When the Tests Come Back Normal

There is a particular kind of quiet that follows the words "your results are all normal."

For a moment it should be the best news in the world. The scan is clear, the bloods are fine, there is nothing sinister to find. And yet, if you are still tired in a way that sleep does not touch, still sore, still not yourself, that sentence can land strangely. You walk out holding a clean piece of paper and a body that is quite plainly still trying to tell you something.

So let me say the thing I wish someone had said to me. A normal test result is not the same as a well person. It is a narrower statement than it sounds. A test measures one particular thing, against a range built from averages, on the day you happened to be measured. It is genuinely good news that the frightening possibilities have been ruled out. It is not the same as an explanation. The absence of a named disease is not the presence of health.

The hardest part is rarely the symptom itself. It is what happens to you when you are told, kindly or otherwise, that there is nothing there. You begin to wonder if you are imagining it. You start to apologise for taking up the time. You learn to make your own body's signals smaller, to talk yourself out of them, to carry on regardless. I think that is one of the quietest harms there is, the slow teaching of a person not to trust what they feel.

So here is where I stand, and you will know quickly whether it is where you stand too. I believe the body keeps an honest record. I believe symptoms are not faults so much as messages, the body's way of saying that something is out of balance and asking to be heard. The work I care about does not begin by deciding whether you are ill enough to count. It begins by believing you, and then by looking at the whole of you, your sleep and your season and the shape of your life, not only the one number that came back inside its range.

None of this is a quarrel with medicine. Jennie spent her career as a nurse, and we both hold a deep respect for good doctoring and for the tests that keep us safe. A clear scan can be an enormous gift. We simply do not stop where the test stops. There is a great deal of living that happens in the space between "nothing is wrong" and "you feel well," and that space is exactly where we like to work.

I have my own version of being told it was not really a problem. Mine did show up on a scan, and still I was told it could wait, for the best part of a year, while my body said otherwise the whole time. That year is also the story of how I came to trust energy work, and I am going to tell it to you next time, properly and from the beginning. For today it is enough to say that I know this particular loneliness from the inside.

If any of this has the ring of something you have lived, then you are very much among friends here. You are not difficult, or dramatic, or imagining it. You are paying attention, and that is the beginning of everything.

Next time, then, I will tell you about the year I spent waiting, and the quiet practice that carried me through it. If you would like that letter to find you, the subscribe button below is how we stay in touch.

Until then, be gentle with the body that is doing its best for you.

Bo x

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