71 – Drew

New associate producer Drew Maar talks hypermobility, fibromyalgia, and borderline personality disorder (among many other things!).

Transcript

Brianne: [00:00:00] I’m Brianne Benness and this is No End In Sight, a podcast about life with chronic illness.

[guitar riff]

Drew: [00:00:09] Hey, this is Drew Maar, your new associate producer.

Before we get started, we wanted to let you know that No End in Sight has a brand new newsletter. It’s full of updates about Twitter conversations happening in our hashtag #NEISVoid, book and article recommendations about chronic illness and disability, and links to new podcast episodes and miscellaneous other media. If you are comfortably able to support our work, there are paid options available, but all core content will be free. You can take a look at previous newsletters, and subscribe over at noendinsight.substack.com.

Today, you’ll be hearing my health story for the first time. Brianne interviewed me, and we got into hypermobility, fibromyalgia, mental health stuff including borderline personality disorder and alcoholism, and quite a few other things.

A few content notes for our conversation: We talk about eating disorders and restrictive dieting at around minute 7, minute 20, and then again at an hour and 45 minutes in. There’s a mention of weight gain and fatmisia at around an hour and 12 minutes in. We talk about queermisia at around minute 10, and there’s a mention of queer conversion therapy at minute 28. There’s talk of suicide and ideation at around the 25 and 50 minute marks. We talked quite a bit about alcohol and cannabis between the 20 and 40 minute marks. And there’s a mention of cocaine at around the 35 minute mark. And finally, there’s a mention of injections at around 40 minutes in.

Before we start, here’s our disclaimer. This podcast is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Make sure you talk to your practitioner about any questions or symptoms.

[guitar riff]

Brianne: [00:02:08] So I like to get started by asking you about your health as a kid.

Drew: [00:02:13] So my health as a kid… I thought of myself, and my family definitely thought of me as a healthy kid. Looking back, I can see that that was not really the case, so basically the earliest thing that I can think of, which is actually so,mething that I thought of last night that just clicked for me.

Brianne: [00:02:39] Yeah

Drew: [00:02:40] …is that I remember being in elementary school and I was talking to my best friend’s mom. The three of us were in the car. And I mentioned that my neck or that my back hurt. And she was like, “Oh, did you sleep funny last night?” And I was like, “I guess I did.” I didn’t really think that I had, but that just seemed like the correct answer.

Brianne: [00:03:15] Yeah, like, “This adult probably knows what causes pain, and they’re asking me about the pain cause, so that must be it.”

Drew: [00:03:23] Exactly. So yeah, I’ve always had chronic pain, as long as I can remember. And before realizing that that had happened last night, what I had thought of as the origin point was… so I was born in Venezuela, and I grew up in Miami. So when I was 12, my mother and I had gone back to Venezuela to visit family or something. And at some point we were at a mall, and I sort of noticed that my left trapezius, which is kind of the muscle between your shoulder and your neck, was hurting. So I put my hand there, and I felt a lump, like a huge lump. It was the size of a grape.

Brianne: [00:04:20] Okay. That you could feel with your fingers. I’m touching my traps, but I actually, incidentally, I have very tight traps also. I’m sure it