, now you're both exhausted and that's when things get hard. Checking in doesn't have to be anything novel. "How are you doing?" works. "He was really angry this morning, how did you feel about it?" works. Being direct about it works.
"You will either break and shatter or you will be forced to grow together. And I think part of that growth together is the acknowledgement that I recognize what you're doing. You're doing a good job. Even if you wake up having a bad day, you're giving 100% of what you have, and that's always going to be good enough."
Why a Consultant From Maryland Started a CHD Foundation
People ask Conner if the foundation is a coping mechanism. His first instinct was to say no. Thinking about it more, he admitted it is. Every time he tells the story it's never easy, but it's a little easier than the time before. It lets him hear from other people and realize he's not alone, and he wants other parents to have that too.
I relate to this from a completely different angle. I went through most of my life hiding my CHD. Three heart surgeries, countless echoes and stress tests, and nobody ever connected me to the resources that existed. I didn't know what a CHD was until my 20s. I found out from some guy on Instagram in Scotland who introduced me to the Adult Congenital Heart Association. A lot of what I do now comes from spite. The resources were always out there. My family just never got pointed to them.
Conner's approach is different but the root is the same. He and Kali went through something brutal, identified the gaps in real time, and started building to fill them. His consulting and military background gave him the lens to look at a traumatic experience and still see it as a process with identifiable failure points. The foundation is what happens when someone with that skill set turns it toward something they care about more than anything else.
He's also now on the CNOC Newborn Neuroprotective Network communications committee, serves on the board of another CHD organization, and is connecting with researchers working on cardiac neurodevelopmental outcomes. The Scent Heart kits came directly from a CNOC conference session that sparked the idea. He's not waiting for permission to contribute. He's finding what exists and figuring out how to make it reach more families.
What You Should Know
- Stronger Hearts Foundation provides emergency housing, care packages, Scent Heart bonding kits, and peer support for families in cardiac ICUs. Learn more and donate at strongerheartsfoundation.com.
- HLHS (hypoplastic left heart syndrome) requires three staged surgeries: the Norwood, the Glenn, and the Fontan. The interstage between the first two is the highest-risk period.
- You don't need to start a foundation to make a difference. A few hours a week volunteering, a couple hundred dollars a year to an organization you trust, or just sharing a story that helps another family feel less alone. Compare it to doing nothing, not to someone doing more.
- For CHD couples: Tag in before your partner burns out. Check in directly. Acknowledge their effort out loud. These aren't grand gestures. They're how you keep each other above the threshold.
"CHD is the fight that I never asked for, that we never asked for, but it is the purpose that we can't walk away from. It became a line in my timeline where it split into before and after. And it is something that we are choosing to build for in that after."
That's Conner Hill. No platitudes, no inspirational catchphrases. Just a dad who watched his son's oxygen drop to 50, came out the other side, and decided to make sure the next family has a place to sleep and a cup of coffee when their world falls apart.
Watch the full two-part conversation on YouTube: Part 1 — Dawson's Story and Part 2 — Building the Foundation. Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts (links on our episodes page).
