[responsivevoice voice=”UK English Female” buttontext=”Listen to this”]
Watching Adrienne Wix move through a series of yoga poses, you wouldn’t guess the 26-year-old Meeker native has spent the last several years seeking a diagnosis for mysterious and debilitating physical symptoms that cut short her career as a firefighter and changed the course of her future.
Wix is a sixth-generation resident of the White River valley. The youngest of Steve and Debbie Wix’s three children, she has great memories of the “golden years of Sleepy Cat Guest Ranch,” owned and operated by the Wix family for many years. “Days spent running around with my siblings and cousins, terrorizing the dish boys and snagging cherries from the bartender,” Wix writes of those idyllic days. The original Sleepy Cat sign is now at home in her Sleepy Cat Yogi Shop on Market Street, a reminder of her family history.
Wix is a graduate of the Meeker High School Class of 2012. After high school, she went on to become a wildland and structural State of Colorado emergency medical technician and firefighter by her 20th birthday.
“I joined Meeker’s volunteer fire department and continued to pursue my bachelor’s degree in fire administration and investigation while living in my hometown and working at the rec center,” Wix said via email. She finished her Bachelor of Science degree in August 2016 and started applying to fireline jobs, but the only fires she would end up fighting were in her own body.
“I was in the gym five days a week besides hiking, swimming, running, playing volleyball, and working fulltime,” she said. “I began to notice my hands were getting stuck around the dumbbells in the gym. I wouldn’t be able to control any motor skills in my hands if I held onto anything for longer than a few seconds, and they started hurting like hell. My neck became very stiff around then, or my whole upper back you could say, and my spine started to feel like it was rotting. From there it spread like grassfire through my body.”
A year later, in 2017, a fall while walking her dog prompted an unusual purchase for someone in their 20s — a cane. The pain in her feet was so bad she had started researching the possibility of voluntary amputation. “At the time the most sensible and possible remedy I could find that might reduce my foot pain and allow me to live a decent life was to get my feet cut off,” she writes. By autumn 2018, the pain had spread to her scalp and face, overtaking the last of the “free territory.”
Wix saw multiple doctors and had countless tests, to no avail. Her research into voluntary amputation had led her to the story of a woman diagnosed with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS). Wix felt sure her symptoms matched and shared the information with her doctor at the time.
“He blew it off because I haven’t ever had a major dislocation,” she said. “Soon after he blew me off completely, letting me know there was nothing else he could do for me.”
She got similar reactions from other doctors during 2017 and 2018. “One even called me a zebra, using a metaphor about other patients being horses. Horses have straightforward symptoms that easily match their disease, while zebras present differently and are hard to match with a root cause.”
Eventually, Wix got an appointment with a geneticist, and on Sept. 19, 2019, she was officially diagnosed with EDS, hypermobility type. The diagnosis was a confirmation of her own suspicions and validated the symptoms she’d been trying to describe to doctors for years.
EDS, with its 13 recognized types, is estimated to afflict 1 in 5,000 people worldwide. It’s not uncommon for the syndrome to go undiagnosed and unrecognized, as in Wix’s case. According to the Ehlers-Danlos Society (ehlers-danlos.com), the syndromes are “a group of connective tissue disorders that can be inherited and are varied both in how they affect the body and in their genetic causes.”
It turns out the zebra is the official mascot of the Ehlers Danlos Society.
There is no treatment or cure for EDS. “‘Suck it up, buttercup,’ is sorta it,” Wix writes. Physical therapy is a component in her self-care. She cut gluten and dairy out of her diet. She practices yoga. She’s tried vitamin C and collagen supplementation and takes a heavy-duty anti-inflammatory and an antidepressant daily for pain.
And she’s learned to be gentle with herself. “My reality is that I essentially have an expiration hour every day where my motor skills give out and my body becomes very weak. Sometimes that hour depends on my activity, the up and the down, the movement and stillness I choose to do/take. Other days, though, my expiration hour may hit before I make it out of bed or 30 minutes into my day without me ever gleaning a clue to why,” Wix said.
That’s a difficult transition at any point in life, but for an active 20-something with big hopes and dreams for the future, it’s even more challenging.
“I never prepared for this scenario, and it has been really hard to let go of the life I thought I would be living,” she said via email, and then, true to form, she adds the “bright side.”
She’s closer than ever with her parents, opened her own storefront where she sells handmade malas and other items, and has evolved her yoga practice and teaching into a style she calls “Comfort Creation,” which she enjoys sharing with her hometown community.
Wix is sharing her particular style of yoga in a hand-drawn weekly piece in the Herald Times called “The Strip,” which has been in the sports section during this absence of regular sports coverage.
“The postures and movements I share in ‘The Strip’ is yoga that will strengthen your body so it can build past or release away from any pain or discomfort you may feel. Since I know what it is like to feel pain in every aspect of my body it is my specialty to find the poses and movements that get straight to the core of what my clients are experiencing but with a gentle enough approach that further damage is not done,” Wix explains.
Although she no longer teaches classes, she does build Mobility Plans customized to address the needs, hopes, and ailments of her clients. “Though I may no longer be a firefighter, safety is still raging through my veins so remember to always talk to your doctor before starting to do any movements you think may cause you concern and try to practice with someone around in case of a fall,” she writes.
The coronavirus pandemic has many of us feeling like our plans have been derailed, and fearing life will never be the same. Wix has some wise advice that’s as applicable to a health crisis as it is to living through a pandemic: “I don’t have a secret cure, what I can share is one tiny, simple bit of advice to anyone whose future got hijacked by life. You don’t belong in a box; I was not supposed to only be a firefighter, so losing that shouldn’t have stripped me away from myself as long as I allowed it to. Life will try and put you in enough boxes for you to be building up your own.”
You can find Wix’s handmade creations and more at https://www.sleepycatyogishop.com/
[/responsivevoice]
By NIKI TURNER | [email protected]
