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President
Heather Lawver
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Born in 1985 in a small town in North Carolina, Heather grew up in a military household with her three older brothers. She enjoyed her gypsy-esque childhood, moving from place to place and exploring new cultures, thanks to her Father's 26-year career in the United States Air Force. From as early as she can remember, she was taking charge, organizing her neighborhood friends into clubs (the most infamous of which was the Frog & Toad Club of Vicksburg, Mississippi), and planning grand schemes for when she grew up. |
Having been home-schooled since the first grade, Heather "graduated" from high school at the age of twelve. However, her plans to attend college at thirteen years of age were stymied due to a rampant and very serious bone infection, which dominated nearly seven years of her teenage life. However, never one to let anything get in her way, while still bed-ridden from illness, two of Heather's brothers began to teach her the basics of HTML and website creation. Thus the Daily Prophet was born.
At first just a means of helping others while also whiling away the hours stuck in and out of hospitals, The Daily Prophet proved to be a great way for Heather to reach beyond her surroundings and get to know new people around the world. However, it soon took on a life of its own, propelled by its fans, its message of self motivation and personal responsibility, and its innovation in the world of literacy education. Now, several years later, Heather has found herself a President of an world renowned 501(c)3 non-profit organization.
Apart from her work with Prophet Incorporated, Heather has had a rich and varied, albeit short, life. She has worked as an online librarian, counselor, mentor, designer, actress, television producer, event planner, campaigner, and she even managed to carve out a career as a racecar driver. As always, she has many plans for the future, each as grandiose and optimistic as the last. Somehow, she finds a way to make them happen and all of them lead up to her ultimate goal of being "the world's most successful grade school drop-out."
At the age of 17, Heather was accepted to the prestigious Courtauld Intitute of Art in London, a very historic & prestigious university on the banks of the River Thames. With the Institute's rich history spanning back over 75 years, Ms Lawver was the very first American and the only home-schooler to ever be admitted to the Institute. The application proved to be a bit tricky, however, since as a Yankee home-schooler she had no British grades or test scores to show as evidence of her education's caliber. The admissions board of Courtauld was very understanding, and instead asked to see a sample of Ms Lawver's portfolio. In a little under a month, she produced a coffee table style art book that followed her work since she was a child, covering her curriculum, her work, and her artistic experiences. Based solely on that portfolio, she was granted an unconditional offer of acceptance - a high honor, especially for a foreign student.
Unfortunately, despite a keen desire to take Courtauld up on their offer, Ms Lawver soon fell seriously ill yet again. This time a serious, debilitating, and potentially fatal pre-existing genetic condition she was completely unaware of had been exacerbated by the strain of so many years fighting the bone infection in her foot. The disease was a little known and widely misunderstood condition known as Dercum's Disease.
She has had to undergo extensive and very painful operations, as well as years of intensive treatments and pain control to battle a bizarre and little understood disease that affects the body down to the cellular level. Ms Lawver will unfortunately have to battle this condition for the remainder of her life, for however long she is allowed to live at the mercy of this hideous disease. But she strives for the day when she will again have the capacity to at least exercise her mind for the continued benefit of others. Since she was diagnosed with this disease in 2006 by a team of doctors from the National Naval Medical Center and The National Institute of Health, she has been forced to take an extended sabbtical from her work. She has since been deemed disabled and is still fighting to regain a reasonable quality of life.
Even in spite of dealing with daily pain in excess of anything she has ever before experienced, she still continues to do whatever she can to help others. As soon as she received her diagnosis, the minute she returned home she began researching the disease. She soon made contact with several doctors in Sweden who were the most recent doctors to have studied Dercum's Disease. With the kind assistance and support of Dr Håkan Brorson and The University of Malmo, she developed The Dercum Society, a web-based international support group and research site for patients suffering from the disease, their families, and the doctors who treat them. Because this disease is so unknown throughout the medical community, it is often misdiagnosed, leading to years of unnecessary pain, complications, and even the risk of death. If you have a minute, please take some time to look over The Dercum Society's website - who knows, maybe someone in your family has this disease and is suffering needlessly. If one more life can be saved and radically improved because of this website, it will be worth every minute invested in its creation.
Heather currently resides in Northern Virginia, just outside her favorite city in the world - Washington, DC. Her other interests include writing, photography, automotive racing, and she is very open about her addiction to her black BMW 3 series. But she's still somewhat less open about her massive crush on David Tennant.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to email Heather directly at HLawver AT gmail.com. (Please remove the spaces before sending, otherwise it just won't work.)
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