It Was Convenient for My Leg to Hurt — A Nail in the Carpathians and a Lesson in Psychosomatics at Seventeen

The pine trees below are getting closer every second. I'm sliding down the slope on my back, an eighty-eight-pound pack slamming between my shoulder blades on every hit against the ice, my skis catching on crust, then on nothing at all, and somehow I have time to think not "how do I stop" but something else entirely: if I hit those trees at this speed with this much weight on my back, I'll end up crippled, not dead. The thought is calm, without a trace of panic. Better dead than disabled.

Three days earlier I'd stepped on a nail. Now I'm thinking of death as the more convenient outcome, next to a broken spine. Between those two points sits a story I spent the next fifteen years teaching as a textbook example of structure, and never once, until today, as what it actually was: the one real conversation I ever had with my own body.

The Body Doesn't Lie. The Mind Decides What the Body Should Believe

I'm not a doctor and I've never pretended to be one. But across more than 2,000 in-depth interviews and thousands of coaching sessions, I keep seeing the same pattern more than any other: people get sick exactly when the illness is doing something for them. They're not faking it. They're not making it up. They get sick for real, with a fever and lab results to prove it. Somewhere inside, the pain has a job, and until that job is done, the body holds onto the symptom with real stubbornness, ignoring both pills and pep talks.

This isn't a story about positive thinking keeping you healthy. Twenty years ago, starting with a nail in my shoe, I learned to ask my body one question before I ever call a doctor, and that question changes everything that happens next.

How an Athlete Becomes the Weakest Person in the Group in Three Days

It was the winter of 2006 and I was seventeen. I was deep into mountaineering back then, comfortable with ropes and gear, and my clubmates knew me as someone who learned fast and never complained. We were sent on a two-week ski trip through the Carpathians, full gear, no shortcuts. Skiing itself never quite clicked for me, my stance was off, my legs bowed out, but a few days into the trip I'd gotten good enough to pull ahead of the group by day three.

I remember the morning of day four in details that have nothing to do with the plot and stick with you for exactly that reason. I didn't want to brush my teeth in front of everyone, so I stepped away from camp, still in my sandals out of habit, forgetting it was winter and the snow was knee-deep. I stepped on something hard. A board was sticking out of the snow, and a nail was sticking out of the board. It went straight through the sandal into my foot. Blood. I was an athlete, so my reflexes kicked in before the pain did: we bandaged it, I put my boot back on, and we kept moving. Nothing, I told myself. It happens.

Nothing turned out to have teeth. By evening the pain was real, and by the next day it was brutal. On a ski traverse, cutting across the slope in a zigzag, every turn means lifting your foot and resetting your edge, and with an injured foot that meant falling, getting up, falling again, dozens of times a day. The guy who'd been ahead of the group the day before was now dragging behind everyone else. The others were already resting at the next stop by the time I caught up.

An Antagonist Named Misha Wasn't Obligated to Feel Sorry for Me

The trip leader was Misha, six foot four, built like a wall, the kind of guy for whom physical strain is just background noise, something you never have to think about because your body's never once let you down. He had no way of imagining what it was like to walk on an injured foot, and he ran the group as if my pain were my own private problem, not a reason to change the route. I'd competed with him before, the way guys do, over nothing in particular, and now, watching him move at his own pace, oblivious, I started quietly hating him. He was right, technically. But I wasn't ready to be right alongside him. I wanted to be a victim.

So I became one. A voice switched on inside me that I'd only recognize years later as a familiar pattern: the world is unfair, the jerk in charge doesn't care, everyone else gets to move forward while I suffer alone. Eating got harder by the day, my stomach shut down along with my foot, and the group medic said a word that sobers you up faster than any lecture: blood poisoning. My fingers on that same foot started to frostbite in the cold. For three days I wasn't hiking through the trip. I was at war with it.

Firn Doesn't Forgive Mistakes Made on One Working Leg

On day four or five the route took us onto firn, ice crust that turns hard and glassy in the cold. Crossing it on skis means carving the slope on your edge, alternating legs. I only had one working leg. On one more turn, I lost my edge. My skis slid out from under me, I lost my balance, and I went down the slope backward, picking up speed on bare ice.

Then came the moment. Pine trees below, an eighty-eight-pound pack on my back, the thought about being crippled and death as the lesser evil. At the last second I managed to dig the tips of my skis into the snow at the edge of the firn and stop. I lay there for a few seconds, afraid to move, sure something was broken. I moved my legs. Intact. I stood up, yelled to the group that I was alive, heard a relieved "thank God" back, and someone's joke about my skis that felt, in that moment, close to blasphemy.

And then the only thing that matters in this entire story happened. I stood up, and my leg didn't hurt.

"It Was Convenient for My Leg to Hurt"

My first thought was practical: adrenaline, maybe? I kept walking. Still no pain. A hundred more feet. Still nothing. And somewhere between those steps in the snow came a thought that still gets under my skin every time I say it out loud: it was convenient for my leg to hurt.

As long as my leg hurt, I had the right to suffer out loud. The right to make excuses for why I was last. The right not to see Misha as an equal, because a victim doesn't owe respect to someone who didn't feel sorry for them. The pain in my leg gave me a legal reason to be exactly what I wanted to be in that moment: miserable. The second that misery stopped being necessary, on the ice, with the trees below, where the question was life or death and not comfortable or uncomfortable, my body simply stopped holding the symptom. Not gradually. Instantly.

From there the thought kept expanding, and it never let go of me again. If my leg was answering not to the injury but to what the injury was giving me, what about everything else? What if I could actually run my body through what I decided to feel? I'd started the trip with a healthy leg, limped for three days, and came out without a scratch on me, the nail wound healed on its own and I barely noticed. That was almost twenty years ago now. I haven't been sick since.

What happened on that ice in one second, I've since watched other people go through slowly, over months, sometimes years.

Mistake #1: Treating Pain as a Diagnosis Instead of a Signal

Most people, myself included before that trip, treat pain and illness like weather: it just happens, and there's nothing to be done about it. It's a convenient position precisely because it removes responsibility. If the body broke on its own, I had nothing to do with it.

Lesson 1. The body almost never breaks down on its own without a reason, but the reason isn't always a virus or an injury. Sometimes the reason is that the symptom is doing someone a favor, and that someone is you, you just don't see it in the moment.

Mistake #2: Looking for the Payoff Only in Big Things

I used to think secondary gain had to be something shameful and obvious, faking sick to skip work. In practice it's almost always smaller and more honest than that: not calling back a difficult client, going to bed early without guilt, being seen and feeling sorry for yourself out loud for one evening.

Lesson 2. The smaller and less visible the payoff, the tighter its grip on the symptom: there's nothing to be ashamed of, so there's no rush to give it up either. It's the same mechanism I unpacked around fatigue and procrastination in "Laziness Is a Misdiagnosis."

A Tool You Can Use: Five Questions for Your Body Before You Call a Doctor

I'm not ruling out doctors here. The blood poisoning in that story was a real threat, and I treated my foot the moment I got back from the trip. There's a question I ask myself first, before the doctor, whenever a symptom shows up at the worst possible time: before an important call, at the start of a hard project, in the middle of a conflict I don't want to keep having.

1. What exactly is this pain or exhaustion protecting me from right now? Not "nothing" — literally, from what conversation, meeting, or decision.
2. Who do I get to avoid seeing or listening to if I feel bad?
3. What permission comes with this symptom — not to act, to back off, to be forgiven in advance?
4. What am I getting from other people's sympathy that I wouldn't get if I were healthy?
5. What would change in my relationships or my work if the symptom disappeared right now?

If you find an honest answer by question four or five, you've probably found not the cause of the illness but its job. And that's the one case where I've seen the body change instantly, not over months of treatment. Once the symptom's job becomes visible, the need for it often disappears on its own.

The Nail Healed a Long Time Ago. The Lesson Didn't

A year after that trip I dropped out of university, a completely different story I've already written about. A few years after that I started doing what I do now: helping people take apart what's really behind their exhaustion, their procrastination, symptoms that show up at the worst time. When a client tells me, "I can't, my head's pounding right before an important conversation," what comes to mind, more often than not, is that exact feeling of snow under my knees and the thought about the trees below, long before any diagnosis.

Misha, for what it's worth, never changed the route, and he was right, just not about what I blamed him for at the time. It was never about whose pain counted for more. Only one person could decide what my pain was for, and it wasn't him. I decided that myself, on the ice, a second before the trees. It's lucky the lesson didn't cost me any broken bones, because most people work through the same question slowly, without a cliff underfoot forcing an answer right away.