This texture, asked Mandy, how did you cure your fibromyalgia? Let me talk about this for just a couple of minutes. Number one, about five years ago, was before COVID. I started having horrible, horrible, horrible crippling pain in my back, in my hip. I missed work from it. A couple of days. I had to call in sick because I couldn't get out of bed. It was horrific, absolutely horrific. And thus began my visit to I feel like every specialist in the history of specialists. I went from doctor,
structural doctor. First, I saw hip doctor, orthopedist. Everything's fine, back doctor. He actually said, we don't see spines that healthy. And in the meantime, I am in crippling pain. And I'm not really a baby about pain. I mean, I'm pretty good about pain. But it was crippling pain, the worst pain I'd ever had in my entire life. And so finally one doctor says, you may have rheumatory arthritis that runs in my family. I go, great, Finally I
was excited that that could be it. I was like, yeah, I mean, I'm not wanting rheumatoid arthritis because I know what it's about But so I go to a rheumatologist and he does all these tests, more tests. At this point, I've had like gallons of blood taken out and have X rays of every part of my body and nobody can tell me why I'm in crippling pain. And I go and he says, well, the good news is your inflammation markers are very low. You don't have rheumatoid arthritis.
And at this point I am crying in the doctor's office because there's no answer to what is going on. And he says, but I think you have fibromyalgia, to which I responded, that's not a real disease because I just thought it was whiners. I'm just I look back now and I'm probably was like judge some people harshly because I really was just like, suck it up, Buttercup, you know, this is come to find out. And that doctor was very very nice, gave me a diagnosis, but
didn't really give me any help. Didn't really he gave me some information, it was just really outdated and old and didn't seem to be helpful at all. So I did what I did I do, and I went on the internet and I started looking at medical studies around the world, and I found a guy in Mexico City who had been studying fibromiologia specifically for thirty five years.
And after thirty five years of all these different hypotheses of what causes this and all these different issues, he had come to the conclusion that fibromialgia is a stress related illness, and as a stress related illness, there's nothing to treat except the underlying stress. And this was me.
I was like, well, I'm not stressed. And then I had to come to terms with the fact that, for a lot of reasons that have to do with my personality type, my childhood, I was one of those people that was never going to let you see me sweat. I think if you asked people in my past, have you ever seen Mandy freak out about anything. There's been one time where I freaked out, and that was when my dad had a stroke. I freaked out, but luckily I was at home, so I could freak out at home.
I don't freak out. I don't panic. It's like when things start to get crazy, I'd drop into a lower gear and then I'm just like, nope, we can work this out. It's the vulcan side of me, or at least I thought. Then I started going, well, wait a minute, what if I'm actually just not allowing myself to admit that I am having stress, I am not recognizing that stress. What if all of these things, What if I'm not handling stress at all, and by not handling at all,
I've made myself physically ill. Now that was something to wrap my head around, because there's a big part of me that's like, that is not a real disease. But guys, I am not exaggerating when I tell you that. The next day, when I woke up and said, Okay, if this is a stress related illness, I'm willing to try anything else. If they had told me I needed to go on fifty medications, I would have absolutely done it if it made the pain go away. So I said, I'm just gonna figure out how to do this. I
doubt this is again how I roll. I downloaded podcasts on how to manage your stress. I listened to other people, I read books. I read books on stress related illnesses, which I did not realize were as common as they are, very very common stress related illnesses. And I started when I started to feel stressed instead of blowing it off, and Chuck probably got sick of this. I would walk into my husband and I would say, here's what I'm stressed about, and I would list off whatever I was
stressed about. But for me, just saying whatever it was was a big part of stress management, just recognizing that I had stress. And within a week all the pain went away. And then I started thinking, well, maybe this is the placebo effect, right, Maybe I've just convinced myself. But then I thought, if I can convince myself not to have pain, perhaps my body convinced itself to have pain.
And just so you guys know, and part of my medical study reading on fibromyalgia, they have done multiple studies where they actually are doing a functional MRI on people's brains while they are actually having a fibromalagia attack, and their brains are lighting up in the same exact way that someone experiencing horrible physical pain from an injury does.
So it's not your brain is really creating that response in your brain and it manifests itself in a variety of ways, and stress related illnesses are one hundred percent of thing. And now I tend to go to it first when people say I've got this. Whenever anybody says the doctors can't figure out what's wrong, then I'm like, have you considered that it might be a stress related illness? Because I am now beyond a true believer in this.
I absolutely feel it when I am in the middle of something, or if I'm having a challenge that I'm working through in any way, shape or form. If I don't catch it, I start, the pain starts to come back between my shoulder blades and then it moves down into my spine and hip. And I'm telling you, guys, it is like being in a car accident. That's the only way I can describe it, and not knowing why was making me absolutely in I mean good gravy, absolutely nuts.
So that's the story. I mean, it's for me, it's been a stress related illness. I've now shared this with other people who suffer with fibromyalgia, and some of them have had great success in figuring out how to manage their stress. And everybody manages their stress differently. You just have to find a healthy way to manage your stress and not rely on ignoring it or self medicating or any of those other things. That we normally do for managing stress. So here's how I manage stress really quickly,
and then I will never talk about this again. I have to exercise every day. I must get some form of exercise every day. Yesterday I didn't get to work out in the morning. I went home yesterday afternoon, and Rake leaves because I'm telling you, Rake and leaves that that counts. That counts. And then I have to make sure I get as good as sleep as I can get. And when something causes me stress, I say, this is really causing me stress, which for me is enough. So
there you go. That is how I cured my fibromyalgia. And I realized there's a lot of people out there that spent a long time not being believed for this. And I hope just by having this conversation, if this happens to someone you know, at least you will go maybe this isn't a figment of their imagination, because I live through it and I'm here to tell you it is no joke. I mean no joke.