Beatriz Sousa

As a third-year medical student, I’m used to being tired and stressed, and like many of us in training, I tend to neglect my own health. “It’s probably nothing,” I told myself. “I’m overthinking it. Illness anxiety disorder.”

But I’d always been unusually sensitive to cold. Since childhood, my hands and feet would freeze, turning pale, numb, sometimes bluish. I thought it was just a quirky trait. Then I learned about Raynaud’s phenomenon in class, and my classmates and I joked: “You totally have that.”