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W four WN Radio. Hello and welcome to Fearless Fabulous You. I am your host, Melanie Young, and it is a beautiful day in December twenty twenty three. We are happy to be reigning in a new year, and I am really excited about twenty twenty four, really excited. If you follow me, you know that I am all about spotlighting amazing women with inspiring stories who've overcome odds, changed their lives and have set their course in a new direction. And gosh, I've done it so many times myself. I'm going
to be doing it again too. In a big announcement. So this show is going to spotlight someone who simply has the most amazing story. Really, here's how I'm going to set it up. She's a competitive paraserver, a golfer, a photographer, a philanthropist, an advocate, and the author of a book called Rough Waters, From Surviving to Thriving with Progressive Muscular Dystrophee. At age thirty four, Heather C. Markham received a life changing diagnosis.
She had progressive muscular dystrophee that would eventually require her using a wheelchair. Her walking days were going to end much sooner than she'd expected. Now, I know people in this situation, and it is hard to live with the progressive illness. But despite her body's betrayal, because her body was betraying her, but her mind is strong, and you have to remember, just because your
body is betraying you, your mind can be amazingly strong. Heather fearlessly leaned into adventure with a capital a performing as a belly dancer, falling in love, becoming an avid paras server pretty Awesome, winning Missus Wheelchair Kentucky, and pursuing her lifelong passion of photography. She shares her story with heartbreaking humor and a lot of big reveals in Rough Orders From Surviving to thriving with Progressive Muscular
District Fee and I'm really honored to have her joining me today. I'm fearless, fabulous. You welcome, Heather. Thank you so much for that amazing introduction. I am honored to be here and having the opportunity to have this really great conversation with you. Thank you well. As I read your book, I was in Hawaii watching surfers and I was like, my god, I can't imagine. You know, I can't even get on a surfboard. And I have a very good friend in the restaurant business who is a huge
advocate for those who wheelchair users. He founded an organization called Wheeling Forward. His name is Sianic Benjamin and he just won a Michelin Store for his restaurant contento, which really takes advocacy for those with disabilities to the highest level possible with a totally retrofitted restaurant to help everybody. And I have a huge sensitivity for it because in New York it's not easy to get around in a wheelchairs. In most places it's not. But before we get into that, I
want you to share your story. You can from a back ground where you moved around a lot talk to us about your family and your childhood. Sure. So my dad was in the military, and like a typical military brat as we're called, right, we moved every few years. I mean in the seventies it was three and out like you. And so that constant moving that gave me the opportunity to learn how to reinvent myself. Right, So
you learn how to adapt to your situations. You learn quickly how to size things up and figure out if you're going to fit in, and how to change your self to fit the environment. Can you give some examples? Oh? Sure? So I was held back in school because of my October birthday. So I was seven years old in first grade, like I was really old to be in first grade. But what my teacher did was she actually gave me my dictation words on a tape recorder and sent me out for the
teacher's lunge and then had me reading to the other students. Well, that's a recipe to get yourself beat up at recess, so you know, you figure out how to down I figured out how to downplay that so that I would fit in with my peers. That skip that being held back meant that when we moved. I skipped a grade, so now I was really young to be in third grade. And once again you figure out how to fit in, and you go, okay, well, I'm an Air Force rat
living at west Point. They the US Military Academy, which is the Army school. How do you not run your mouth that gets you beat up? That, you know, because I was raised Air Force rules and Army sucks. Well, you say that as a third grader living at West Point, you're going to get your faith beaten in. So you learned how to not say that kind of stuff. But in the meanwhile, you know, I played the kids in the neighborhood and and we all figured out how to,
you know, make that work. But the constant moving meant that when I would fall down and get hurt, and there wasn't a lot of consistency in the medical treatment. Right, Mom noticed that I wasn't healing very quickly, but that I was like getting hurt a lot. And how old were you when you were falling down? Heather? Oh gosh. Mom called me her clumsy child, so I was probably always falling down. I mean I had
broken bones at the age of six. I grot my mom at six, just falling so and Mom called me her brittle boned girl because it was just kind of strange but muscular dist to be is genetic, and but no one else in my family had it, so there was no reason to suspect anything. And when we finally in that year that we were at West Point,
I was at the er once a month with something. And it was really surprising to me looking back, of course that like child Protective Services wasn't called in, you know, because nowadays with that kind of a medical record, you know that absolutely there would have been, you know, there would be huge scrutiny. But we shared our medical records, and I say, there just wasn't that necessarily necessary follow through, say, not that anyone would have
suspected anything. So were you close to your parents? Yeah, m hm. I My mom worked really hard to make sure that she was around for us. So she worked nights in the hotel industry, and she thought that my dad should be more involved. And so my dad was the cookie mother for our girl, for my girl Scout troops m and he was the person who took me on road trips so that I could travel for tennis. I was a I was championship ranked in the state of Texas and the girls twelve
and hunders and we were all over the state of Texas. So and they supported what I did. They supported orchestra, and they supported my being in school plays and you know that kind and support it. So I would say, yes, does that make sense? Yeah? No, I just was curious because you know, it's rocky. I mean, you're if I had a child that was getting injured a lot, I'd be like doing a lot to find out what the hell's going on, you know, But you're moving
around a lot. It's probably hard to have relationships, as what I'm thinking, when you're moving around a lot. Right, Yes, it's it's very interesting because there's not a lot to clinge it, right, I mean you kind of just you know, your family is the stable thing in your life, and you learn quickly how to make friends and let go and move on. And I have a few friends from I actually have a few friends from elementary school, but I still chat with online, which is fairly amazing.
But it's moving around that much taught me how to recognize who to keep and who to let go of. That's interesting. I've heard that I've interviewed a couple of people that have come from military families, and they've most said that the you know, establishing long term relationships could be hard, but you kind of select and choose as you go. So at what point did the reality was that you really had something that was not right with you, and you
sought further doctors to see what was wrong. So I injured my back at the age of twenty two when I was working custodio, and that seemed to set off this whole cascade of things in my body. There's been some research that supports the idea of a traumatic event triggering a genetic condition, and so that injury was severe enough that I was out of work and I was seen by a lot, a lot of a lot of a lot of doctors.
Unfortunately, how my symptoms presented didn't look like a typical back injury, and so they would send me out to physical therapy and I would get better as quickly as they thought I should, or the exercises that the physical therapists having
to do would fatigue me quickly to everyone's surprise. And so as time went on, I actually had doctors say to me, two of them actually, one who said, if you hate your job, this much, and because I was working with serdial, he said, if you hate your job as much, you should quit rather than take an injury, which was, you know, just really strange to me. Yeah. And another doctor who after rounds of physical therapy I wasn't really progressing very well, he said, I'm
just going to tell the company that you're faking it. Oh God, And I just started to cry and he said, see, aren't those tears just really it's a relief. You don't have to lie anymore. And I said, you know there's something wrong, and just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's not true. And I'm gonna I'm gonna say something really snarky. So I'm just gonna I'm going to give you a snark alert right here. Snark alert. Okay, snark alert. He's dead of a brain tumor and
I'm still here. Wow. So the snark is I win. So that the bottom line is you you know, first of all, the bottom line is you have to be your own advocate when you deal with the medical profession. If you and you have to push, and you had to push a lot, you had to push a lot because it was yours was a tough diagnosis to nail down. And I am not an expert on must muscular dystrophe,
but you have something called limb girdle muscular dystrophe. So I would assume, like you know, I'm a breast cancer survivor, so there's emptying different kinds of breast cancer. So I would safely say there's different kinds of muscular dystrophe. So you had to nail down what you had in order to figure out how to treat it right. Right. So when I was first diagnosed in two thousand and two, so we are a long way down the road
by now, there were no specifics about limb girdle muscular dystrope. All they said was we get a muscle buyout. See, we recognize that it's in the muscular district be family, but it's nothing that we can nail down. It's not als, it's not dushen, it's not my physiogravits, which is a muscot district like, it's not one of those. So we're just going to call it a limb girdle mustardst to be it's it's going to take out your hips in your shoulders, but it's really kind of just a garbage hand
term. This is these are the words the doctor said to me. It's a garbage hand term. So what I like, that's a that's kind of spooky because you know, because you really want to know what's going to happen to me. I mean, you've basically been told you have a degenerative illness and your body is going to disintegrate, and you're like, can you give
me a time frame? Can you give me? Like? What? Like, I'm trying to put myself in your shoes because I mean, when I was diagnosed with breast cancer, I had a million questions like what is going to happen? And and then there's those variables. So at what point did you go from, for example, walking with a cane to having to get a wheelchair to realizing your shoulders were going what is the how is the progression
happening? And where are you now in this sure So I was walking with a cane due to back pain and losing my So part of the musk hearestry subtype that I have means that the long muscles that go from the bottom of your ribs down to your knees are actually the ones that help you stand up straight. So that set of muscles is actually getting weak. So I was getting more and more bent over. I started using a cane on and off in oh gosh, let's see nineteen ninety, as early as nineteen ninety,
and I got my first wheelchair in two thousand and eight. Now, the literature that I got in twenty in two thousand and two said limburtle mustard just to be typically progressed, so that the user ends up with a wheelchair twenty years after onset, and so I kind of did the math and thought that I might end up with an extra couple of years in there. I thought
I might have my first wheelchair about twenty ten. But I had gone, I had run the whole progression from Cain to Cain with ankle foot or foci supports because I had foot drops and was dragging my toes and falling down to getting a roll later, which is one of those walkers that with wheels in a seat that you can buy at the costco, right right, yeah. And then it wasn't until I so I, let me tell you, I fought a wheelchair like I just spot it because I had only ever seen a
manual chair, and I knew that my shoulders were weak. I had no idea how I would push a chair. I had no idea how would get out of a chair because I was having difficulties standing up from chairs. And no one ever said, hey, this isn't how this is going to go for you. No one, you know, at no time between two thousand and two and two thousand and seven did my neurologists and I ever have a
conversation about what a wheelchair would look like in my future. And so I was just left to, you know, let my brain run them up, which is never a really good spot when you, you know, have a disease that no one can really pin point down for you. But so it's twenty twenty three. I'm fifty six years old now and I use a powerchair full time. And I've only ever had a powerchair because everyone was like, yeah, girl, you're never going to push yourself. Really, you know,
I can. I can. I have a manual chair for travel sometimes and I can push my way across the pile floor probably fifty yards and I'm toast. I can done. And it has to be flat, you know, So you ever put if you ever put me at a curb cut with my manual chair, I'd be out into traffic without being able to stop myself. But here's the thing. You you have a life where you are functioning
amazingly. I have to say, you know, I got so the whole wheelchair thing and the involved process in getting a wheelchair outffitted for you was for driving, for flying, for everything, was so I couldn't believe how what an industry, the wheelchair industry is. I mean, I couldn't believe how complicated it is. It is so complicated. And at this point, I have a great, big monster of a power chair and I just kind of, you know, make a joke about the fact that it is an entire
foot longer than where my backside sits. So I just kind of, I just kind of joke about my wheelchair big booty when when I'm in restaurants and stuff, because I want to make sure that people don't kick the back of my chair. So I want to ask you. I want to ask you about that. So sure people who do not have wheelchairs don't understand what people
who have wheelchairs need and can appear very insensitive. Yes, And I want you to talk to us because I remember when I hit breast cancer some of the stupidest things people say to me, So talk to us about so that people can be more aware and sensitive. What are some of the really ridiculous things and challenges and how can people be better? It's kind of a two, two or three part question, but you know where I'm going with it, yep. And let me let me back up and finish the other answer,
which is that my power wheelchair. I'm either on my power wheelchair or I'm in bed, like that's my day. Wow, So there's no in between for me. Do you have someone helping you, a caregiver? I have? I have a caregiver who comes in three days a week to help do laundry and clean the house and help me shower, but otherwise I live alone. Wow. Yeah, good for you killing it. Thanks, So the things that wanted so people, isn't that funny? Let me work.
Let me frame up my words really carefully here. Sure, No, it's not. It's not that so much as I want to make sure that I'm really accurate in what I'm trying to convey. Is that I will say that I have a disability, but not that I am disabled. Good point. So that's my that's me. Those are my choices. I follow follow Matthew Sanford's language of I sit on my wheelchair and not in my wheelchair. Good point, because you sit on a kitchen chair, not in a kitchen chair,
right, right. And it's not to say that my wheelchair is a kitchen chair, but it's to help convey the message that I'm not wheelchair bound. I'm not confined to my wheelchair. My wheelchair is actually the thing that lets me roam the neighborhood, right, It's the thing that lets me go to wherever it is that I want to go. I mean, we just flew my backup chair and went to Europe for twelve days. My fiance took me to Europe. Wow, and we took that monster powerchair all over you
know, in Madrid, in Barcelona and Paris. In the States, the big challenge is just plain access. And you know, there are still restaurants that don't have accessible bathrooms. I know, and there are still I've still been taken through kitchens. They're like, oh, yeah, the ramp was in the back and you have to go through the kitchens to get there to get to the dining room. Well, that isn't isn't awesome? It doesn't make me feel welcomed. It doesn't feel like you actually value my business.
The you'll call I'll call places and say, you know, hey, are you wheelchair cosable and they're like sure, yeah, we only have one step wow, okay, well, and the the number of times that I've heard, oh well we were grandfather into the ada. Okay, we're thirty three years later and you've made no changes to your building ever. Or you can't
spend sixty dollars and buy a ramp, even a portable ramp. I mean I went into the most seemingly unaccessible places in Paris because my fiance would go ring the doorbell, that's us, and someone would bring out a ramp. You're allowed to have a portable ramp for access. It is permissible, you know. The and people are making poor design choices. I was. I was in a restaurant in Dallas in the Arts District, and when you opened the bathroom door, there was a short wall I had, so you'd have
to go in and make a hard write ninety degree turns. Are you with me? Yeah? I can? I am yeah, I got the visual on okay, And so you'd get past the door, you'd make that hard, right ninety The first thing that he came to were the sinks, and then you'd make a less to go back to the toilet salls. Well, the door was actually set into the hallway wall at an angle, and so when the door opened all the way up, it in whack. Who was
ever standing at the sink? Oh god? So to fix this they put a door stopper in the floor, which reduced the swing of the door. And when they did that, they made it so now I couldn't get my power chair through. Oh god. And I had my fiance when we travel, we go look at bathrooms because that's my that's my main pain point in
life are bathrooms. Yeah, yeah, I mean I know I had friend, I had a friend who you know, broke her foot and had to crawl down the steps on her on her butt to go to the bathroom in a restaurant. Yeah. In in Madrid and in Barcelona and in Paris, a lot of the bathrooms in places were downstairs, right, and there were no elevators, you know, So there are some just some bad design choices being made. And in you know, overseas, that's different, you know,
in Europe it's different. But here in the States, like I shouldn't have to call to find out you know, what the setup is going to be like. But in that restaurant in Dallas, I had my fiancee go in all the way into the bathroom. He's like, this is the biggest successful sol I've ever seen. It's gorgeous. And you need a swan team. You need a swant team to an advanced team to check out restaurants other
than restaurants, which I was. I'm fully aware of because I ran the James Spear Foundation Awards, which included restaurant design awards for many, many years, and one of the jurors uh was a designer who was disabled. She had a wheelchair, and she basically said, we will eliminate all restaurants that do not have a DA considerations, you know, And and that's what opened my eyes up to it. Plus my friend Yanik, who is in a wheelchair and running a restaurant, and you know, I'm like, oh my
god, it's like crazy. What about other things? Hotels? Yeah, hotels, meetings. I was out in Miami and at a meeting where you broke out into little groups and then they would choose the It was a speaking It was a thing for public speakers, and they you broke out into little groups and then they would nominate who was the best, had the best story, or the best little elevator pitch out of that group so that you could get up on stage. And then they sent like the eight of these two
hundred and fifty people up on stage. And I pulled the event planner aside later and I said, where was the ramp? And she said what do you mean? And I said, if I had been chosen as one of the eight, where would I in the current setup? Where would I have had to do my speech from? And she said, oh, on the floor in front of the stage. I said, right, And how does that make me look to the everyone else participating? And she said smaller?
I said right? Small? Yeah, literally literally not as tall as everyone because they're all standing up three feet above me. You so we've created this visual that I'm small and i'm and because of that, you labeled me as insignificant And she looked like I'd slapped her face. Now, that wasn't meant to be harsh for her. It was simply like something that she needed to
consider. And hotel rooms are my other pain point in life. The things that people consider to be a da the fact that it's still next to impossible to book an actual accessible room online, which has been the loss since twenty thirteen. That they're actually supposed to have floor plans for the bedroom bathroom areas
so that I can choose, and the Venetian in Vegas did that. They actually put up a floor plan and it looks super fantastic, except that they put the toilet in a toilet room like a water closet, and in doing that they took away the transfer space, so now I can't actually get close enough to the toilet to use it. It's like, okay, you need to consult people who use wheelchairs to actually do this. And there are just
inconsiderate choices. We were just at the Paris in Vegas, at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, I'm just going to call them out, and there were like twenty or twenty one desks at receptions, and twenty of them were
forty eight inches high and one of them was thirty six inches time. And when we went to check in, rather than someone saying, oh yes, let's walk down here to the accessible desk, and no one offered us that consideration, and when we went down to look at it, it's now actually the enterprise rental car desk, so they've they put it there because it was
required by the ADA, and then they refuse to use it properly. It makes me shake my head, and so I don't travel alone anymore for physical reasons, but also just those kinds of considerations where you know, I actually need someone who's able to go in and look at things and help with other stuff. So the you know, that's kind of and and I have a business called making Waves for Good, right which is and that's what we're that's what we're doing. And making ways for Good is I want to help businesses
understand the codes. And that's really so valuable. I mean, here's a good thing. You're taking an inevitability is something you cannot control that's happening to you, and you're taking your rough waters and your experience to try to help smooth away for others and teaching people who really don't know. You know, until you enter this world, you don't understand it. You have to be
tauned. You know, I've said for a long time, and you know, people don't know what they don't know and they don't know what they don't think about, and they don't think about what doesn't affect them. Right, But we all need to be sensitive because we're all on alike. So here's something interesting to me. I just want to make sure we get in that. You know, you also defy what people you know again, you you you know you you explain living with a disability versus disabled, and that's a
big definition. You have done things that many many others have not, and I was in one of them. Thus, rough Waters is you became a para surfer, which you know. Why have I tried surfing about kill? I thought my back hurts so bad for day I couldn't do it. I couldn't. I can't even as a breast cancer. So if I ever lift a lot of stuff, why did you choose parasurfing of all things? I
mean, I get the Miss Wheelchair Kentucky pageant, which was awesome. I happen to like pageants, but the surf parasurfing was a big That was a big one. So I actually found those at the same time. Uh huh. I had knew that I was going to be getting a wheelchair because that was kind of I knew that was coming in the future. So I went looking for things to do that I could do with a wheelchair, and I found on video clips where Miss Wheelchair California was going out surfing with this group,
and then there was video of her laying down on a surfboard. So I will tell you that there is that difference in that I never stand up on my surfboard, so I never to I never have to pop up. You also have a team to help you too, because I was thinking, you know, if you've roll over, you can't swim. I can write myself okay, so I can kick and I can get my faith out of
the water, but I cannot pull myself back up on a board. And so because my shoulders are weak, right, and the and so when I've competed, and that was in twenty eighteen, So the book kind of stopped in twenty seventeen. It took me six years from finishing the book to actually get it out into the real world. And that's part of a whole other rough water story. But so the minimum number of people that I have in
the water is two. So I have someone who will push me onto a wave and someone who will catch me on the other end of it, and in Hawaii that can be a really really long way. But the number of people that takes to get me on my surf for when I fall off and not that's not if because every server falls off the Bethanie Hamilton just put up this amazing video of her wiping out fantastically during your competition. So everybody gets
falls off and everybody gets back on a board. It takes five or six people to flip me back onto a board, people to hold me steady, people to hold the board steady. The most interesting flip happens is they'll line me up parallel to the board with my face to the sky and then someone will literally be under me and flip log roll me onto the back up on
the board. So you have to trust, like really super super trust the people that you're with because they're in charge of your safety and your physicality. Yeah, you're safety completely. And it's a team. I mean your life involve a team. Yeah, contest you enter, I mean you went to Hawaii. I'm reading this book in Hawaii and you're I'm reading it. How
you actually entered this huge competition in Hawaii. I mean you've been you've been doing this parasurfing in New Jersey, right, and then you get on a plane, which is a whole nother story. The plane right, traveling by playing with the wheelchair and getting Hawaii. How did that go? Not like I thought it was gonna in so many ways. I ended up traveling with a manual care of that trip, which meant that I was my independence was really limited, and so uh that was the the personal care team that I
traveled with. I didn't know those people very well, and I made a decision not to ever do that again, to not travel with people that I know really, really well. And I wasn't nearly as strong enough as I thought I was. I wasn't in in prime surfing condition. I mean, I was significantly heavier than I should have been, and which means that and that extra weight limits my own mobility because it makes it harder even for me
to transfer myself and move around. And so it became a point where it was decided for my safety and for the safety of everybody else that because I couldn't get on a board by myself and it was going to take a lot a lot of time. I ended up being in a different part of the competition than I expected to be. I still caught some really great waves. I'm trying not to completely you know, spoiler alert that one. But the point is, Oh, you took the leap, and you did that with
the miss Wheelchair Kentucky. I mean you did the whole pageant thing, which is a lot of pressure and photography. You know, what is it you haven't done that you'd like to do? Jump out of an airplane? Seriously, there are places that will that specialize in helping people with disabilities jump out of airplanes. So I'm really excited to do that. I want to go back to I want to go back to London. I want to go to Budapeste and see my photos in a gallery be hung up at a gallery in
Budapesche. I had some photos up there before, so I'm crossing that figures we can make that work out. What is your medium with your photography, Heather? Some digital. I'm using a micro four thirds camera that has interchangeable lenses, and I chose that because of the weight. I'm really sensitive to how much things weigh. It has a tilting, rotating screen, so I actually shoot everything out of my lap, which then by default gives me a
much different angle than you if we were standing side by side. If we're side by side and you're holding a camera to your faith, my camera is probably two feet lower than yours. I was out doing some nature photography and saw another photographer who had a thirty five millimeter and a great big zoom lens, and they were doing these big tracking shots, so they're following the bird as it's flying. And that's hard for me as a power wheelchair yeah,
to move and hold and hold my camera and do all that. So I don't tend to do those type of photos. But the photographer didn't say to me, oh, man, like, you get to hold your camera steady all the time, right, and it's and it's got a stable place to live all the time. It just sits on my leg. I do have a robotic arm attached to my wheelchair now, which allows me to take my camera up high level or even higher, and then there's an interface with my
phone to activate the shutter. So I used to have a black and white dark room set up when I was in my twenties, and I loved it and I carried it around like it was, you know, a life reserver, you know one of those orange light bests that you have on coast guard boats. Like, that's how tightly I held onto my dark room. But now now I run strictly digital. It's just it's simpler. But I still have the ability to do all the same creative stuff with software. Wow,
that's amazing. You know, jumping on airplane, really and you found love you you know, which is good, which is important because I know in the book it reveals some rocky relationships. You know that there were rocky relationships, and in the book, I fell in love and then I knew that that wasn't There were there were challenges there. Yeah, And I ended up choosing me instead of choosing us because he wasn't able to come to grips with
my muscular districty. He was really struggling with that. Yeah. And I had chosen him thinking he was my last best shot. And when you believe that, lie, you'll settle for anything. Wow. And he was a great guy. In fact, we still talk, so you know, he just wasn't my guy. Does that make sense? Yeah? I mean, you know, some people can't deal. It's hard for them. And you know, if they can't do and and and they can't yeah, you got to choose. I think you said the most important thing you said, I
chose me. I chose me, and so I when I went back to school and ended up with my first wheelchair, that's when I chose me. It turns out that this January, my first love high school boyfriend, resurfaced and he had been a widower for three years when he reached out to me through my photography website of all places, and we started dating. We got engaged in May, and congratulations, that's so wonderful. It's really sweet. And we're going to write our story because it's complicated. Yeah, you know,
it's more complicated than thirty five years of not talking. Speaking of story, when did you start writing rough Orders And what was the was it cathartic for you, what was you know, the process for you emotionally? So I started writing rough Waters in twenty sixteen, and it was actually a completely different book in its first dress. In its first run, it was a book of stories, not a book of the story of me, if that
makes sense. So I told funny stories about my cat bringing in a mouth and my service dog playing with it and you know, me trying to get it back out of a house, but not deep stories, and it said was another editor for a really long time. And then when I got it to the groups that I started working with last year, they were like, Okay, there's some stuff here, but it's boy, this is rough and it needs work. And so we got me in touch with a developmental editor
who said, you know, where's the interiority here? And I said, I don't, you know, I don't even know what that word means. So let's start again. She said, what were you thinking here? What were you feeling here? Right? You know, I'm like, I to tell those stories and she said, uh, to make this a book that people are going to connect with. Yeah, you've got to do that.
And so it was cathartic and painful and about the same time. And right before I turned my book over to this new group, I was working with a business coach and she said, you know, don't I don't need the details, but if you had traumatic you know, at least one traumatic event
happened where you decided then that hiding who you are was safest. And I said, uh, yeah, this and this and this and this and this, and she said, then I can I suggest that you go get trauma therapy before we start working really deep, dig in deep on this business thing, because I think you really need to be seen, and when you let yourself be seen, it's going to be a beautiful thing. And so I took a deep breath and I found a counselor who specializes in I E M
D R. It's yeah, yeah, it's trauma. It's eye movement E M R D. I don't know, so it's bimodal. So you I was tapping on my legs alternately, and you it's this whole big thing. It's trauma therapy. They use it for PTSD, even out in the military. And so I was doing trauma therapy at the same time that I was rewriting my book. Let me tell you that I would only recommend you do
one or the other, not both at the same time. Trauma therapy would send me, you know, I would finish my session and I would go lay in bed and cry for an hour, like tough, really tough stuff, and then trying to you delved into all of the you know, how did it feel? Because I'm also a breast cancer survivor, I know, you know, how did it feel to have them effected me? And you know, I felt named. Yeah, I felt like a monster. I didn't want to leave the house. Yeah, you know. And then I
actually knew though that I needed to get back to my fan family. So and actually going into that surgery, I told my doctor, look, dude, I have a date with a surfboard in seven weeks, and you have to help me make that happen because I knew that the water was my healing place. I have to tell you, Heather, your breast cancer diagnosis struck a nerve with me because you had something called the Filoades tumor, which I
happened to know about because my best friend had a Flodi's tumor. Unfortunately, she was not as lucky as you were, and she passed because her cancer was discovered in an advanced stage because she didn't go get she did. She ignored it and Filodi's tumors. You're very lucky. You're very You're a very lucky woman, and I hope that you know, you continue to stay healthy in that area. It was just a lot. You know, I'm reading this book and there were a lot of reveals in the book which we don't
forget into. But I'm like, and now she's got breast cancer. It was tough. And then when I read Felodi's timmer, I'm like, oh, yeah, that's that's that's rare, dude, that's rare. Rare. You deal, You're dealing with a lot of rare things. You were picked to be super special. I guess you know that, you know. I I make the self deprecating joke. You know, Mama always said I was
special. Yeah, you know, but yeah, nobody needs the kind of special that I've gotten to be. Yeah, And I will tell you that the doctors when I run this, run this rare one more, one more point down the rail, and the doctors have said to me, oh, by the way, we think that the mustard just me that you have might be secondary to something we don't know how to find. But we don't think this is actually the primary cause of your issues. We think it might be
secondary. And I have to tell you that I just kind of broke into one of those hysterical laughs. It's like, really, this thing that's wiping out my hips and my shoulders and my hands and my feet and and is you know that might not be my big thing? Wow? Wow. So here's what I want to ask you because we're going to have to wrap Heather, knowing all of this and you've you've lived an astoundingly amazing life. You've achieved more than many people who you know have the use of their legs and
arms and their full bodies. So congratulations on that. Well, do you have a mantra or a quote that you live by that motivates you every day? You know? I have a couple. M One is find your team. Yeah right, you know, life is a team sport and people are going to come and go from your team, but the really good ones stay and they're the ones who will snatch you up and roll you over so that your faith up to you know that your face is out of the water.
I'm going to use surfing metaphors. Yeah, they keep you afloat. They keep you afloat, and they keep your head you know, you keep your head above water basically. Yeah, they help you do that when you know, when you're really really struggling. And the other thing that I'm really working on and my monitor is self care is good. Yeah that's mine too, because I neglected my self care. Well, Heather, we've got to we've got to wrap up. It's just been a great conversation. I could talk
to you forever. I want to just make sure that my listeners know again that your name is Heather C. Markham and your your company is making Ways for Good. The book is Rough Waters from Surviving to Thriving with Progressive Muscular Dystrophee and your website is Heatherseemarkham dot com. Correct, Yes, all right, listen. I wish you smooth waters ahead in your life and love,
and thank you for sharing your inspiring story. I hope it will help inspire others, particularly those who are receiving diagnoses that are knocking them off their feet. You know it's a choice you make every day. That's yeah, I make that choice, Dan Tall, no matter where you sit. Thank you very much for joining me and you've been listening to Fearless Fabulous. You I'm Melanie Young. You know that life will develop lots of detours, but you
know you have the ability to navigate them if you choose. And life is about making choices to take care of yourself and live on your terms. So stay well, stay fearless and fabulous, and please follow me at Melanie Fabulous on Instagram. Thank you