The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

In this roller coaster ride that recaps the lengthy amount of time it can take to be diagnosed with an invisible illness that has the main symptom of pain, this story will hook you from the first chapter. If you can tolerate a bit of vulgarity (which is well placed and makes a reader feel empathetic at the author’s level of pain and frustration) along with some graphic descriptions of what she went through, beginning in college, you’ll appreciate this book.

Sarah Ramey tells a story of the insanity that chronic pain sufferers are put through which causes the eventual start of questioning their own sanity. Many fibro sufferers often go through a phase of thinking it must be all in their heads, and the author describes this wonderfully. The book’s journey is the story of how she survives questioning her own sanity and fights for answers to the pain.

Sarah Ramey explores all the different avenues of diagnosis, treatments and struggles which are the common thread between so many silent sufferers. With quotes from the book such as:

“Inflammation, dysbiosis, infections, gluten, toxins — these deeply affect our brain and our emotional state, and cannot be forcefully overridden with affirmations and gratitude. By all means, we should all be grateful. We should all have a practice of loving kindness. I do. And this should be part of any healing program. But convincing the patient she as created her own illness all by herself for sinister, subconscious reasons may not only be really and truly incorrect — but, my goodness. Something here is rather sinister, and it’s not the patient.”

She goes on to say, “And so, what the patient knows to be true — this matters. What I know to be true matters. What anyone with chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple chemical sensitivity, fibromyalgia, Lyme, lupus, MS, ulcerative colitis, Chron’s — what they know, their experience, it matters, and the experts should be listening to them.” She perfectly describes the desire to be believed, heard and taken seriously.

She conducted a lot of research and went down many of the well-travelled rabbit holes we all have, searching for answers in the brain, the gut, the endocrine system. She shares stories about the HPA axis, cortisol, adrenaline, traumas, and stress. She recounts the struggle of  “If no one believes you, and there are no advanced tests to prove that you are sick, and no practitioners are trained to help you in any meaningful way — and at the same time you have been conditioned to think that you are weak, and in order to prove yourself, you need to “battle” your illness — then you are pretty much destined to throw yourself against that invisible wall, again and again and again and again and again, perhaps forever.”

She recaps the culmination of things which cause invisible illnesses such as fibro and helps us to understand how the body is the warning bell that won’t unring and we should be listening closely.

Sarah refers to the “Curse of the Good Girl,” that place and space where we accommodate, please, bend and achieve. That curse of “strength” which is not good for our health, because we go along to get along. That curse which gets us into the boat we are in with our invisible illness in the first place. Where we profoundly lack the anger to fight for more for ourselves, more help, more solutions that don’t harm us. Our weakness is that we’re too nice. She explains how she discounted the fact that she knew more about herself and her body than they (the doctors and treatment specialists) did. She might actually know what was best for her and that there was something really, truly, profoundly wrong. And she needed to save herself.

In the end, it’s never clear to the reader whether the author does have fibromyalgia necessarily, (in fact it turns out to be an objective, diagnosable problem that will blow your mind!) but anyone with a chronic illness will be able to relate to this book. And if nothing else, while no actual cure is found or prescribed in the pages, readers will gain from seeing a way to step back from themselves and realize there’s always someone out there who has it worse. And realize they are not alone. And they’ll be able to shed a tear and have a couple laughs along the way through this book.

Emotions Management, Fibromyalgia, For Health Professionals, Mental Health, Traumatic Stress