I'm Durian, slate and Fleming, and thank you for joining me on get what you need and feel good about it. Do you find it difficult to ask for what you need? Do you frequently feel misunderstood? Do you have a problem or cause that you would like to learn to manage more effectively? What makes it so hard for us to tell each other how we feel? And how do we speak up for ourselves so we get what we need and feel good about it? How do we do this? Respectfully, so that we honor the needs and feelings of others. Together, we'll explore tips, strategies, and resources that, when used mindfully and consistently, will improve our results and enrich our relationships.

Hello and welcome back to get what you need and feel good about it. So happy to be here with you today. And today I'm interviewing Amber Needham, and I met Amber in a certification course that we both are enrolled in called Happy for no reason. And it is being masterminded by Marcie Shaimov, who wrote chicken soup for the woman's soul. Happy for no reason and love for no reason. In coming episodes, you will hear more about the idea of being happy for no reason. It's all about communicating, and so we're going to get into communicating about Amber and what her story is about, overcoming her challenges and how she's going about her journey. Amber, welcome. Thank you for being with us.

Thank you, Darian. It is a super pleasure to be here.

Amber, you have such a compelling story, and you have a long journey that you've been on so far. Tell us about your story and while you're at it, give us some ideas about the thoughts and feelings that you experienced.

Certainly, I can fast forward my life to 2014. Up to that point, I was an entrepreneur. I had a business running about 23 years in, and life was good. Life was good. I had come from a turbulent past in family life and marriage breakdown and so on and so forth. Life was good. 2014, I had sold my business, probably 2009, I sold the business. 2014, I rebranded myself and had two brand new careers underway. And one was teaching fitness and the other one was as an artist. I tell people I came out of the closet and showed my artwork and began teaching. And these were beautiful careers for me. It was the creative side of my very Virgo ian, analytical mind being very much in my head, very creative now. And life was, like I said, really good. 2014, I was heading to the gym to teach a class when all of a sudden I was not seeing well at all. It was like I was looking through a very thick fog. Now I'd had pristine vision prior to that and only had some recent troubles with my vision, mostly in the evening. And I kind of chalked it up to just a strain on my eyes and didn't think much more about that. Six weeks after that incident, I'm sitting in the optometrist's office, not able to count fingers in front of my face. How was I feeling? I was petrified. Absolutely petrified. I was rushed to an ophthalmologist. They couldn't say what the problem was, but they could tell me what they were seeing, and it was a very damaged, scratched cornea. I had a pre existing condition, which doesn't allow for optimal healing, so they were scratching their heads on how they were going to overcome this. 2016. After many failed attempts to correct the problem, we did our last ditch effort, and that was a stem cell transplant. So not a corneal transplant, but live stem cells were going to be implanted into my damaged eyes. Hopefully, if success and not rejection, it would teach my cornea and cells, my limbal cells, to become healthy. And miraculously, it worked. And so how was I feeling? I was over the moon. I was like a whole new life had begun. It was like I had a second chance at life. It was fabulous. I can't even put words to how I was feeling. I was back driving, I was back teaching. I was traveling. I was living life large. 2019. A second ridiculously freakish incident happened, going back to 2019, when they finally discovered what the cause was, which will roll your socks off, then a plan of action could occur at how to correct it. What the problem was was I was putting in an ointment in my eyes each and every single night for absolute eons, as far back as. As I can remember, because I had LSCD, which is called limbal stem cell deficiency. It's basically dry eyes, and it was basically from a preexisting condition called SJS, Steven Johnson's syndrome. So putting this ointment in my eyes every night was just so routine. It was like brushing my teeth. However, what had happened was the ointment that I received in bulk about ten tubes at a time. That particular shipment was damaged. It had frozen in shipment. And so when I received the tubes from my pharmacist, there was a government recall on that particular shipment and other shipments, but those using it were not informed. And so therefore, I'm continuing to put this stuff in my eyes each and every night, having some discomfort here and there, but not enough to sound off the alarms for me. I thought it was just strained eyes, very, very sore eyes. So a government recall for which I was uninformed of it was a level two, which means it is not severe and that most people heal. Again, my Stephen Johnson's syndrome SJS doesn't allow me to heal in the same way. So my eyes were permanently damaged from that incident. Going back to now, finally learning of the cause, they could go to work at getting a plan. Many failed attempts until they finally decided the last effort that they could do for me was a stem cell transplant, not a corneal transplant. And again, miraculously, it worked. At about nine months, maybe twelve months in, I had complete vision. I was back seeing, I was back driving, I was back working, I was back living life, and I was ecstatic. I was absolutely ecstatic, because I knew that I had a second chance and I wasn't going to waste a moment of it. I was happy. I was happy for no reason. 2019, I'm in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner with my buddy, and I was taking out the liner of my compost bucket. It had become full from the waste, and as I'm taking it out of the bucket, moisture condensation from it flung under my glasses and into my left eye, and I rinsed my eye out again. I didn't think anything of it just proceeded on. And it was about six, seven weeks later when I started to get the same symptoms. This fog, this incredible, thick fog. So I called my ophthalmologist. I told her, she got me in immediately. And what was discovered was that this moisture started a invasive, very slow growing, insidious fungal infection on my cornea. My stem cells were still alive and happy. I never rejected the stem cells, but the cornea now had this growth that was obscuring my vision and developing the severe inflammation. We were back to square one. I had lost my vision a second time. The ophthalmologist wasn't as optimistic. As a matter of fact, there were many incidences where I felt her fear and disappointment. And again, how was I feeling? Oh, boy, I'm almost feeling it in my body right now as we speak. I was so broken, I was so bewildered. I just couldn't believe that this was happening again a second time. I almost wanted to give up. I really did. And that wasn't normally my way of being. Normally, I'm very optimistic, glass half full kind of girl. But this really took me down, and I went into deep despair anyway. 17 weeks of attempting to eradicate this growth, we finally were able to do that. However, the damage of that caused a dysformation on my cornea from all of the scraping or debulking, as they called it. And it left my cornea deformed, still stem cells alive and working well. But the shape of my cornea now is deformed. I had to come off a lot of medication that I was previously on the steroids and in the process of all that, my eye pressure was spiking. They couldn't do much about that until the fungal growth was under control because they contraindicated each other. So as an end result to all of that story, I now am left with glaucoma, permanent damage to the optic nerve that really distorted or blackened out my periphery. I see centrally only and I see through a cornea that is fractured. It looks like it's fractured, what I'm looking through. And then on top of that, depending on the level of inflammation each day in my body determines the thickness of fog that I look through. I am what they say as not a total blind person. I do have extreme limited vision. So how am I feeling today? I'm grateful, I'm blessed and I'm happy for no reason. I'm happy for no reason because I have so much to be thankful for. Having lost my vision, I have been able to gain in so many other ways. I've been able to gain my ability to feel and be very, very present. You have no choice, Darien. As you know, we have no choice but to remain extremely vigilant and present. As we can't see our world, so we must be very present in it to know what we are doing, who we are with, what's our surroundings. And today, what I tell people is that I was meant to be blind. I truly feel that because those two incidences are too way off the wall, too bizarre to not have there be a real specific purpose in it. My previous personality was I was not a. I didn't trust people. I had a very difficult time trusting, I had a very difficult time loving and I was fiercely independent. To a default. Again, my past conditioning. And while now being visually impaired, oh, boy, talk about the divine giving you what you need in order to learn what you need to learn. I now have no choice but to trust. I have to trust and I'm good with it and I'm grateful for that.

Throughout this process, I imagine you came up against those thoughts and feelings of, what am I going to do now? In your darkest days, and you're so eloquent, you didn't put it that way. But what are some of the barriers that you have faced to overcoming these thoughts and feelings and getting back to finding meaning in life and doing what you love doing.

I have, throughout my life, when I have been faced with challenges, I found that I took on a pattern of a way of being, and it was super challenged. When I went blind, however, I found that I just went back to that pattern and how I've been able to cope. I found that this pattern repeated itself throughout my life. And when I went blind, it really, really needed to be perfected. So the pattern is, what I tell myself is my four key strategies. And the first one is accepting. Accepting it doesn't matter whether we have a disability or a setback or whatever it is accepting what is, but it's accepting just the facts. I, being a Virgo, I'm very into my head, and so I can think up scenarios like you, and I can create stories in my head like there's nobody's business. So accepting just the facts would put me in a state of calm. My dad said once to me, the only way to get through a problem is not go around it, not go under it, not avoid it, not hide from it, is to go straight into it, to get to the other side. And so accepting just the facts and not the story, I found that I could. It was, I was able to cope. The second one was manage. I had to learn to manage my new way of being. If I'm going to accept it now, I have to learn this new life. It wasn't going to be anything that I had previously experienced. So little things. Because I'm independent and wanted to remain healthfully independent and live in my home, I had to figure out ways. With help, I was able to do things that allowed me to function in my home. I would pin my socks together before they went into the washing machine so that I could instantly bring them out of the dryer. And there was no having to figure out or find somebody to match them for me. There were stickers on all of flat screen devices and appliances so that I could operate the microwave. I could operate the stovetop. So managing my new way of being also meant having to learn to ask something that was very difficult for me. By asking, I was managing my blindness. The third was to embrace it. I had to embrace it. This meant taking responsibility. I had to take responsibility. There was no feeling sorry for myself. There was no being a victim in this anymore. I had to learn where I was now in charge of this, and I needed to take responsibility. And when I did so, life started to really feel good. Again, it really did. The fourth was where I opened my heart and I celebrated it. I celebrated my blindness because I felt that there had to be a reason why this happened. And what I come to feel that if my heart led the way, which, of course, we've learned in happy for no reason, is by opening my heart and celebrating it, I could be of service to others who are dealing with their setbacks in life, their challenges, their new disabilities. When life turns you upside down on your head, I wanted to be there. And so I created the tandem ride for sight. And I also wrote a book, which has since then become an international bestseller. The fourth and final key that I incorporate in my life is. And it has helped me to open my heart, and that is celebrate. To celebrate. I felt that it was because this incident that happened, my blindness, there had to be a very good reason why, and I needed to figure out a way in which it could be used for good. And so I chose to write a book called the Blind Girl sees seeing through the heart and not the eyes. And I've been blessed that it has become an international bestseller. I also created what is called the tandem ride for sight. It was a fundraiser, riding a two seater bike. Obviously, we know where I sat. My buddy was the front seat rider, and we rode this tandem ride bike all across Ontario. A 2600 kilometer bike ride. It took us six and a half weeks. And it was to raise awareness to LSCD, which is limbal stem cell deficiency, and to raise funds for the creation of a stem cell donor registry, which is very similar to a bone marrow registry. However, it doesn't exist yet. It being a potential list of donors who would come forward, pretested and interviewed for the potential of being a donor to a recipient who needs stem cells from a healthy eye and implanted into a diseased or damaged eye. Much like myself, there's no damage or harm caused to the donor, which is wonderful. A healthy eye heals within a week from this type of surgery. This bike ride was to raise awareness of the possibility of creating this, as well as to avoid damage to the eye and particularly the cornea. It was a wonderful six and a half weeks. We lived in a motorhome and we had drivers that drove it all around while Mike and I peddled our tushes all over the place. And it was an amazing experience. And we were able to raise just under $20,000. To create the stem cell donor registry, we require approximately $80,000. So when my book was launched, I put it in the book that all proceeds from the book sales would also go towards this fundraising initiative in order to continually rise the amount to the goal of $80,000. And I will use the book and any other means possible that I can create in order to achieve that goal.

You were making a big ask of yourself to stay active and healthy and doing the right itself, and asking for help from the public to fund this very important work. And so obviously, you know how to ask for help for big things. How was it getting to the point where you, the very independent woman, knew that you had to ask for help in your daily life? How do you do that? That's so hard for people to. When they. When something happens in their life and they need support, they're not used to asking for it. It's hard to overcome that anxiety.

Yes, it is. My former life, my former sighted life, being fiercely independent, asking for help was painful. It truly was painful, because I didn't trust. I didn't trust life, I didn't trust people. It was just the way it was for me. Becoming blind taught me that asking for help actually kept me independent, and that was a huge epiphany for me. By asking for help, I can remain in my home, I can function as normal as most people can. Asking for help gets me to and from all of my appointments and obligations, and asking for help was exactly what I needed. And my blindness caused that to happen. And that's why I embrace and love my life today, because it taught me that I could still be independent and ask for help. And trusting. Trusting the process, trusting people. You and I both know if we're on somebody's arm or we're walking with our cane, we have to be present, aware, and we have to trust.

Could you tell us about a time of something you were experiencing and you actually did ask for help.

The first time after becoming blind, where I needed to learn this, a lot of my friends knew me as, don't ask her if you need. If we can help, because she's just going to say no. So they would not come forth. I trained them not to ask me if they could be of service to me. So here I am now, needing to go back and forth to Toronto every single week for 17 weeks to eradicate that fungal infection. The second incident that caused my blindness. That is a huge ask. That is huge. I had to find a soul, a person who would be willing to tackle the traffic and the time it would take. It would be an all day event to get me to my appointments, wait for my appointment to happen, and then drive us home. It was an all day event, so it was a big ask. But what I discovered that when I did enroll my friends, they were more than happy to help me, and I was pretty much blown away by that because of what it meant that they were going to have to give up in order to do that. They were more than happy to help me. And what was really the second epiphany I ever had was while not asking them, I was robbing them of their joy of being of service to others, something that I am. It's very near and dear to me. I love being of service. It lights me up when I can do something for somebody else. The whole time I was not asking, I was robbing them of that very joy. It was a huge epiphany for me, and it made it easier to ask. From that point on, it's their choice to say yes or no. It's my choice to ask.

What a great point. So how do you remain determined now to stay your course?

I remain as positive as I can, and I'm back to my natural way of being, and that is generally extremely happy. I look at things for the lesson and the gift that is contained in the challenge. And this is something that both you and I witnessed in our course, that we're both involved in the happiness for no reason. It has taught us that, that to be happier, you take your situations and you find the good in them. You watch your thoughts, you're mindful of your thoughts, you choose your thoughts, and you look for the lesson in the gift. And I do that every day.

In fact, you do it intentionally. Not only do you, we change our thoughts. We challenge our thoughts and reframe them. But often that leads to changing our behaviors, because if we keep doing the behaviors that lead to frustration and unhappiness, things don't change. And so, in my second episode of this podcast, I talked about mindfulness, which is being aware on purpose in the present moment without judgment. And being aware is the first step towards making change that you really want.

Yes.

And so, gratitude. I heard gratitude also throughout your comments today. And shifting to an attitude of gratitude, it changes our, our perspective. And so do you have any parting words for our listeners about how they can remain courageous and overcome fear and get to a point where they can live the lives they love?

I think my answer to that would be, is my guiding principles in that when you are faced with something that is rocking your world, that you first take a big, deep breath, you do your best to get out of your head and go down to your heart. You accept just the facts, remove the story. You manage what you can manage. You do take baby steps every day towards what it is that you desire. You embrace what has happened by taking responsibility, and then you find a way in which to celebrate. And that can be different for everybody. It could be celebrating taking a walk in nature. It could be having a nice hot epsom salt bath. It could be taking a vacation with a friend. However, it feels good to celebrate your life as it is in the moment by being extremely present. I think that's, that's what keeps me going. I do wish that for everybody.

Thank you so much Amber. I hope people will be as inspired by your story and your courage and your strength as I am. And everyone check the show notes because I will be posting Amber's bio and the link to her book and also information about Marcie Schaimov and her program, Year of Miracles, which is where I heard about the happy for no reason certification.

What Amber and I are doing is.

Going down a journey of.

Developing an.

Attitude of gratitude and sharing this joy with others.

Absolutely.

In closing, I want to share some thoughts and insights that are printed on intention cards produced by Marcie Shimov and the Happy for no reason program. I let go of what doesn't serve me and open to greater happiness. I listen to and honor my inner voice. I focus on what energizes and supports my well being. I look for the lesson and the gift in every situation. I experience peace and harmony within myself. I lean into and savor joy. I focus on gratitude, a fast track to my happiness.

I wish you all happiness. Take care everyone and we will see you again in May.

Have a good night. Thank you for joining me today on get what you need and feel good about it. Remember, when you speak up for yourself assertively, you will get what you need and feel good about it. You will also be showing respect for yourself and for the other people in your life who are important to you. Until next time, try thinking about it like Stephanie Lahart says it. Say what you mean, mean what you say, but don't say it mean before.

It gets too late. Only way to do this is with hope, not a yes. The only way to do this is with hope, not hate.