If I eat something that is too spicy or too physically hot, I sometimes get a small blister on my gums. After a day or two, the inside of my mouth heals and all is right with the world–at least until the next hot-out-of-the-oven pizza or garden-grown jalapeño.

Back in January, I had one of those episodes that blistered three different spots in my mouth. Two of them were gone in the customary day or two. But one on the upper right gum hung around. And hung around. And hung around some more. Since I knew I had a dental cleaning coming up, I decided it would keep until then–unless it became more than the annoyance it was. Absent that cleaning on the near horizon, I would have made an appointment to get it looked at.

But this weekend–when of course there was no one available to look at it–an awful thought occurred to me: What if this is a cancerous lesion? If it got this big this fast, I could be in a lot of trouble here.

Fortunately, my

dental cleaning was this morning. The hygienist asked if I had any pain or anything unusual going on. I told her about the bubble on my gum. She looked at it, said it was a fistula–and that it meant I probably had an abscess. Normally, an abscessed tooth results in real pain, but because the fistula was acting as a drain for the fluids, no pressure was building up to pinch the nerves.

The long and short of it is I need a root canal done in the near term. Given the alternative I had imagined for myself, I’ll gladly take the root canal.

Our bodies are constantly sending us messages about what is going on with them. Sometimes those messages are pretty simple. One day last week I woke up with a stiff back. I had been emptying a room and washing walls the day before in preparation for a painting project. I took a couple of aspirin, did a little stretching and was soon fit enough to do the planned painting.

But other times those messages are more serious. I have known folks who could not walk by an in-store blood pressure machine. But when the readings were high they always had an excuse: the machines were not maintained properly and were therefore inaccurate; they felt fine; they were nervous; they had just eaten something salty. The result was they never reported their suspicions to the doctor until something landed them in a hospital with a heart attack, a stroke, or kidney failure.

I am not saying you should report every hangnail to your doctor. I am saying that listening to your body is important. I am saying that an annual physical is important. I am saying that sharing any unusual changes your body has had since your last appointment is important.

Doctors are only as good as the information they have to work from. Part of that information they need they get in medical school. Part of that information comes from the tests they have done and from their observations of your body. But some of that information also has to come from your mouth based on your observations of your own body. No one knows that body better than you do.

Even with the best information, doctors are still going to be wrong some of the time. But if patients don’t hold up their end of the information bargain, the chance of those mistakes increases dramatically.