February is American Heart Month, and it's time to celebrate cardiovascular health. WMOA spoke with Renea Ball, a nurse with over 28 years of experience and a CPR instructor for over 20 years. 

"We need to be physically active. So leading an inactive lifestyle would put us at at risk for heart disease. Also, we wanna make sure that we're eating a healthy diet. We want to either, if we are a smoker, we wanna quit smoking or we wanna avoid smoking altogether. That includes being around secondhand smoke. And also we wanna avoid excessive, um, use of alcohol."

She explains the importance of a healthy heart.

"The heart is basically the major, uh, pump in our body. It supplies all of our blood to our every cell in our body, and when it supplies the blood, it's also supplying all of our oxygen and our nutrients that our cells need in our body. So it has a very important job to do."

CPR may be intimidating, but we must ask ourselves a question.

"For maybe that first time parent, I say, you know, what would happen if your infant was choking? Um, would you rather be prepared than not prepared? Same with if it was your spouse or your loved one, um, you know, a parent, a sibling, um, anything. I just always say, put yourself in the, those shoes. If you would want to help your loved one, then it's best to go ahead and get trained in CPR."

Ball shares a disturbing statistic.