That time I accidentally trolled my sister for fourteen years

My sense of humor is occasionally a little deadpan. Occasionally it's not immediately apparent when I am in fact joking about a thing.

My sister was telling me about pine needle tea. (It has a lot of vitamin C in it). "You can drink it if you go to Japan again, so you don't get scurvy," she said.

The thing is, I DID talk a lot about having scurvy when I was in Japan. This is because fruit is expensive there, and I was eating almost no fresh fruit. Maybe a little canned fruit. Not only that, but the international dorm had a communal kitchen, and I was very shy around the Chinese students, so my meals tended to be the following:

1) McDonald's, KFC, Mos Burger, other fast food
2) A bento from the convenience store heated up in the microwave
3) Spaghetti with sauce from a can

But I never had scurvy. It's entirely possible that I had a slight vitamin C deficiency, but I was never diagnosed with anything, nor did I have any real symptoms. When I talked about having scurvy, I was always under the impression that I was joking. I was always under the impression that my sister knew I was joking.

She didn't.

For fourteen years, she believed that I had had scurvy.

But in fact the joke's on me; I talked about scurvy like it was one of those diseases people only got in Olden Days, but it's actually making a comeback as increasing numbers of people in the UK and the US aren't getting enough fruit to eat.