The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness Quotes

“This could have been a lesson—that when a disease doesn’t show up in the lab tests, but corresponds identically to the anecdotal evidence of thousands of other case histories, that should speak to the inadequacy of the tests, not the inadequacy of the patients.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“the mystery illnesses are like the climate change of the human body.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“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, Crohn’s—what they know, their experience, it matters, and the experts should be listening to them.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“Fixing dysbiosis and leaky gut. Correcting nutrient deficiencies. Retraining a hyperreactive brain, stuck in fight or flight. Lightening the toxic load. Treating infections. Regulating stress, metabolic, and sex hormones. Calming inflammation, histamine issues, and microglial inflammation. Supporting the mitochondria, and supporting the methylation pathways.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“Gut dysfunction. Includes small intestine bacterial overgrowth (SIBO), infections (e.g., parasites, pathogenic bacteria, viruses, candida), low stomach acid, bile, and enzyme production, intestinal permeability, and food intolerances. Nutrient imbalance. Includes deficiency of nutrients like vitamin B12, iron, folate, magnesium, zinc, EPA/DHA and fat-soluble vitamins (most common), and excess of nutrients like iron (less common). HPA axis dysregulation. Includes regulating the communication between the hypothalamus, pituitary, and adrenal glands, and balancing the production of hormones associated with those glands (e.g., DHEA, cortisol). Toxic burden. Includes exposure to chemicals (e.g., BPA, phthalates, etc.), heavy metals (e.g., mercury, arsenic), biotoxins (e.g., mold/mycotoxins, inflammation), or impaired detoxification capacity due to nutrient deficiency, GI issues, or other causes. Chronic infections. Includes “stealth” infections by tick-borne organisms (e.g., Borrelia, Babesia, Bartonella, Ehrlichia), intracellular bacteria (e.g., Mycoplamsa, Chlamydophila), viruses (e.g., HHV-6, HPV), and dental bacteria. Hormone imbalance. Includes hormones associated with metabolism (e.g., insulin, leptin), thyroid, and gonads (e.g., estrogen, progesterone, testosterone). Immune dysregulation. Includes autoimmunity, underactive immune function, and chronic, systemic inflammation. Cellular dysfunction. Impaired methylation, energy production, and mitochondrial function, and oxidative damage.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“To see that though she is stripped, she is also stripped back down to what is more essential about herself, both the light and the dark. And to see that being sent through the mulcher—by illness, trauma, or loss—is to be sent down into Nature—and into one’s own nature—but also into the nature of the culture—and given the opportunity to bear witness to what is there, to adjust it if necessary, and then to realign, reroot, and regrow. And then to help others do the same.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“run. If a system is broken—no matter how broken she is—what is most needed is for her to say: no.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“Loss, search, return. Descent, mystery, ascent. Destruction, gathering, rebirth.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“The heroine is a healer.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“I was a collapsed star.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“method for testing, treating, and stabilizing the four main systems that have been identified as the drivers of our modern, chronic illnesses. These four areas of focus are: The Gut. The Liver. The Immune System. The Endocrine System.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“Functional medicine, I learned, is about the root cause of chronic illness.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“How have you created your own illness? How could this situation be benefiting you? Difficult questions, but I accepted the challenge. What you resist, persists, they said.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“For so many of us with bodies just barely connected to our heads, taking up yoga and self-care and finally sinking down into our neglected temples is the beginning of the way home.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“But if those women just had some piece of data to hold on to, some scan to hold against the backlight, to show the world the contours of her problem—that would make a huge difference.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“Despite how unpopular this idea has become, the reality is that hundreds of studies on sex difference support the simple idea that a majority (not all, just a majority) of people born into female bodies have slightly different brain structures, immune systems, and endocrine responses that do seem to explain a slightly (just slightly!) more feminine way of showing up in the world, and instinct for things like connection over domination, empathy over trying to immediately fix a problem, and sensitivity to poor environments instead of a stoic response to poor environments.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“That diversity within each gender obviously exists, and should be both accounted for and protected. We should indeed be free to chart our own course, and no one should be required or expected to behave one way or the other.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“For problems that are systemic, what is required is to walk right into the darkness, right down to the roots, to look around without being undone by fear, and without killing everything off, and instead slowly bringing what is true—even if it’s ugly—back up and into the light.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“Because in a deeply unbalanced state—where only the logical mind is valued, where only striving and achievement are valued, when the lights never turn off, when the seasons don’t matter, when symptoms are repressed instead of understood, when empathy is uncommon, and when the algorithm trumps the story—this is when the need for the feminine corrective balloons and becomes the large black eye of death and, reaching a glittering black arm up through the cracks in the earth, begins to abduct her initiates by the thousands, by the millions. When we have said too many times “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”: The black fish says, “As you wish.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“Akin to what writer Danielle LaPorte calls “the euphoria of admitting your life sucks.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“And it echoes a statement made two decades earlier by Dr. Mark Loveless, head of the AIDS Clinic at Oregon Health Sciences University, who noted that his CFS patients scored lower on the Karnofsky performance scale than his HIV patients, even at the most severe progression of the disease. In his own words, he said that the severe chronic fatigue patient “feels effectively the same every day as an AIDS patient feels two weeks before death.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“While these sorts of things are easy to pooh-pooh as a doctor, or a rational skeptic, or anyone on the outside—if you are the patient, the perspective is radically different. How do you say no to a cure? How do you resist the promise of feeling better, even if it sounds a little eccentric? (A lot eccentric.) This is doubly, triply, quadruply so if the illness has absolutely no protocol, no treatments, no markers, and no name. And it is quintuply so if your doctors are misprogrammed to see your symptoms as unimportant, irrelevant, or noisome. How do you not try to escape this nightmare?”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“There is a secret society of sorts that no one—not even the members—has heard of. We don’t look alike, we don’t dress alike, and we’re from all over. There is no secret handshake, no meeting place, no cipher.

We are the women with mysterious illnesses, and we are everywhere.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“When we demonize the feminine in women, we demonize it in men, too, causing tremendous imbalance for everyone.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

“I hope the ax doesn’t grind too hard against the stone to say it, but this being far and away a Lady’s problem
goes a long way toward explaining why it hasn’t been taken very seriously at all.”
― Sarah Ramey, The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness