by
Emily Jane O’Dell
Emily Jane O’Dell teaches at Sultan Qaboos University in the Sultanate of Oman.
Muscat, Oman – I am elastic girl. I’m as stretchy as they come, but I’m coming undone. My joints keep dislocating. Tendons tearing, ligaments loosening. Even my voice box is leaping out of place. What’s a girl with messed up glue to do?
“You should join the circus!” adults used to say when I showed them contortionist tricks as a child. Back then, I thought my freakish flexibility was a superpower. But my superhero dreams were dashed when I got hit by a bus while riding my bike in Harlem, learning while in recovery that I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome – a rare and incurable connective tissue disorder that can cause dislocating joints, rupturing organs, blindness, and even death from cardiac defects.
Disjointed
Dozens of times in a day, my bones would slip from their sockets – my elbows when I swim, my fingers when I type, my shoulders when I open a door. I almost choked to death on my own voice box last summer when I was swimming backstroke and my larynx ripped out of place. Left in its wake – a paralysed vocal cord.
Call me Humpty Dumpty for I am beyond repair. Though I am in need of a number of surgeries, surgeons do not dare to suture my widespread tears. The risk of cutting into my cursed cartilage and stitching up my slow-healing skin is too great. I bear many wounds that will never heal.
I landed in a hospital in Turkmenistan a few years ago after my hips tore out of place while I was researching Sufism and shamanism on the border with Iran. “Eta elastichniya deyavooshka,” the Soviet-trained doctors said in Russian – “This is an elastic girl”.
For full article go to : The Elastic Girl: Living with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome
In this heartbreaking incident, a man died because another judged that he was not in need of this parking space in a supermarket car park. The attacker saw a gentleman walking out to place some goods in his car and, because he wanted the spot for himself and his disabled wife and he deemed the other unworthy of parking there, he got out of his car and hit the gentleman. He didn’t stop to notice the blue badge sitting on the dashboard, or the name on it that showed it belonged to the gent’s wife. He didn’t wait to hear that the lady was still in the store and suffers with rheumatoid arthritis. Instead with one punch he floored a stranger and then calmly got back into his vehicle when he “heard his head crack on the ground” and drove home.
After arriving at the field, I asked my friend to take this picture. Do you like it?
Artwork: Robin Mead 
PainPalsBlog 