Heather Scharding:  

I graduated in 1994 as did the rest of you I'm sure. I spent a year pretty much living it up as Robert Nevitt would tell you. We spend a lot of time hanging out with each other just having fun. I became pregnant (not by Robert but by a man that I met at a club in Hollywood 🫣) and had my son Justin in October of 1995. I was not able to go to college right out of high school as I wanted to, but I got a job starting at the very bottom working at Countrywide Home Loans which as you all know turned into Bank of America in 2008. I started as an assistant just in putting customer service letters in the system and answering questions in the subprime mortgage department. I spent a lot of years working my way up and survived the 2008 housing and banking crisis. I worked my way up to a position as VP of subprime mortgage underwriting. In 2008 my job switched to working with lawyers to help defend the bank against customers that were suing. The bank moved me to North Carolina where I was able to buy my first home. I spent some time there before Bank of America wanted to move me back to California. So I started managing rental properties for students at the NASCAR institute. I spent a good number of years back in California continuing to work my way up but still not having that coveted bachelor's degree that I had always wanted. In 2012 I became gravely ill and nearly passed away. It was discovered that I have a congenital defect in my spinal cord that causes hundreds of little leaks of CSF fluid from my spinal cord and my brain. I also have chiari malformation and they discovered that I have Ehlers-Danlos. I had emergency brain and spinal cord surgery where they did a quadruple laminectomy at the base of my brain and attempted to repair as many holes as they possibly could in order to stabilize the CSF pressure in my brain. The defect is not curable and neither is the hEDS. In 2014 I requested that Bank of America moved me back to North Carolina because my medical bills were in the millions of dollars and I needed to live in a place that was much more affordable than California. So they moved me back here and I worked for a little while until my son graduated from high school. He stayed behind for a short time and lived with my parents so he could finish out high school in California before he moved out here with me. I gave him a choice on which high school to go to and he decided he did NOT want to go to the same school that I went to so he chose Westlake High School and he graduated from there in 2015. In 2014 my job was dissolved within the company and while I could have transferred into another area given that I was a VP, I decided that this was my opportunity to go back to school, especially because I was getting sicker. So I left the bank, applied to UNC Charlotte and started school in 2015. I had a massive math background working in mortgage for 15 years, so I decided it was time to explore the creative side that I had always been good at. I went to school to get a degree in graphic design and I minored in math. My scheduled walk date was in May 2019 and the last day of my finals was the day that the school shooting occurred at UNC Charlotte. The decision was made that no one had to take finals unless they wanted to in an effort to raise their grades. Those of us that already had GPAs that we were happy with went ahead and opted not to do finals and walked in our graduation ceremonies in May. There are some things that I need to talk about when it came to that shooting but I'm still not ready to do that and am considering writing a small book that talks about The truth of that day and how close I was to the actual end. Regardless, immediately after graduation I started working in house at a graphic design firm based out of Ohio. I was able to work from home and did not have to move which put me in the perfect position to manage life during COVID. This worked to my benefit because I was progressively getting sicker and sicker. After a short period of time I opted to go more towards the marketing side of graphic design and I started managing social media content creators while also designing merchandise lines for all of them. I also dabbled in photography on the side and submitted my work in various contests and won a few awards. This allowed me to work for myself and have a little bit more of a flexible schedule since I was getting very sick. At this point I started having a lot of seizures which continue today. In 2022 I had to basically stop working for the majority of time. I did fairly well in banking and my graphic design business so I've been able to financially support myself while also collecting rent money as a landlord on my homes. I moved to Delaware for a short time and then moved back to North Carolina and opted to live in the mountains of Western North Carolina so that I could enjoy how beautiful it was and how peaceful it was up there. A family member became ill and I had to move from Colettsville NC back to Mooresville 3 weeks before the hurricane hit. Unfortunately I had not sold my home and had not moved out of it yet. So my home was washed away in the hurricane and I lost everything. The only thing that I had left were my two storage units that I had packed full of things that I had moved around various parts of the country over the years and from Delaware. So...Expand for more