Hello, and welcome to Among the Lilies. This is a show for ladies who are tired of pretending and are ready to be real.

I'm your host, Cameron Fraad, and today I'm going to be really real with you. So I haven't done an episode in a good bit.

And I feel like I just want to touch base and kind of explain why. So I know a lot of y'all know I've been struggling with health issues for like the last year.

And I just want to talk about like chronic pain because it's really painful. I think sometimes.

I don't know like when I hear chronic pain, I'm like, Oh, that stinks. People are in pain a lot. That really, that's hard. That stinks.

But now being someone that struggles with it myself, like I feel like some people have like a lot of letters after their name.

Like they have like, you know, they're an MD or a, I don't know, psychologists, whatever. They have all these cool letters and I have weird diseases with different numbers.

I mean, not numbers letters. My brain is motion. It's not working right now. But like I knew I had endometriosis and PCOS like forever ago before I ever got married.

And then I had GERD, another one, G-E-R-D, gastroosoccal reflex disease. I got diagnosed with that when I was like, I don't know, 19 I think.

And then IPS and now pots and EDS and all these fun things. And the EDS is the one that's like kicking my butt the most.

We went south. We went to Florida. So I could spend some time in the sun and I felt great. I felt amazing. It was like.

The way I talk about it or the way like the best way of describing it is like I felt like I defrosted. And I know that sounds like crazy. But Matt and I went on a trip.

And when we had flown home, like I felt so good there. And he was saying it was just so good to have his wife back and just feeling like I was normal again.

And then probably like two days after getting home, I, it's like the first day. I'm like aware of all my joints. So EDS is something similar to like a fibromyalgia.

It's ALO, ALO's, Danlos syndrome. ALO's Danlos syndrome. And so I've always been hypermobile. So my sister and I used to joke. So sometimes it just runs in the family. But we always joke that we could be cheerleaders.

We would be like, go team go. And like that's what my elbow does. Right. So that's like me having a straight elbow. I don't even know if you can really see it in the video. There you go. That's me with a straight elbow, right.

So it kind of bends further than it ought to bend. And then like my, I have like my fingers do weird things. And I'm joined so like pop it in and out.

And I dislocated my shoulders, side tackling someone and wrestling or no, and soccer. I side tackle someone in soccer. And then like in a really good wrestling match, it would get popped out.

And my knees would pop out like when I played soccer. And I learned how to like just pop them back in. And I just thought it was because I was, you know, yeah, I'm hypermobile, whatever. I'm super flexible. But I didn't realize as I've been on my health journey the last couple of years.

Um, I doctor, like put these things together and was like, huh, have you ever heard of EDS? It was like, no. And she asked me to do a couple different things. Like, oh my goodness. And then like you have extra, um, a less like it.

I don't know extra like your skin's kind of see my lovely neck, my skin's like more stretchy than it ought to be, which true story. One time I was getting a facial, the only time I've ever got a facial in my life. And the lady told me, oh my goodness, you've lost like all the list.

A less tasty electricity. No, a less.

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