To Broken Dolls.

When I was three or four I was called a broken doll.

I was at day care, and a beautiful older boy named Carlos, who looked like Aladdin and whom I was completely smitten with, walked over to where I was sitting and said it to me. He asked me why I so weird and sat like a broken doll... with my legs all bent to the side like a W. I was, understandably, crushed, and spent the rest of my day hiding underneath the shrubbery thinking about what he meant.

It was the first time I ever thought there might be something "wrong" with me.

Looking at me, you'd never know it though, at least not most days. I look like any other healthy twenty-three year old. I have glowing, baby soft skin that makes me look like I'm just hitting puberty, I almost never bruise, and I can do yoga better than most people who have been training for years... but all of these outward signs of good health are lies.

I was born with a degenerative connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. EDS is a genetic disorder that effects every inch of my body, because connective tissue is in every part of the human body. That baby soft skin of mine? It's prone to extreme scarring if I get the slightest scratch. I never bruise because my blood vessels are so floppy and loose that they don't break on impact. The extreme yoga skills? They come with the added "bonus" of being able to dislocate every single joint in my body because my tendons and ligaments are like stretched out rubber bands. I have arthritis in almost every part of my body stemming from many traumatic falls, impacts, and breaks. Even as I write this I am laid up with a massive sprain and tendon bruise in my right ankle... not my first, and certainly not my last.

Now, this is not some "woe is me" story. For the most part, I try and live normally. I don't widely publicize my issues, and I don't demand others make take special care around me. From a very young age I realized that how people treated me hinged on how I reacted, and over the years I have seen my fair share of the drama queens and martyrs. This blog will not be that, and if it becomes so, someone please slap me. I don't "suffer" from my disorder. I live with it, and will hopefully do so with some sense of decorum until it finally beats me down. That being said, I will be honest, which will mean there will be times I talk about struggles, and hard times, and ugliness, but that's not what this blog will be about.

 In talking with others with EDS patients over the seventeen years I've been diagnosed, I realized I have a sort of odd perspective on the condition. Most of what I have to say is not what people will want to hear, but that has never kept me from saying things before, and it won't now.

That's what this story is about

The view from one broken doll to the others, and anyone else who stumbles along, on our own Island of Misfit Toys.

~Heather~