How I Gave Myself A Disease

And it led me to question everything

Fifteen years ago, my lips got swollen. It happened overnight—I woke up one morning and they were swollen to triple their size, speckled with tiny red welts like measles. I had no idea what was wrong, but after freaking out, icing it, and talking to my father, who is a doctor, and who assured me it was probably an allergic reaction to something I ate, I felt marginally better.

It took a few days for the swelling to subside, and when, a week later, it happened again, I grew more panicked. My lips were literally deformed. I looked freakish. It was embarrassing to go anywhere. People would stare at me blatantly.

I sought out medical help right away. Three different doctors told me three different things—I had a bacterial infection, a fungal infection, and a virus (herpes). Later tests proved that I had none of these things, but I took all the medication they gave me anyway. None of it worked. The swelling simply didn’t stop.

I changed my diet. I changed my entire skincare and make-up routine. Nothing worked. My lips just kept getting swollen, then subsiding, then getting swollen again.

After a few months of this, I began spending my evenings trawling the internet in search of a diagnosis. I would spend hours looking at horrifying pictures of mouth diseases, but nothing looked like mine.

Then one evening, I found it—a photograph that was identical to my problem. Lips swollen at the center points, outer edges speckled with miniscule red welts, a pattern of bi-weekly swelling.

I clicked on the photograph and it took me to a Mayo Clinic doctor’s blog, where the doc explained the photograph as an atypical presentation of herpes virus, which had infected the facial nerve, which led to half of the patient’s face becoming paralyzed in what is known as Bell’s Palsy.

Even as I was reading this article, my face began to feel numb. By the time I finished the article, I was drooling out of the corner of my mouth, and I couldn’t feel my right ear.

I immediately called my friend, who listened to me (I was having trouble speaking), and she said: You obviously did this to yourself. Just give it a while, it’ll go away.

She was so cavalier about it that I didn’t argue.

And she was right—a few hours later, the paralysis was gone. The lip swelling disappeared with it and never returned.

Since that evening, no matter what happens to me, no matter what happens to anyone around me, all the surgeries and crises and illnesses, all the prescriptions that work and the life-changing medical procedures that don’t, no matter what goes down, I still can’t erase the fact that I gave myself an illness. That I literally have no better explanation for it, but that I gave myself an illness. I could, of course, conveniently ignore it like medical science does with every clinical trial it performs. But I can’t, not in truth, because it happened.

And so, no matter what goes on, I must consider this fact.

I didn’t for a long time. But slowly, I built up a momentum. It was a thought that wouldn’t go away. Within two years I had recognized that two significant things had happened that evening. One, the picture was the only one I had ever found that looked like what was happening to me, and the doctor was from the Mayo Clinic, which I considered a respected source. Both of these things acted as an authority on me, one that was powerful enough to change my belief in an instant. Powerful enough to convince me that this is what I had. Bell’s Palsy.

I believed it, for a heart-stopping instant.

Two, I subsequently made it come true. Instantly.

But the questions only began from there. Because then I began to wonder: How did it happen? What was the mechanism? Was there a mechanism—or would we call it spirit? Does spirit even exist?

If there is a way that we can affect our bodies with the sheer power of our THOUGHT, then is it a special quality? Do only certain people have it? Or does everyone? This seems far more likely to me than me-being-special.

And if everyone has it, then why don’t we know this? In other words, how is it possible that human beings could have latent powers that practically nobody in our medical culture believes in or understands? Why? And why again?

Please join me for a series of posts where I’ll share insights from my 15-year exploration of our inner resources, not just to heal our bodies and write books, but to do pretty much anything else.