Who knew I had already consumed my last "real" meal....

It was Christmas Day 2020, and everything was going perfectly in my life. My husband, my kids, and I, loaded up and went to my parents house for Christmas Dinner. I got my usual plateful after getting the kids plates ready, and sat down to eat. I didn't get through more than 3 bites before the most extreme abdominal pain set in. Almost instantly, I started to vomit all of the food right back up in almost what looked like the exact same condition it went down in. I thought maybe I had caught a sickness, and stopped eating for the night. The next day the pain was the same when attempting to eat. This became a pattern day in and day out. If I attempted to eat any food, I would start to belch uncontrollably, and the pains in my abdomen would cause me to scream out loud in pain. I couldn't keep food or liquids down. I was rapidly loosing weight at this point, and the GI doctors, after further testing, came to the conclusion that I had....you guessed it...IBS and an eating disorder. They wanted me to go to a counselor to teach my brain that it was "ok" to eat. No doctor believed me, an people I thought were close to me started to question me as well. It was such a hard time in life, because I knew something was very wrong, I was losing weight faster than ever possible, and no doctors, specialists, or hospitals would take me seriously. I was labeled as an individual with an eating disorder at every ER I went to. Every doctor chart that followed me around labeled me the same. I felt like I was running out of options and I was definitely running out of hope.

We decided to move to Florida in July of 2021, in hopes that a new area, with new doctors, would offer answers to what had become a mystery of what was going on because I knew that the doctors analysis was incorrect. In Florida, I happened upon someone on TikTok that had Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and a lot of things that were happening with her I could relate with medically. I did some research and got an appointment with one of the top EDS doctors in the USA who was working out of the University of Miami hospital, and at the time we lived 2 hours away in West Palm Beach. I was diagnosed with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS). EDS is explained as : Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) is a group of 13+ inherited genetic disorders that weaken the body's connective tissues, primarily causing hypermobile (loose) joints, skin hyperextensibility (stretchy skin), and tissue fragility. Symptoms often include frequent joint dislocations, chronic pain, easy bruising, and poor wound healing. There is no cure, but management focuses on stabilizing joints and reducing complications. 

EDS is the ROOT cause of MANY of my diagnosis, because as explained, EDS is a connective tissue disease, and over time those muscles break down and cant perform their intended function. My health was declining rapidly and when we moved to Florida, we moved there knowing no one, (Besides my Father-in-law who lived on the other side of the state) so we decided to move back to Indiana because we were not having any luck with any of my GI health issues there either, and we felt we could save money and have more help from family members back in Indiana. It was a hard decision because Florida is where I dreamed of living as a kid, and the weather in southern Florida was AMAZING year round which helped a ton with some of my other diagnosis such as fibromyalgia and lupus. We took what we could and left what we couldn't fit and moved back to Indiana. My health continue to get worse and worse as I continued to not be able to eat food and was getting zero nutrition. What came next was the start of my never ending surgeries.