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It started with Brenda two floors down in accounting, and by the time it reached my desk it had passed through four departments and at least a dozen women. I want to tell you the whole story, because watching something spread through an entire office building, desk by desk, is how I finally figured out what had been wrong with me for three years. My name is Linda. I am 57. I work as an office manager for a mid-sized commercial real estate firm in Columbus, Ohio. I have worked in this building for nineteen years. There are about forty women working across the four floors, most of us in our 40s, 50s, and 60s. You get to know people over nineteen years. You notice things. Here is the problem I had been quietly living with. For about three years my body had stopped feeling like mine. Puffy face every morning. Rings off for over a year. Ankles swollen by the afternoon. Heavy, tired, holding fluid in a way that did not match the food I ate or the water I drank. My doctor ran the labs twice. Normal both times. Watch your sodium, get some exercise, it is your age. I had told no one at work. You do not bring that to the office. But last spring I started noticing something department by department. It started, as far as anyone can trace it, with Brenda in accounting. Brenda is 60. She had looked tired and heavy for years — and then around February she started looking lighter. Her face. Her hands. People started asking her what she was doing. Brenda told a few women in accounting. Then it was in accounting. Three or four women on the second floor, all looking better within a month of each other. Then it jumped to HR, because someone in accounting mentioned it to someone in HR at lunch. Then it was on the third floor. Then it reached the women in leasing on the fourth floor. By the time it got to me, on the first floor, I had been watching women all over the building quietly transform for three months without understanding that there was a single
