Holly go lightly

As muscular dystrophy takes hold of the bright and beautiful Holly Warland, she’s using her remaining strength to lobby for the right to die and to celebrate life. She tells Genevieve Gannon about her final fight.

- Genevieve Gannon

Pinned to the dressing table opposite the bed where the irreverent Holly Warland lives her life is a piece of paper that reminds her to breathe. Her bed is the adjustable type you’d see in a hospice but otherwise, we could be in the room of any young cat-loving Queensland woman. The almost-doctor and one-time aspiring dancer had the potential to achieve anything. But her childhood dreams were snatched away when a letter congratulating her for being accepted into the Australian Academy of Dance arrived around the same time as a diagnosis that would rob her of everything. That determined 11-year old girl, whose family nickname was trips-wiggle bottom, interpreted the “muscular” in her muscular dystrophy (MD) as meaning she simply wouldn’t be as strong as everyone else.

“I wanted to be a make-up artist and an archaeologist and all these jobs that I just couldn’t do,” she says. Then she started high school and became increasingly reliant on her wheelchair. “I thought, ‘Oh this is going quicker than I thought. Okay, what else am I interested in?’”

She set a new course and doggedly pursued a psychology doctorate, but she had to withdraw months before finishing. “I didn’t realise that MD would come with pain and sickness,” she says of the rare condition that is wasting her muscles.