Man of Zebra (Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome Type 3)

Man of Zebra, a cute name, but what exactly is a zebra?*raises hand* an animal with stripes. Well yeah, but not quite. If you are new to the spoonie community welcome, there are plenty of… nope actually fresh out of spoons.

When dealing with complex health issues, diagnosis is always a crucial part of organized care. I have a severe connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome but that’s a story for another day, Man of EDS LINK Coming Soon. Zebra is the American medical slang for arriving at an exotic medical diagnosis when a more commonplace explanation is more likely. It comes from the instruction a professor once gave to medical interns. “When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses not zebras”. It has wide spoonie meaning, but has especially found its home in the Ehlers-Danlos patient population. EDS can look like a lot of different conditions, Fibromyalgia, Hypermobility, and Arthritis and that is just covering a few. You see, those conditions are horses, and when you see an undiagnosed EDS patient, you hear their hooves, those hooves very well could be a horse, any of those previously mentioned diagnoses, or every once and a while that hoof is a Zebra, and an EDS diagnosis is given.

Follow me as I navigate the world of Zebra, and provide a perspective of a guy battling EDS and its comorbibities everyday. I already have a ton of ideas for posts I’ll work on in the future:

• Man of Disability (Disability Application and Approval Process)
• Man of Medicaid (All things Medicaid, including how to investigate home health aide waivers in your state)
• Man of Kidney Stones (This one is horrendously self explanatory)
• Man of Faith (Discussing how my faith fuels my drive to push forward and provides comfort in the down days)
• Man of Pain (Chronic Pain and its effects on daily life)
• Man of EDS (All things Ehlers-Danlos)
• Man of POTS (Talking POTS and other heart issues)
• Man of Dysautonomia (Talking Dysautonomia and its many complexities)
• Man of Riley (Riley Childrens Hospital and the impact its had on my care)
• Man of Physical Therapy (Working to stay strong while battling EDS)
• Man of Occupational Therapy (What has worked in slowly strengthening my hands and avoiding tissue damage)
• Man of Minecraft (How I’ve poured hours into a passion for Minecraft, Java Development and System Administration in an effort to distract from daily struggles)
• Man of College (This will likely include multiple parts, ongoing struggles with school and some of the resources I’ve found totally invaluable)
• Man of Technology (Where I was headed, what I lost along the way, and how that has influenced a course correction within the same field)
  
  Thank you so much for taking the time to read this, for the first of many, this is ManOfZebra, signing off. 🦓