Colonel Carter found me in the hallway outside the courtroom. He was out of uniform that day, just a gray sweater and jeans, and without the insignia he looked less like the man who had shouted “CALL 911” across a stunned courtroom and more like someone’s kind neighbor.
“You did well in there,” he said.
“You did the hard part,” I told him. “You believed me before anyone else did.”
He shook his head slightly. “I didn’t believe you. I checked your pulse. Belief wasn’t required.” Then he softened. “But for what it’s worth, in twenty-two years of practicing medicine, I’ve learned that the people accused of exaggerating their symptoms are almost never the ones exaggerating. It’s usually the opposite. They’ve learned to minimize, because minimizing is safer than being disbelieved again.”
I thought about that sentence for a long time afterward. It explained so much about the year before my diagnosis — the way I had downplayed the blackouts to Daniel, softened the ER visits when I described them to friends, apologized for needing to sit down when the room tilted. I had spent a year making myself smaller so that my illness would be easier for other people to accept.
