Sometimes the body is telling the truth and the story we build around it is the complicated part. I learned that one morning over a coffee I had been drinking every day for two months.
I want to tell you about the morning I diagnosed myself with a disease I did not have.
A few months into my new life in Texas, I started going to a coffee shop near my work. I ordered the same drink I had ordered for years at coffee shops all over the world, a drink that, everywhere I had ever gotten it, tasted the same.
Over the next two months, things started to go wrong in my body. I noticed I was getting soft around the middle. I told myself it was a normal fluctuation. Then my mind started to fog. Then the headaches came, almost every day, the old familiar pressure creeping back.
I started looking into lab work. I began, in my mind, to build a case. What disease had taken hold? What process had broken? I was a doctor, and I knew exactly how to assemble a list of symptoms into a diagnosis, because I had been doing it to other people for years.
Then one morning, as I placed my order, something flashed on the screen before the confirmation. My coffee was three hundred and eighty calories.
There is no way that is right, I thought. It should be about a hundred.
I swiped back and pulled up the nutrition facts. The drink I had been buying every single day, the drink that had been sugar-free everywhere I had ordered it for my entire adult life, was not sugar-free here. It never had been. I had been drinking the equivalent of a milkshake, every morning, for two months, and calling the fog and the softness and the headaches a mystery.
I read it again. And again. It does not even taste sweet, I argued, out loud, to no one. I stood there mortified, then angry at the coffee company, at their sneaky menu, and then, slowly, at myself.
I was doing something to my body. The body responded the only way it knows how, by interrupting its own processes, by sending up signals, by speaking the language of symptoms. The entire machinery I had built my career on, the scans, the labels, the case-building, would have found something official to call it. It would never have thought to ask what I was actually pouring into myself every morning.
Not every signal needs a grand explanation. Sometimes the practice is getting quiet enough to notice the obvious thing we have been stepping over every day.
