Hypermobility hell

Ugh... sorry. I realized I've taken an unbelievable amount of blog breaks this past year, and I need to take another one... obviously, since I haven't been here in two weeks.

Five years ago I was diagnosed, after about four different specialists, with Hypermobility Syndrome. It's something you're born with that makes your connective tissue too loose - specifically the connective tissue around your spine. It's a genetic condition and my brother (clearly, though never officially handed a diagnosis) has it also. It causes your spine to move as well as "collapse" since the connective tissue can't hold it up properly.

If you're diligent about core exercises, you can (or at least my brother and I can) get pretty much pain free. But if you're pregnant and on bed rest and recovering from all of that and have various surges in pregnancy related hormones that make it worse, you're not pain free. At all.

Right now, and for the past several weeks, I've been battling chronic pain. Most of those days I've been able to walk, but some I haven't. The rest of the days I've stayed on the couch as much as is possible for a stay at home mom of a toddler and a 3 month old.

In a touching bit of Sibling Synchronicity, my brother and I are both currently trapped in what I'm calling Rehab Catch 22. The ONLY way out of the pain tunnel is to do your rehab exercises... You're in too much pain to even do that much. Ugh.

As anyone who's ever experienced it knows, chronic pain is a bizarre, lonely, frustrating, day-altering situation to be in. It overrides your perspective because it's all you can experience. Everything else around you is out of focus because you only have one sensation and it's highly in focus.

So after taking a few weeks off to deal with the acute pain, I've knocked my PT exercises back to two and am going to restart my regimen. Two. If that's not baby-stepping, I don't know what is, because I thought I was baby-stepping before when I was doing five exercises.

This Wednesday night B will be 100% done with grad school - thesis will be bound, presented, defended, etc. - and this weekend my brother and his lady are coming to meet Everett. I'll try to meet you back here in a week or two and be healthy enough to start enjoying our summer.