I am caring and attentive to my body.

Attention is the cheap half of care and it does most of the work.

A car makes an odd noise for three weeks. You turn the radio up. Then one day you actually get it looked at, and it is a forty-pound part rather than a weekend and a tow truck.

Bodies run the same arithmetic. The thing you have been turning the radio up on — the tooth, the mole, the sleep — costs less the earlier it is heard. Attentive is not the same as anxious. It is just declining to pretend you did not notice.