Wendy Booker was your typical 44-year-old wife and soccer mom. She had three boys (ages 20, 14, and 9), worked part-time as an interior decorator, and kept in shape doing Jazzercise. Then she got the call. The numbness she had been feeling on her left side was not a slipped disk; it was multiple sclerosis. “I was standing in my driveway, and I burst into tears,” she says. “But then I got this strange feeling in my gut that it wasn’t the end.”
Most people envision a wheelchair when they think of MS, but because of new therapies, that’s no longer the inevitable outcome. Even though Booker had resolved to fight, her first year after the diagnosis was a “pity party.” Her family treated her like a carton of eggs, and she regarded herself as similarly fragile. “It’s a very immobilizing time,” she recalls. “If you look behind, you start mourning what you think you’ve lost, and if you look ahead, well, it’s frightening.”
What pulled her out of it was a call from a friend who had been diagnosed with breast cancer at about the same time. She suggested they run the Boston Marathon, even though neither of them had ever done a 10-K. “To me, it sounded as if she said, ‘Let’s go to the mall,’” says Booker. “I mean, why not?”
During the training and race, which she finished in 4 hours and 42 minutes, Booker discovered something. When she was running, her mind didn’t dwell on the MS. She was busy doing something she enjoyed, and she was able to lose herself in it. Pain bows to passion. It was a revelation, and it gave her the confidence and control to undertake other challenges—like climbing mountains.
Since 2001, when she just as naively agreed to attempt Mt. McKinley (“I didn’t even know it was in Alaska”), she’s been on a mission to climb all Seven Summits. These are the highest peaks on each continent. She’s already done six and, next year, will attempt Mt. Everest for the second time. (Bad weather forced her down from 22,000 feet earlier this year.) She brings her medications on these expeditions and has injected on glaciers at 20,000 feet.
Booker, who lectures and also runs a children’s foundation (wendybooker.net), lives by three guiding principles. She contends that anyone can use them to plant a personal flag atop any metaphoric mountain.
Self-discovery: “Look around with wide-eyed intrigue at the world. Life is an awesome smorgasbord. Pick and choose what engages you.”
Serendipity: “Serendipity means a fortuitous accident. But for it to work, you must open your heart and head. Otherwise, you’ll walk right by.”
Stubbornness: “Life is much more enjoyable when you’re a participant rather than a spectator. That’s been my epiphany. Instead of going with the flow, I learned to become my own self-advocate and to have the stubbornness to push back…. Our lives are not so much determined by circumstances as by how we respond to them.”
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