'RPDR' Star Yvie Oddly Is an Inspiration When It Comes to Living With an Invisible Disability

Apr. 11 2019, Updated 11:forty a.m. ET

Last week wasn't the first time we watched Yvie Oddly push herself too laborious on RuPaul's Drag Race. The self-described "oddball of RuPaul's Drag Race Season 11" has managed to wow judges and Ru week after week along with her humor and determination.

But a couple of weeks in the past, throughout "Trump: The Rusical," audiences first started to notice that Yvie, 24, used to be additional frightened when it came time for the crowd choreography. We watched as her knees rolled to the aspect whilst she admitted to the dance instructor and the remainder of the crowd, "I'm just a little worried about hitting my knees because they come out of place a lot. It's part of my disease I've got, girl," Yvie defined. "All of my s--t pops out." 

And final week, we saw the down-to-earth queen injure her ankle once more all through the "Draglympics."

So, what is Yvie Oddly's condition?

"I have a connective tissue disorder where all of my joints are, while they're flexible, all of it pops out of place if I hit the ground too hard," Yvie published back in Episode 4, "so I'm going to try and be soft." 

We are obsessed along with her implausible perspective — despite the ache she endures every day and the concern of having her joints slip out of place. She's low-key one of the crucial grounded contestants Ru Paul's Drag Race has noticed in years.

In a confessional interview, Yvie later explained to cameras that her situation is called Ehler-Danlos syndrome kind 3. "I don't produce a whole lot of collagen so I have extra skin like everywhere," she demonstrated by means of squishing the skin on her scalp and stretching the surface around her face. "And I'm prone to dislocating my knees and things like that, but it's not going to hold me back in this competition."

Despite her situation — which the Mayo Clinic describes as "a group of inherited disorders that affect your connective tissues" — Yvie always assists in keeping her chin prime. And she's not backing down.

Even after she twisted her ankle last week and had to wobble around with an lovely ice pack, she persevered to offer the competition her all. "If I have to go out on stage in a wheelchair, girl, I'll do it," she asserts, resiliently.

Twisting ankles, fragile skin, and overly versatile joints turns out par for the path for people who have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. Mayo Clinic notes that the condition can pose an issue if a affected person ever has a wound, as a result of "the skin often isn't strong enough" to carry stitches. 

Likewise, the most common symptoms of Ehler-Danlos syndrome are joint hypermobility, skin hyperextensibility, and tissue fragility. In a up to date interview with Out, Yvie admitted that she by no means sought after to deliver up her illness on the display.

"I really badly didn't want to bring up my disease," she admitted. "Maybe it's just because I'm hyper competitive but I didn't want to make it clear that I had any sort of weakness holding me back. Drag in general is a lot of pain, a lot of sweat, blood, and tears and I didn't feel like bringing it up would paint me in a good way with my sisters."

We're honestly in awe of Yvie and her perspective. We love that we are in the end getting to look her backstory, her struggles and the way she nonetheless manages to persist because the baddest queen of the entire team. "Every year," she persevered, "I lose another set of skills that came easy for me the year prior."

"I know eventually I'm either going to have to stop doing all of my crazy exhaustive acrobatic performances or I'm going to...I just know that I'm going to have to stop," she mentioned. 

We're so glad we are getting to see her incredible moves ahead of that day comes and can continue cheering Yvie on in the course of the finish of the season.

RuPaul's Drag Race airs Thursdays at Nine p.m. on VH1.

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