My name is Emily Marble and I have been a formal chronic illness warrior since 2019 but symptomatic since 2008.
I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico (yes, of Breaking Bad fame). I was terribly clumsy as a child and didn’t have a single athletic bone in my body. I rolled my ankle weekly from first to fourth grade. My amazing mother wrapped my ankles in ACE Bandages everyday for years.
My life changed at my elementary school playground in 2008. I was kicking a tetherball in the sand then I was suddenly on my back with excruciating pain in my left knee. This was my first dislocation.
This same left knee would pop out of place while walking, biking, jumping and so many other activities at least 14 more times over the next 11 years. I stopped counting after a while.
In May 2017, after my first year at Arizona State University, I went back to Albuquerque to have a Fulkerson Osteotomy to fix this constantly dislocating/subluxating knee. Everything was fine now! Right?
Wrong.
In 2018, I was living my best life. Exercising, dancing, hiking, running, and all the things a college-age person should be doing. After some crunchy sounding knees and a fall that left both my ankles, knees, and hips all feeling sprained, I saw a rheumatologist who gave me my first chronic illness diagnosis: Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS).
In the following years, hEDS brought all its friends to the party: POTS, IBS, arthritis, endometriosis, PCOS, chronic bronchitis, asthma, gluten intolerance, some miscellaneous allergies, and symptoms that don’t have names yet.
My first career after college was in research so getting all these diagnoses had me diving into PubMed, Google Scholar, and all those. My second career is in nonprofit consulting. Combining those and my personal experience created this!
Welcome to the Anachronist Collective.