When Your Body Doesn’t Warn You Until You’re in a Crisis

I recently had a dental emergency that I hadn’t been feeling.

Sensitive to cold? Nope. Hot? Also nope. When the dentist asked, I answered honestly, because as far as I could tell, nothing was wrong, except maybe I was tired? A bit of pain when I chewed gum? It was only after getting it treated in an emergency procedure that I realized I had been feeling something. I just hadn’t been feeling it as sensitivity.

I’d been feeling the absence of not having that particular problem, if that makes sense, a kind of low-grade wrongness I had no category for, so it never registered as a symptom at all.

Pain? Also, weirdly, no. Except when I stopped to think about it, I remembered telling someone recently that I was in a lot of pain. Chronic pain, the kind that’s been there so long I’d stopped registering it as information. It had just become texture. Background. The water I was swimming in, not a signal I was receiving.

Sitting in that chair, I also felt something else, something that shows up almost every time I end up in a medical or dental setting: the creeping worry that I was a bad patient. That I should have caught this sooner. That “I don’t really know, I might have been a little tired, there was maybe some pain with gum?” wasn’t a good enough answer, and that the gap between how bad this actually was and how little I noticed was somehow going to be read as carelessness, or worse, as me not being believable. There’s a specific kind of shame in realizing you needed an emergency procedure for something you would have sworn, an hour earlier, was nothing.

The same thing happened with a burnout a while back. Nope, not me, I don’t burn out, I just have a lot going on right now. Until I hit a wall so completely that recovery wasn’t optional anymore. And only in that forced recovery, once I finally stopped, did I start noticing how many symptoms had actually been present the whole time. Not one or two. A lot. They’d just never been visible to me as symptoms while I was still moving. And underneath the exhaustion was the same shame again, just with different words: how did I let it get this far, why didn’t I see this coming, everyone else seems to know when they need a break.

This is apparently just how I find out I need food, too. Not “I’m hungry.” Not “I’m thirsty.” It’s “I haven’t eaten in a while, so I must need to eat.” Logic problem, not a felt sense. Same with sleep: not “I’m tired,” but “it’s late, so I must be tired now.”

I run my whole life on inference. Evidence gathered after the fact, pieced together into a conclusion, instead of a feeling that arrives on time and tells me what’s happening while it’s still happening.

For a long time I thought this meant I was disconnected, or not paying attention, or some flavor of “too in my head.” It took me a long time to understand that this is an actual, documented thing, and that once I could name it, I could finally start building an early warning system that didn’t depend on a feeling that was never going to show up on schedule.

If any of this sounds familiar, this is for you.

(Bonus: Scripts to help you communicate this to healthcare providers)