Last week was a painful one. A simple, ordinary movement, the kind we make a hundred times a day, led to excruciating back pain that rivaled childbirth and sent me first to urgent care and then to the emergency room for additional testing.
By the end of that first day, I was medicated, still in pain, and utterly exhausted. The tests had shown nothing substantive—a few inconsequential, incidental findings.
The physician came into the room and pointed to one of those minor findings. “This is likely causing the pain,” he said. “You should follow up with a specialist.”
I just wanted to go home, so I didn’t push back. Then, the next morning, I reviewed my chart, and it stated emphatically that the diagnosis was the incidental finding. Now slightly rested and back in my own space, I began to question that conclusive assessment. Yes, I was still in significant pain. Yes, it was in the right vicinity. It’s just that the finding had seemed insignificant, the onset of pain was sudden, and the diagnosis felt more convenient than certain.
The experience made me reflect on how deeply we seek certainty and answers. Research shows that we avoid ambiguity so intensely that we’ll choose a clear, riskier option over an uncertain one with potentially better outcomes. We are wired to want to resolve the unknown, even when the unknown hasn’t finished revealing itself.
I also thought about how often I notice that tendency in workplaces. Clients and colleagues speak with conviction, even when the full picture isn’t there. It just feels better to have the answer. We provide confident predictions without substantive information. We make the call before we have all the data. We assign blame before we understand the full story. We move forward on assumptions that we’ve quietly promoted to facts. And, perhaps most problematic of all, we stop asking questions the moment we have what feels like the solution.
A week later, I have more, and better, answers. My primary care physician reviewed the course of events and suspected that the issue might be muscular. She asked for additional reviews of the findings, and everything was deemed benign and insignificant. She suggested a visit to physical therapy, during which the therapist noticed that something was off, made some adjustments, and gave me exercises to support my recovery. While the pain is still there, it is already much improved, and I feel that things are moving in the right direction.
While I hold no hard feelings to anyone on my care team, the experience was a vivid reminder:
Decisiveness does not always yield accuracy.
Confidence does not always signify truth.
And sometimes the body, like a good team, just needs someone willing to say, “I’m not sure yet” and then to ask more questions.