Introducing myself: I’m Heidi, here to learn.

Doing my due diligence and making a post so I’m not only a voyeur. I’m here because of a roundabout reason.

I’m a romance author by trade, author of eighteen novels and a handful of novellas and short stories. My “beat” for lack of a better term is “love against the odds,” a slogan a friend handed to me when he pointed out how my books are always about overcoming some kind of major life obstacle in addition to falling in love. I don’t like to do “issue” books, but I’ve included characters recovering from abuse, characters suffering anxiety, stammers, and reading disabilities.

A book coming out in April 2015, Carry the Ocean, features a high-functioning autistic protagonist falling in love with another hero with major depressive disorder. This book is pretty personal, as my husband and daughter both suffer from clinical anxiety, a friend’s husband has crippling MDD, and my agent’s son is autistic. I’ve had so much fun writing this book this year, and I’m in the home stretch.

I always knew one of the secondary characters was named David and that he was a quadriplegic, but in the past few weeks I’ve started to write him in earnest, and he’s turned into what I think of in my head as a “hot” character: he’s vibrant, edgy, a little naughty, and as all hot characters do, he’s rewriting parts of the book as he rolls through them, in addition to informing me he gets his own turn in the drivers seat for his own story next. (He doesn’t get to be next, as there’s a line of things I’ve already contracted, but he’s definitely in that line now.)

I’d done some initial research for this character, but as he worms his way deeper into the story, I find I must know more and more about him, and so here I am. I’ve been devouring all articles I can find about quadriplegia, and I keep ending up on this site as my favorite.

So I guess I am a bit of a voyeur, but if anyone is open to me asking questions, I have a zillion. I feel like my learning curve is a sheer cliff, and I’m incredibly conscious of how many ways I could under-research or misunderstand how something works. I’m interested very, very much in portraying a positive, human character–I love David already, and I want to write him in a way my readers can too.

For now I will keep reading posts in between frenetic writing sessions as I approach this story’s deadline, but I really would love to ask questions.

As for more about myself, I have to say I really hesitated over the “disability” section in the profile. I am able-bodied, though for a terrifying three months last year I wasn’t sure I’d always be able to say that. After suffering unidentified chronic pain and fatigue for the past ten years, last summer I became increasingly unable to walk well. A trip to the podiatrist got me the fast-track to neurology, who was convinced I had MS or a terrifying buffet of equally unpleasant diseases. While we waited for the tests to come back, I read everything I could about MS, including a possible MS-reducing diet. In trying the diet, I discovered I have an incredibly sensitive gluten reaction, and though no one can explain why, cutting it out of my diet reduced and eventually eliminated most of my neurological issues. For awhile that seemed like the big bullet, until this spring I began getting severe abdominal pain, requiring several trips to the ER and eventually emergency surgery. What they’d thought was a few cysts turned out to be a case of endometriosis so severe they didn’t have a diagram for how bad it was.

I’m slated for a full hysterectomy this summer and a scraping out of what is “the most frozen pelvis anybody has ever seen,” says my gynecologist. In the meantime I’m on injections of Lupron, an (expensive) chemical menopause, because they flatly wanted no more hormones to ever stimulate endometrial growth. There’s a strong possibility the lining has ridden on my lymph nodes throughout my body and is why I’m so tired and sore. Even if that wasn’t the case, the cysts inside me are so intense, they can’t grow any more without sending me back to the hospital. I get the idea I’m quite lucky things didn’t get worse internally than they did.

I’m feeling much better these past few months on the drug than I’ve felt since my daughter was born twelve years ago, though I don’t think I’ll ever be 100% again. I share the story mostly to let everyone here know I may not have a spinal cord injury, but I am an intimate bedfellow of pain and frustration and the terror of not knowing how, when or if I can ever get better. I’ve been on NuStep machines beside 90 year old men who outpaced me four times over. I’ve wept on the anti-gravity treadmill when I could finally do 3.5 miles an hour for 30 minutes with 60% gravity, because it took a struggle beyond imagining to get there.

So, hi. I’m Heidi. Nice to meet you.