Swimming

As a child, I was always a 'water baby.' I loved swimming and felt most relaxed when I was in the water. Since it is so cold in Tasmania, there are probably only 4 months of the year it is actually warm enough to swim, unless you have access to an indoor pool which I rarely ever did. I didn't mind swimming at the beach, but I didnt feel as comfortable swimming at the beach as I did in a pool. Luckily our family had a swimming pool in our backyard. It wasnt a huge pool but throughout the summer I would spend hour after hour swimming. I loved the feel of the water flowing around my body and would sometimes just hold my breath and lay at the bottom of the pool. Being underwater was the most serene feeling for me and I honestly think that if I was an animal in a past life, it would have been a dolphin or turtle or something like that.

I suppose it was only natural that I became a good swimmer. Swimming was the one sport I was good at. I was never very good at running or athletics or any team sports for that matter. I think the reason I liked individual sports more is because of my controlling perfectionist nature. When you were playing as part of a team, you can not make your teammates try there best or put in 100% effort. No matter how hard you try yourself, you can not control how your teammates perform. When you are competing alone however, you can ensure you are trying your best and have more control over how you perform. All of my friends played netball for clubs on the weekends but I never did, I just swam.

While our pool wasnt very big, it was still big enough to do 'laps' in to train once I started swimming more competitively. I also did swimming squad training 3 or 4 times a week throughout the week where we would go and swim for atleast an hour straight.  I dont remember exactely how far we would swim but I do remember my coach telling me to jump in and do a 1 km warm up on arriving at the pool each day it was a 25m swimming pool so that was 40 laps! I think I surprised many people when they saw me swim as I was not typically a sporty child. Swimming made me feel powerful and strong and was the only sport I truly loved, which is why it hurt so much when I had to give it up.

In the summer of 2011, my collar bone started popping out all the time. Even now, every time I raise my arm above my head, my collar bone will pop out. While it can be a little painful, it doesnt really hurt that much unless it repeatedly pops out many times in one day, which is exactly what was happening when I swam. I went to see a doctor that they told me my collarbone was actually dislocating every single time I lifted my arm above my head. This confused me as it didnt feel like a dislocation while it was happening, in fact while my collar bone was actually popping out, it wasnt really painful at all.

My doctors had never seen anything like it before and neither had any of the specialists I went to. I was diagnosed with ligamentous laxity which means that my ligaments are heaps stretchier then they should be and therefore don't hold my joints together as they are supposed to. This explained why I had always been so flexible as a kid and had been able to do lots of tricks like putting my legs behind my head and hyper extending my elbows.

Even in tight skinny jeans I can still put my leg behind my head 

My freaky elbow :o

Not only does my collar bone disslocate regularly but so do my hips, ankles and wrists. As I said, it usually isnt too painfull when it actually happens and this is because my ligaments do not tear when the joints move as they would in a normal person, they just stretch. It is still a problem however as while my joints are so unstable, my bones are constantly grinding on one another and causing permanent bone and nerve damage. I will probably have osteoarthritis in the future, if I do not allready have it now and it also causes muscle problems as the muscles try to compensate for the lack of ligaments and have a lot more pressure placed on them then they are designed to have.

As you can see in this image, there are lots of ligamets aroud the collar bone which are supposed to hold it firmly in place however my ligaments dont work.

So swimming became far to painful and I had to give it up forever. Going from swimming everyday to never being able to swim another lap in my life was very hard for me. I could no longer do any sports I enjoyed and therefore lost heart in doing any physIcal activity at all. I became much less active but still continued to eat the same amount as I always had which meant I gained weight. I think I started to become unhappy with my body at this time as I was also developing a more womenly figure at the time. 

I honestly do think that being forced to give up swimming contributed to me developing my eating disorder. My ligamentous laxity felt like just another thing in my life that I had no control of and this really frustrated me. I was also frustrated that my body was changing and that I was gaining weight due to not being as active as I had always been. I decided I wanted to lose weight at the start of 2012, just one year after I had to give up swimming and my anorexia continued to develop from then on.