When I was younger, I knew something wasn’t exactly right with my body. It wasn’t necessarily hard to see, but one of the biggest issues always had to do with water.

In elementary school, teachers worried about how many times I was leaving class to get water on a regular basis, usually once an hour or more, because my school didn’t allow us to have water bottles in class. This led to me being tested for diabetes at a young age. When that came up negative, they simply chose to believe I just liked water and maybe wanted to take a walk in the halls while my classmates did their work.

In middle school, I discovered coffee and switched to drinking that almost primarily. I was not a terribly well-hydrated teenager. In high school, I would start my days with a mountain dew and a coffee, and maybe sip some water here and there if the water fountains weren’t filthy that week. When I played field hockey my freshman year (for one brief and miserable season) I would drink at least two Gatorades on practice and game days. My teammates would often joke about my “poor kidneys.” Any time I drank water in what would be considered a “reasonable” quantity, I had to leave class once or twice a period to go to the bathroom, and would often end up light-headed upon standing.

All of this led to my friends joking that I just “trained” my body to not run on water, and run on other things like soda and coffee instead. It didn’t know what to “do” with water.

Eight years from my freshman year of high school, I am all but diagnosed with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome- or POTS. I joke amongst friends that I am “peer reviewed.” One of the symptoms is my body flushing all my electrolytes through infuriatingly frequent trips to the bathroom if I drink too much water. I learned this about myself (or, rather, was told it) when a fellow POTSie saw my face drain of color upon standing up on a day where I drank around 64 ounces of plain water. He gently explained to me that I likely needed to down a couple salt packets or I was going to end up passing out.

Water, yes, the thing we all need to survive, has almost made me pass out when I drink it in “normal” quantities without supplemental salt pills or Liquid I.V.

I spent years thinking my body just needed to “get used to” drinking normal quantities of water, that it was normal to be a little dizzy after drinking a 32 oz. nalgene, and that feeling like a human being again after chugging a Coke or a Gatorade was because of the sugar rush, not the sodium content. The way people tried to shove my body into a normative category, even though it so clearly wasn’t, marred my entire life. Disabled bodies are often subjected to normative health standards, and then met with confusion why the “normal” fixes aren’t working.

My doctor’s suggestion for my water problem when I was in high school? Drink more. My body was probably “realizing how dehydrated it had been” and the solution was to drink 96 oz. of water a day, only one cup of coffee, and no soda or Gatorade. I kept that up for all of a day, when that advice had me almost unconscious on the floor of the auditorium during play rehearsal.

So no, normative health advice is not going to fit onto many bodies. Whether it is the 10,000 steps a day rule, average water intake, or the number of calories one needs to sustain themselves. Some bodies need less than 2000 mg of sodium a day, some (mine!!!) need upwards of 3000.

Bodies are all different, disabled or not.

Shocking information, truly.