🔍 DISCLAIMER – AKA: DON’T SUE THE BENDY MESSENGER

 This is not medical advice. This is satire. If you’re using this to diagnose yourself, someone you love, or your dog—stop. Talk to a licensed medical professional. (Preferably one who doesn’t say “have you tried yoga?” while your shoulder is flapping like a broken cabinet door.)

This rant is for awareness, humor, and solidarity. It’s written with love (and mild rage) for those navigating the wacky wilderness of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.

Now, that said...

LIVE FROM THE SHRINE OF MEDICAL GASLIGHTING

Welcome to Connective Tissue Roulette, where your bones are made of Jell-O, your skin is thinner than a politician’s morals, and the only thing holding you together is duct tape, grit, and a deep-seated need to flip off reality.

Let’s talk about Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome—EDS for short, because if we had to pronounce the whole damn name every time we explained it to a doctor, we’d dislocate a jaw. And yes, that actually happens. Because with EDS, every part of your body is a suggestion, not a commitment.

You wake up. You stretch. And your shoulder waves goodbye and moonwalks out of the socket like it’s late for a jazz audition.

EDS, baby! The only condition where your body ghostwrites horror stories behind your back—and uses you as the pen.

Let’s start simple: ribs.

 You sneeze. That’s it. One solid sneeze and your rib cage decides to reenact a cage match with itself. Gesundheit? No. Try, “Gesund–OHGODMYSPINE!”

But that’s entry-level bullshit. Let’s dig deeper into the collagen clusterfuck.

Joints?

 You don’t have joints. You have vague geographical regions where joints once existed. “Hey, knee, you staying put today?”

 “Not if there’s stairs, Becky.”

 Yawn too big? Boom—jaw out. Sit too long? Hips out. Look at your shoulder funny? It rage-quits your skeleton.

 This isn’t a disease. It’s extreme sports in slow motion.

Skin?

 Sure! If you like stretchy, tear-prone, translucent wrapping paper. EDS skin comes in two modes:

• Rubber mask from a horror movie, and
• Civil War battlefield after one shave
•  Put on a bandaid? Congrats, now you’ve got a scar, a rash, and a lawsuit pending against the adhesive strip.
•  Want a cool party trick? Just pull your cheek over your ear and wait for the gasps.

Teeth?

 Oh, the teeth.

 They’re not teeth. They’re fragile little chalk sculptures from Satan’s pottery class.

 Break on ice? Sure. But EDS teeth go out on mashed potatoes. Soft food. Baby food. It’s like your enamel got a note from your DNA that says, “Nope, we’re not doing this today.”

Floss too hard and suddenly you’re holding a molar and questioning your life choices. Dental hell has a name, and it’s Enamel Doesn’t Stick.

Digestion?

 Now we’re cooking. Except we’re not. Because the stomach’s on strike.

 You’ve got gastroparesis, reflux, nausea, bloating, constipation, diarrhea—sometimes simultaneously.

 You eat lunch and twelve hours later it’s still in committee, debating whether to move along. Congratulations, you’re a human lava lamp.

Fatigue?

 This isn’t “oh I’m a little tired.” This is run-over-by-an-emotional-dump-truck fatigue.

 You sleep eight hours and wake up feeling like you went toe-to-toe with a caffeinated raccoon in a Walmart parking lot and lost.

Temperature regulation?

 You’re a broken thermostat in a haunted house. Sweating like a baked ham in January, shivering in August.

 Can’t get warm, can’t cool down. Your body’s internal settings are run by a drunk toddler with a grudge.

Nerves and Blood Vessels?

 Your autonomic nervous system has one setting: “Nope.”

 With POTS (that’s Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome, for the uninitiated), standing up turns into an Olympic sport. Heart rate spikes to 160 like it’s auditioning for a cardio ad.

 “Oh, are you fainting again?”

 “Nope, just ascending into the void.”

Blood vessels? Bruise city. Look at a table wrong, and your leg turns into a Pollock painting. And you don’t heal, you just collect trauma in RGB.

Eyes?

 Detached retinas. Dry as a stand-up comic at a wake. Vision so blurry it’s not even metaphorical anymore. Sometimes they just decide they’ve had enough and leave the group chat.

Bladder?

 It’s either Niagara Falls or Death Valley.

 You have to pee all the time... unless you can’t.

 And when you can, it burns like you pissed off a fire elemental.

 “Is it a UTI?”

 “Nope. It’s collagen that quit its day job.”

Spine?

 Your spine is a freelancer. No loyalty, no structure. Sometimes it wobbles like a Slinky on edibles. People literally tape their necks in place with Kinesio tape just to function.

 That’s not a medical strategy. That’s MacGyver-level survival.

And now, the real kick in the hypermobile crotch:

 These symptoms? They don’t show up in neat little boxes. They show up like a drunk bingo caller on a bad acid trip.

 One week it’s your heart.

 Next week, your eyes.

 Then boom—your stomach rage-quits like a reality show contestant with nothing left to lose.

So instead of one solid diagnosis, you get:

• Fibromyalgia
• TMJ
• IBS
• Chronic fatigue
• ADHD
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Somatic symptom disorder, aka “we don’t know, so let’s blame your feelings”

Each one gets a shiny new doctor, a shiny new med, and a shiny new shoulder shrug. Usually your shoulder, because it dislocated again while you were making the appointment.

Meanwhile, the doctors—you know, those goddamn goofy idiots in lab coats, playing Pin the Symptom on the Diagnosis—they go, “Well, it can’t all be from one thing.”

REALLY?

 Have you MET connective tissue?!

 It’s everywhere. It’s the goddamn duct tape of the human body. If that shit fails, everything fails.

But nooo. Instead of connecting the dots, they whip out the ol’ diagnostic dartboard, and somehow land on “probably anxiety” with the consistency of a YouTube ad.

 You sneeze, a rib dislocates, and they write down “stress response.”

Oh sure, doc. My childhood trauma undid my skeleton.

EDS isn’t rare. It’s rarely diagnosed.

 And when it is?

 It’s after a 12-year tour through Medical Gaslight America, starring Dr. Shrug, the Intern of Indifference, and Nurse Google-on-Break.

So what’s the moral here?

If you’ve got EDS—and you’re still vertical, still breathing, still laughing—you’re not just a survivor.

 You’re a goddamn legend.

 A myth. A gladiator in yoga pants with a heating pad in one hand and a dislocated pinky in the other.

And next time someone says, “But you don’t look sick—”

You look ‘em dead in the eye and say: “That’s because I’m too fucking tired to look sick. Now hand me my wrist brace and get the hell out of my way before something else falls off.”

Thank you. Tip your massage therapist. And for the love of all that’s bendy—don’t sneeze too hard on the way out.

🩺 Are These Symptoms Actually Real?

Yes. Every symptom in this post is documented in medical literature or widely reported by patients living with EDS. Here’s the breakdown:

Symptom

Medical BasisJoint dislocations/subluxations | Core diagnostic criterion for hypermobile EDS (hEDS) and other types.
Rib dislocations from sneezing or coughing | Common patient report, especially in hEDS. Painful and under-acknowledged.
Stretchy/elastic skin | Hallmark of classical EDS (cEDS); may appear in other types.
Easy bruising & fragile skin | Classic sign of vascular EDS (vEDS) and cEDS; also reported in hEDS.
Tooth fragility / dental issues | Linked to collagen defects affecting enamel and gum tissue.
Fatigue | One of the most common and debilitating EDS symptoms. Often chronic.
GI issues (reflux, gastroparesis, IBS) | Documented in over 80% of hEDS patients.
Temperature dysregulation | Often due to dysautonomia, especially comorbid POTS.
POTS / fainting on standing | A common comorbid condition with EDS, especially hEDS.
Vision issues (dry eyes, retinal detachment) | Related to tissue fragility in ocular structures.
Bladder dysfunction | Urinary urgency, retention, and IC symptoms are frequent.
Spinal instability / neck issues | Craniocervical instability and cervical spine laxity are known complications.
Multiple misdiagnoses | Standard part of the EDS journey; patients often spend years being misdiagnosed with unrelated or overlapping conditions like fibromyalgia, anxiety, IBS, TMJ, and more.

These symptoms are supported by:

• The 2017 International Diagnostic Criteria for EDS
• Research from the Ehlers-Danlos Society
• Studies in peer-reviewed journals (e.g. Hakim, Castori, Tinkle, and Grahame)
• Clinical experience of thousands of EDS patients
• Dysautonomia International data for POTS comorbidity

So while the language may be colorful, the condition is very real—and very often misunderstood.