My Story

Hi, I’m Ashley. Seven years ago, I developed a terrifying mystery illness that almost took my life. At the peak of this illness, I was swimming in over 30 symptoms, ranging from serious heart issues like tachycardia, arrhythmia, and severe palpitations, to chronic fatigue so crippling I could not stay awake, to muscle aches, torn tendons, and rheumatoid arthritis, to weight gain and alopecia, to massive headaches and severe, chronic insomnia.

Modern medicine does not have a good approach to systemic mystery illnesses. So after a year of being shuffled in and out of doctor’s offices and not getting a single answer or any manner of help at all, I decided, screw this! I’m going to help myself.

As a Systems Engineer, I found a way to approach my illness in a way that none of my doctors had been able to do: a black box troubleshooting approach, in which the system under test cannot be opened up and measured, so is instead studied and analyzed functionally. Using this approach and my engineering skillset, I solved my illness, mapped out all my symptoms, traced it back to root cause, developed a comprehensive cure, and took back my life. Then, I wrote a book about the whole thing.

I believe that the illness I have solved is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. But the sad truth is that CFS is barely even recognized by the medical community, and since no one takes it seriously, no one has cared to evaluate it past the hallmark symptom of fatigue. 

Few have studied it, no one has solved or cured it, and I do not believe anyone has survived it. I have done all four, and I think this entitles me to a theory of my own: that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is not just one symptom, but the culmination of 30 symptoms that are systemically interrelated and originate from a single root cause. I postulate furthermore that CFS is a four stage illness which, without intervention, culminates in multiple organ failure. I also claim that CFS, as I have defined it, is both completely curable and entirely preventable.

The CDC estimates that 2.5 million people are suffering from CFS today. However, this illness is both struggling for legitimacy and also severely misunderstood, so I think the true number of sufferers is unknown. 

It is for this unknown number of suffering people that I have written my book.