My elastic body

I didn’t notice my flexibility until medicine taught me it was abnormal. Before that, it was a party trick. Fingers bending backward, knees resting at improbable angles, skin that stretched like dough. 

During residency, colleagues joked that I’d be good in trauma because I could contort into any call-room bed. I laughed along. This is what we do in medicine. Turn bodies into anecdotes, recast pain as resilience.

“Benign joint hypermobility,” reads a note in my chart, as if that word; “benign,” could neutralize my exhaustion. Over time, the consequences accumulated quietly. Wrists aching after typing notes, shoulders slipping when I reached for a sample, migraines arriving on schedule during clinic. The fatigue is harder to name, a tiredness that no amount of sleep repairs.

"Benign” has a way of flattening a complex condition into something dismissible.

In clinic now, I hear that same mix of apology and disbelief in my patients’ voices. They describe diffuse pain, dizziness, and instability. They, too, have been told their tests are normal, that they “are just flexible.”

As physicians we are trained to look for patterns. As a patient, I began to see another kind: the pattern of dismissal that shapes the care of people with hypermobility spectrum disorders. They are often young, often women, often articulate. And they learn early that legitimacy must be earned through visible evidence: swelling, bruising, or quantifiable dislocation.

My vocabulary expanded alongside my symptoms. Proprioception. Dysautonomia. Pacing. Living with hypermobility disorder means my body works constantly to stabilize my joints. Muscles that should rest have to stay engaged, and my proprioception is unreliable. Ordinary daily tasks exert a higher physical and cognitive toll. Standing and sitting still take effort.

With time I learned to brace my joints beneath professional clothing and to work through pain that once would have kept me home.

Living with hypermobility has changed how I listen. I no longer fill diagnostic silence with reassurance. I know how easily “Your tests are normal” can sound like “Your pain is imagined.” I know the harm of medical doubt, and the relief when a physician finally says, I believe you. 

The body I inhabit teaches humility daily. Some mornings my hands are steady; other days I fumble with EpiPen trainers or drop my stethoscope before seeing the first patient. I’ve learned to navigate instability without fear. My body is not a machine worn smooth over time but a landscape reshaped by repetition.

At conferences, I sometimes overhear debates about the “psychological overlay” of chronic pain. In these moments I think of my patients who arrive with binders of physiotherapy reports, hoping someone will connect the scattered symptoms. They show remarkable persistence. I recognize their courage. I see them, quietly, in myself.

Illness, especially the invisible kind, redraws professional boundaries. 

The first time I disclosed my condition to a patient, a 30-year-old high achiever brought to her knees with newly diagnosed Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, she looked startled, then relieved. “How do you manage?” she asked. I told her the truth: some days are tough. We compared physio routines like colleagues. In that moment, medicine felt less hierarchical, more human.

There is a quiet solidarity among the hypermobile: an understanding that we live in elastic bodies inside a rigid system. Our joints bend where medicine does not. Yet flexibility, literal and metaphorical, is also a form of strength. It teaches adaptation, patience, and a reverence for the connective tissue that holds us together, both anatomically and communally.

If I could rewrite that line in my chart, I would remove one word. Benign.

Joint hypermobility syndrome, without the modifier, is a phrase that carries both the biology and the burden.

Dismissal is its own form of harm. 
Because there is nothing benign about not being believed.

—

Dr. Samira Jeimy is a clinical immunologist and allergist, and an associate professor at the University of Western Ontario.