What's with the Zebra?

 From Why the zebra? – The Ehlers-Danlos Support UK :

“When you hear the sound of hooves, think horses, not zebras.”

This phrase is taught to medical students throughout their training.

In medicine, the term “zebra” is used in reference to a rare disease or condition.  Doctors are taught to assume that the simplest explanation is usually correct to avoid patients being misdiagnosed with rare illnesses.  Doctors learn to expect common conditions.

But many medical professionals seem to forget that “zebras” DO exist and so getting a diagnosis and treatment can be more difficult for sufferers of rare conditions.  Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is considered a rare condition and so EDS sufferers are known as medical zebras.  This identity has now been adopted across the world through social media to help bring our community together.

All my life I've been living as a zebra trying to be a horse.  In fact, I was told repeatedly as a child that it was not ok to be a zebra and that I needed to be a horse - I needed to change myself into a horse.  The fact is, a zebra is a zebra and they cannot change into a horse.

In 2017 I was blessed to come across the first doctor that saw me for who I was and helped me start my journey towards learning to live in my body.  She diagnosed me with Lyme Disease and identified many physical problems that had resulted from it going untreated for at least 12 years.  It wasn't until five years later that another doctor put together the puzzle pieces and realized that I also had Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes.  I have experienced the symptoms and consequences of these two conditions for decades, but by the dozens of doctors I saw, I was written off as a depressed hypochondriac.  

Of course I was depressed, I had lived my whole life being told my pain was in my head and that I should be able to do what everyone else did, further, that if I didn't I was lazy and valueless.  And yet I still experienced pain and struggled to keep up with all that I wanted to do.  I learned to push through, to live in a constant state of overdo.  I told myself that if I COULD do something - even though it hurt - I SHOULD do it.  My pain didn't get better, and it didn't make sense.  It would change from headaches to back pain to knee pain to hip pain.  All of this fed the lie that it was just in my head and it couldn't possibly be real.  

I'm relieved to know today that my symptoms ARE REAL.  There are reasons behind what I feel, and I'm not crazy.  Unfortunately, there are no cures for my underlying conditions, but I now have the opportunity to learn how to live healthily with them. I feel validated. I finally feel like it's ok to be me. I'm a Zebra - a Salty Zebra.