Welcome to Is This Real Life, a Bravo podcast that relates our favorite shows to our own lives in the world around us.

I'm your host, Mandy Sleutzger. Let's get to it.

Hi, everyone. Happy New Year. Welcome to 2025, and this is officially year eight of the podcast. I have done it for seven full years. I honestly cannot even believe that that's true. I mean, this started out as a fun hobby and a distraction during a really difficult

work period in my life during the first Trump administration. And here we are,

gearing up for a second Trump administration. And yes, I will lean into this podcast as an escape.

And boy, do I need an escape. I have not had a great last few days.

First of all, my identity was stolen, likely in a government data breach, and someone used my name

and my social security number to try and open a credit card. So I had to freeze my credit at all three

credit bureaus. I had to go to the police station, file police report, all these other reports I have to

file. And then, I don't know, this sounds crazy. I told you guys on Instagram that I thought I had

tennis elbow because I googled what happens

when it or what does it mean when it hurts to make your arm straight? And every answer was tennis

elbow. So I thought, okay, well, hopefully this will go away in a couple of days if I rest it.

But it just got like worse and worse and worse. And it felt as though I, like my funny bone had been hit and just like that feeling was just

continuous.

And I, you know, when you're in that much pain, it, you start to kind of go mad.

So one of you very smartly suggested that I check out in ortho urgent care. So I went to one and they said it is your

ulnar nerve, which is the nerve of the funny bone that is irritated. And if you have anything,

it would actually be this golfer's elbow. But we don't even know if you have that because you

don't really have all the symptoms of that. So we just need to get this kind of calm down, this nerve that's super irritated so that we can

figure out what's actually going on. And so tomorrow I start prednisone, which is a steroid that I've

taken in the past for asthma. And I feel like it makes me crazy. I either cry for no reason or last

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