How thousands of people like Maureen live for years with unexplained symptoms...
but amazingly they CAN now get help By Jo Waters Published: 17:04, 23 September 2024 | Updated: 17:30, 23 September 2024 e-mail 3 View comments In her early twenties Maureen Sharphouse’s joints were so bendy she got a job as a magician’s assistant, effortlessly folding herself inside boxes for tricks on stage. ‘I was literally the woman “sawn” in half on stage, with my legs crammed inside up over my body, I was just so flexible,’ says Maureen, 67, a life coach who lives in Kinross-shire, Scotland, with her husband Peter, 75, a semi-retired businessman (they have five children between them from previous relationships). ‘At school I was great at sports and dancing and could easily do the splits.
’ Maureen Sharphouse, 67, suffers from Ehlers Danlos syndrome, a condition that one in 500 people But there were also some worrying health issues. ‘I remember my knee joint popping out multiple times on the sports field,’ says Maureen. There was also the frequent joint pain, occasional dislocations, loss of balance and co-ordination, pins and needles and slurred speech.
What she couldn’t know was that these were all signs of a medical condition that, as she puts it, ‘was to eventually dominate my whole life’. But it would be another 35 years before she found out – in June 2023 – what that condition was, after countless visits to countless doctors: Ehlers Danlos syndrome. EDS is .
