For eleven years we called my little sister a faker. Carol. Her own family. I need to get this out somewhere, so here it is.

She was always the dramatic one, or that’s the story we told ourselves.

Get a splinter as a kid and you’d think the house was on fire. So when she started in with the headaches, she was maybe forty-one then, we all kind of looked at each other. “Here she goes again.” I’m ashamed to even type that. But it’s the truth, and I’m done lying about it.

It wasn’t just headaches. It was numbness in her hand. Dizzy spells that would last for weeks, not days, weeks. She’d grab the kitchen counter sometimes like the floor was tipping. She went to fourteen doctors. Fourteen. And every single one of them sent her home with the same thing. Anxiety. Stress. “Have you tried a hot bath, hon.” Our mom said Carol just wanted attention. Dad said she was being dramatic, same word he’d used since she was six. And me? I’ll be honest with you. I said nothing at all. I just stopped going over.

I told myself I was busy. I told myself she was exhausting. The thing is, when fourteen doctors say a person is fine, you start to believe the doctors and not your own sister. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway. Doesn’t help much.

She lost her job in 2019. She couldn’t keep up, kept calling in sick, and her boss finally let her go. She filed for disability and they denied her. She filed again and they denied her again. Said there was no medical evidence of anything wrong. No evidence. Mind you, she’d been to fourteen doctors.

Every one of them wrote down “anxiety,” so on paper my sister was a perfectly healthy woman who just didn’t want to work.

She used to call me back then. I let most of them go to voicemail, God forgive me. The ones I did pick up, she’d say the same thing in this small voice. “Something’s really wrong with me. I can feel it.” And I’d say, “Carol, the doctors checked. You’re okay.” Like I knew better than her about her own body. Like I knew anything.

Last Thanksgiving we were all at Mom’s. First time the whole family had been together in a long while. Carol was quiet, picking at her plate, holding her fork kind of funny. I remember thinking she looked thin and gray and I almost said something nice. Almost. And then I didn’t, because saying something nice to Carol felt like opening a door I’d shut a long time ago.