But what I would love to hear from you is your journey and how you ended up in this space in the first place.

Gosh, yes.

Well, thank you again for those kind words.

But yeah, and you said I was one of the first accounts that you found.

And, you know, my journey, when I started talking about hypermobility and I started seeing EDS patients, it was around 2010.

So a long time ago, you know, the EDS Society didn't even exist back then.

And there was very little information out there.

What are some of the I guess, safety starting points that you like to start with when you're working with a

Yeah

... you know, people being gaslighted, very poor, people talking about, you know, patient odysseys and, you know, really reading things we shouldn't be reading about how patients have been treated.

But, um, all of that kind of, I was trying to form a model, an idea, a concept of, well, how do people end up in the condition, you know, 'cause some people are really severely impacted and disabled by this condition.

How does that happen? Um, and that's what I was trying to investigate through my dissertation.

Um, and sadly, um, again, the research backed it up, it wasn't just me saying this, it, it did come down to that first interaction, that first catalyst, I think, is that interaction with the medical world.

Because if you're, say, take me for example, I've been around hundreds of doctors trying to get answers, but the longer that goes on, the more disabling maybe your symptoms become, the less, um, the psychological burden of having this condition starts to weigh on you maybe socially.

Maybe you can't work anymore.

Okay.

But where did you start to get permission to move slower or to do things that your body needed it to do?

Yes.

So weirdly, because I, as you said in my bio, I'm trained originally in Pilates.

So I trained back in 2007, so a long time ago.

And so Pilates is very different and the breathing and everything is very different.

It's very choreographed and everything has to look perfect.

And so I was like, I started looking around and actually a book I found was from a yoga teacher called Vanda Scaravelli.

Is there anything else about your work or about kind of what we've seen in the medical progress around everything that we haven't touched on that you'd like to touch on? No.