There was a reason everything hurt.

For years, my body had a tidy explanation pinned to it: too many things hurt to be real. When everything is failing at once, it is easier to call the patient anxious than to look. So they stopped looking.

Rowan Paul looked. He scanned everything — and found a reason for every ache I’d been told to ignore. I have hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS); my connective tissue doesn’t hold. What that meant, exactly: a torn capsule in my neck, between C1 and C2. Torn tendons in my hands. Torn labrums in both shoulders and both hips. Tendonitis nearly everywhere there was a tendon. Reading the list now, it is a small miracle I could stand at all.

He treated the system, not the list

He didn’t chase one joint at a time. He led with diagnosis, read the whole kinetic chain, and rebuilt me the only way a body like mine can be rebuilt — slowly, and in the right order. He combined hyperbaric oxygen therapy with intensive, image-guided regenerative work, and coordinated a team of specialists around the parts that needed more than one set of hands. He was the only one who could put it together.

It took years. He brought me back.

He has repaired my hands, my feet, my shoulders, knees, hips, neck, back, collarbones. At this point, most of what holds me up was rebuilt by Rowan. I went from walking with assistance to traveling the world and riding horses.

I am not the exception. He has become one of the world’s leading regenerative-medicine physicians for Ehlers-Danlos; in 2024, he and I presented my case live at TOBI, The Orthobiologic Institute. The people who find him are usually the ones everyone else gave up on.

The first call I’d make

I now have a full multidisciplinary team. He is still the first call. If you live with EDS and you need someone to find out what is actually wrong — not manage your file, but understand your body — he is the first referral I would give anyone.

I write about living with hEDS and MCAS, and the science behind regenerative options, here: hEDS + MCAS