Coming out of Hibernation
I haven’t been writing much for the last couple of years. I once tried to put out an article a week, but my health took a turn for the worse in 2020, and no, it has nothing to do with COVID-19.
Around the same time that my daughter was diagnosed with Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS), I started to show increased signs and symptoms of the disorder. hEDS is a genetic disorder, so obviously I’ve had it all my life, but just as COVID hit, my symptoms began to snowball. (No, really, that’s what it’s called.) Suddenly, the weird injuries and unusual ailments that result from hEDS went from the minor inconveniences I’ve had all my life to life-altering problems. I asked my doctor (geneticist, specifically) why it would get so bad so quickly in middle age. The answer was essentially, “We don’t know; it just does that sometimes.”
I guess you’re wondering what the hell hEDS is at this point. Well, hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome is one of the thirteen disorders that bear the EDS moniker that affects the connective tissue in the body. Connective tissue is about 80% of the body. Your skin, eyes, tendons, ligaments, lungs, GI tract, blood vessels, sheathing around the nerves, and more are all made of connective tissue. Connective tissue itself is made up of collagen, and there are nineteen types of collagen in the body. The type of EDS you have depends on what kind of…
