The little fibs we tell people with medical degrees.

There’s a special kind of stranger in this world who we trust with our blood, our weight, our darkest bodily secrets, and yet we still look them dead in the eye and lie. Not big lies. Not “I’ve never smoked” lies, usually. Smaller ones. Cowardly little ones. The kind that serve absolutely nobody, least of all us, since these people went to school for eight years specifically to see through our nonsense.

And yet. The second that paper gown crinkles and the blood pressure cuff tightens like a boa constrictor with a grudge, something in our brain decides honesty is optional. We become unreliable narrators of our own bodies, mid-diagnosis, for reasons that make no sense even to us.

Here’s what we’re all quietly fibbing about in that little room with the weird art on the walls.

1. “Just a glass or two a week.”
Meanwhile the recycling bin sounds like a wind chime made entirely of empty bottles. The doctor nods. She knows. She always knows.

2. “I exercise regularly.”
If walking briskly from the couch to the fridge counts as cardio, sure, technically not lying.

3. “I floss.”
This one’s practically a national pastime. Everybody says it, nobody does it, and the hygienist can tell within four seconds of poking around in there.

4. The symptom timeline.
“It just started yesterday” means it started three weeks ago and you’ve been Googling it at 2am like a raccoon hoarding bad news instead of snacks.

5. “I haven’t looked it up online.”
You have seventeen tabs open. You’ve self-diagnosed four different conditions. You’re basically pre-med at this point, except everything you know is wrong.

6. Portion sizes.
“A normal amount” of anything, described by a person who has never once in their life measured a serving of pasta.

7. “No, I’m not stressed.”
Said through gritted teeth while your left eye twitches like it’s trying to send a distress signal in Morse code.

8. The step count.
Some fitness tracker is quietly reporting the truth while you tell the doctor a number that sounds respectable and has no basis in reality.

9. “I take my medication every day.”
There’s a pillbox somewhere with three weeks of Tuesdays still sitting in it, judging you silently from the bathroom shelf.

10. Sleep hours.
Rounding four hours of doom-scrolling followed by fitful tossing up to “around seven, give or take,” because “give or take” is doing some heroic, unpaid labor in that sentence.

11. “This is normal for me.”
Whatever mystery ache, weird noise, or concerning color you’ve been personally negotiating with for months, suddenly reframed as your baseline personality trait.

12. The diet description.
“Balanced” meaning one salad exists somewhere in your recent memory, surrounded on all sides by things that came out of a drive-thru window.

13. “I’ll definitely follow up if it gets worse.”
A promise made with full sincerity in the moment, immediately forgotten the second you’re back in the parking lot, already planning to just wait it out and hope for the best.

Here’s the strange thing about all this fibbing. We’re not trying to fool anyone who matters. Doctors have heard every version of these lies a thousand times over, delivered by a thousand different people convinced they’re the first to invent them. They already know. They’re just being polite enough to let us have this one.

Maybe the lying isn’t really about the doctor at all. Maybe it’s about not wanting to say the truth out loud to ourselves, in a bright room, on a piece of paper that crinkles every time we shift. Once you say it, it’s real. And nobody wants “I haven’t slept properly since spring” to become an official medical fact.

So we keep fibbing, gently, badly, and probably not fooling anyone. At least the paper gown keeps our secrets too, mostly by trapping them under a thin layer of judgmental tissue paper.