I believe in being gullible.

I believe in other people’s stories of their experiences. When I was younger, I did everything I could to avoid being fooled. I only realized this was wrong after people chose not to believe me when I needed their support the most.

In the middle of my 6th grade year, I began to feel pain in one of the toes on my left foot. The pain spread down my toe. Starting at the top of my toe as a dull pain, it spread down to the base of my toe and intensified to a hot, prickly, and intense sensation. It was both outside on the skin and deeper inside than I had ever felt before. My toe felt like it was boiling in a pot of needles. I hid my pain for two weeks until it became too much to bear and I burst into tears. My parents took me from doctor to doctor and from medical test to medical test. Each time the doctors found nothing and I got looks that were more and more skeptical.

Finally, I went to the emergency room. The ER doctor, who seemed proud of his insensitivity, looked at me with cold disbelief and said something like, “Oh, I’ve seen this a million times. Girls this age shouldn’t be wearing high heels.” I was only 12 years old, and was already 5’6’’. I didn’t own a single pair of high heels.

In that moment, I felt so small, weak, and alone. The doctor refused to trust me because he couldn’t figure out my disorder and maybe because I was a preteen girl. He chose instead to believe in the infallibility of his medical prowess.

My pain and my condition were real. A few doctors later, I was diagnosed with Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), which negatively affects your peripheral nervous system, causing the nerves to send incorrect pain signals to the brain. CRPS can be permanent, especially when not diagnosed. The pain is so debilitating for many patients, that they stop using their affected limb, which counter-intuitively increases the pain and can cause the affected areas to lose their function entirely.

Undiagnosed cases are actually incredibly high because of experiences like mine. CRPS patients are often told, “it’s all in your head,” or “stop complaining about nothing,” until it’s too late. When my CRPS was finally diagnosed, the medical test that proved my condition also showed that the pain had the potential to spread all the way up my leg. It was only because my parents believed me that I was able to keeping going doctor to doctor and catch the problem before it became irreparable.

It was from this experience that I learned to listen to others. I chose to be gullible over being insensitive. When someone tells me about a problem they are having that seems far-fetched or exaggerated, I remember how far-fetch and exaggerated my story must have seemed to those doctors.

I choose to believe.