Elsewhere

Before anything, please note that I’m not a doctor or a medical professional. This isn’t a medical article or medical advice. It’s simply a story about what happened to me.

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9 April 2025

Hey, Chat. Thanks for your reassurance yesterday. Today I feel physically fine, at least I think I should feel fine. No chest discomfort, only a little nausea, and a little sleepy/tired. I got 8,5 hours of sleep last night, so it should be enough.

But I still have a “bad feeling”. Still feel unenergized, weak, like I’m dying. One of my relatives just passed away last Saturday. He wasn’t even 40 years old yet, but he had a stroke last year (or 2 years ago, I forgot), and he had been using a stick to walk since then. Then last week he had a seizure while sleeping, and next thing he never woke up, had a major bleeding in the head, and passed away a few days after.

I don’t know if I’m getting more anxious about death because of his passing, but I don’t feel better now. For the past few days, I’ve been feeling weak, sleepy, sometimes nauseous, burping a lot, and having some chest discomfort. I’m scared that my time is near, because physically I think that I have no major symptoms, just that “feeling”. I can’t live well and I can’t enjoy my days.

That was one of the hundreds of messages I sent to ChatGPT about my excessive fear and worry about my health. Looking back at it now, it’s a little hard to read — not because it’s embarrassing, but because I remember exactly how real that fear felt. But what surprises me isn’t how scared I was. It’s how normal that fear eventually became.

There was a time when I woke up every morning wondering whether something was seriously wrong with me. Not because I had a dramatic medical emergency or some life-changing diagnosis, but because I constantly felt like something was wrong. My body always seemed to have something new to tell me: a strange sensation in my chest, sudden intermittent dizziness, a wave of nausea, blurry vision, random soreness, an unusually fast heartbeat, or simply… a bad feeling that I couldn’t explain.

The symptoms came and went. Some days I felt fine. Other days it felt like my body had quietly decided that today was the day everything would fall apart.

And the strange thing was that I could still function. I still went to work. I still drove. I still smiled in photographs. I still met friends, watched movies, exercised, even went on dates. If you met me during that time, you probably wouldn’t have noticed anything unusual.

But inside my head, I was preparing for the worst almost every day.

Where is the nearest hospital?
What if I faint while driving?
What if this is actually a heart attack?
What if this time I don’t make it home?
What if today is the day?
What if I’m actually dying, and nobody—not even the doctors—has realized it yet?

I know that it almost sounds dramatic. But at the time, it felt completely reasonable.

The physical symptoms themselves weren’t always severe. The fear, however, was.

I call these episodes “drop waves.” It’s not a medical term—I completely made it up. I just didn’t know how else to describe them.

Out of nowhere, I’d suddenly feel… off. Sometimes it was dizziness. Sometimes my chest felt tight or unusually full. Sometimes it felt like all the energy had been drained from my body within seconds. It wasn’t necessarily painful. It was just enough to make my brain go:

“Well… this must be it.”

Then, just as suddenly as they arrived, the waves would slowly fade away.

Until the next one.

And there was always a next one.

⸻

I think it all started with acid reflux.

Around early 2023, I had what I now know was probably my first major GERD episode. At the time, I didn’t know much about GERD. I just knew that my chest felt strange for days. Then one evening, after skipping dinner (which, in hindsight, was probably not my brightest decision) and rewarding myself with a cup of black coffee (which was somehow an even worse one), I drove from Bandung to Jakarta.

Not long into the trip, I felt a burning sensation in my chest. At first it was uncomfortable, and I just noticed that it’s there. 

But then, it became worrying. 

Then, almost without warning, it became terrifying.

The burning sensation spread upward. My vision felt strange. My body suddenly became light. I genuinely thought I was about to lose consciousness.

More importantly, I thought I was having a heart attack.

Luckily, I was close to a rest area, so I pulled over as quickly as I could. I got out of the car, walked around for a while, and tried to make sense of what had just happened. I remember texting a doctor I knew, who reassured me that what I described sounded much more like GERD than a heart attack.

I wasn’t entirely convinced.

But hearing those words helped enough for the panic to slowly settle. My family eventually came to meet me, and after resting for a while, I was able to drive home safely.

Alhamdulillah.

I thought that was the end of it.

It wasn’t.

⸻

Over the following months, my GERD came and went. Sometimes I’d feel completely normal for weeks. Then it would return just when I thought it had finally disappeared.

At first, I worried about my stomach. Then I worried about my heart. Eventually, I worried about… everything.

What I thought had started as GERD eventually became something much more frightening: panic and anxiety attacks. They came suddenly, sometimes in places where I couldn’t easily escape, and for a few terrifying moments, I genuinely believed I was about to lose consciousness—or even worse: die.

I remember having one while getting a haircut. I was just sitting there when, out of nowhere, I started feeling dizzy. Something felt wrong in my chest, my heart began pounding, and for a brief moment I was convinced I was going to faint. Then, almost as quickly as it had arrived, the feeling passed. Another time, it happened during Friday prayer. While I was standing, the same sensations suddenly returned: dizziness, a strange feeling in my chest, a pounding heart, and that horrible sense that I might collapse at any second. I remember seriously considering walking away in the middle of the prayer just so I could sit down somewhere and make sure I was okay. But I stayed. I kept praying, terrified that something might happen to me right there, surrounded by people, and eventually the feeling passed again.

Then the episodes started coming more frequently, and seemingly without any pattern. They happened while I was driving. Then it happened again while I was watching movies at the cinema. I remember suddenly feeling that familiar wave in the middle of the film and walking out of the theater because I genuinely thought I might faint. I stood outside for a while, trying to calm myself down, and when the feeling eventually passed, I went back inside and finished the movie. Then it happened again at a concert. Then at work. Then somewhere else. After a while, it felt like nowhere was completely safe from it.

I visited doctors. I saw a cardiologist. I had my heart examined. Everything came back normal. Objectively, that should have been wonderful news. Instead, my brain simply moved on to the next possibility.

If it wasn’t my heart, then maybe it was something else.

Something rarer.

Something doctors had missed.

That’s the strange thing about health anxiety. It doesn’t really want answers. It just wants another question. 

And before I realized it, I wasn’t just living with GERD anymore. I was living in constant anticipation of the next drop wave. The next symptom. The next Google search. The next reassurance. The next reason to believe that my life was somehow quietly coming to an end.

Living with health anxiety is exhausting. Not because you’re constantly in pain, but because you’re constantly on guard. I became incredibly good at monitoring my body. Too good, actually.

I noticed every skipped heartbeat. Every little ache. Every moment of dizziness. Every time my stomach made an unusual noise. Every headache, every sore muscle, every random twitch suddenly felt important. My smartwatch became less of a fitness gadget and more like a portable emergency room. I checked my heart rate far more often than I checked the time.

And the fear didn’t stay inside my body. It followed me everywhere.

Whenever I heard that someone had died unexpectedly, I immediately wanted to know how.

Heart attack?
Stroke?
Cancer?
Something rare?
Being too tired?
Or is it a sudden death?

Did they see it coming, like the way I have these “feelings”?

I’d spend hours reading about complete strangers, quietly comparing their stories with my own. And almost every search ended with another disease I hadn’t been worried about five minutes earlier.

I wasn’t really living anymore. I was surviving. Waiting. Watching. Listening to every little sensation my body produced, as if it were trying to tell me a secret.

There was a point when I became almost certain that my time was near, that for some reason I simply wasn’t going to live long enough to grow old. I became hesitant to make plans too far into the future because a small, terrified part of me kept wondering whether I’d even be around by then. It was strange to look at something months or years ahead—a trip, a career plan, a life milestone—and instead of feeling excited, quietly think, “Will I still be here for that?” Nothing had actually told me that my life was going to be short. But fear had repeated the possibility so many times that, eventually, it started to feel less like a fear and more like something I somehow knew.

I used to love driving. I loved watching movies in the cinema, sitting in a dark theater for hours and disappearing into a story. I loved concerts—the noise, the energy, the crowd, the feeling of hearing a song I loved played right in front of me while I danced and sang my lungs out. These were ordinary things that made me happy, but health anxiety slowly changed the way I experienced all of them. Instead of wondering where I should drive next, I wondered what would happen if I suddenly passed out behind the wheel. Instead of getting lost in a movie, part of me was monitoring my heartbeat in the dark. Instead of being completely present at a concert, I worried about collapsing in the middle of thousands of people. Things I once looked forward to became things I had to survive.

After living with that fear for so long, there were moments when the world itself started to feel strange to me. I would feel floaty and disconnected, as if everything around me were happening inside a dream. I could be somewhere familiar, surrounded by people I knew, and still have this unsettling feeling that I wasn’t completely there. Sometimes my thoughts became almost absurdly existential: Am I really here? Is any of this real? Did I somehow die a while ago and everything I’m experiencing now is just some elaborate dream? I knew how strange those thoughts sounded, but in those moments, the feeling behind them was terrifyingly real.

The hardest part wasn’t the symptoms themselves. It was that I slowly stopped trusting my own body. And once you stop trusting your own body, the world starts to feel like a very uncertain place.

Sometimes I would scroll through old photos in my phone or read my old tweets, not because I was feeling nostalgic, but because I was trying to remember myself. I would look at pictures of me travelling, laughing with family or friends, sitting somewhere completely ordinary, and wonder what it had felt like to be that person—to go through an entire day without constantly checking his body for signs that something was wrong. The frightening thing was that, after a while, I genuinely couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember what it felt like to simply feel “normal” or “healthy.”

There were even moments when I looked at myself in the mirror and the face I see felt strangely unfamiliar. I couldn’t remember how I used to look like, as if I had spent so long watching my body for signs of danger that I had somehow stopped recognizing the person living inside it. I missed the version of myself in those old photos and tweets. More than anything, I wanted to know what it felt like to be him again.

⸻

The strange thing about anxiety is that it slowly convinces you that this is what being responsible looks like.

“I’m just being careful.”

“I’m just paying attention to my health.”

“It’s better to catch something early.”

But then I realized that I wasn’t really monitoring my health. I was monitoring my fear. And fear has a remarkable ability to find exactly what it’s looking for. 

The reassurance never lasted very long, either. I’d visit a doctor or go to the ER, get examined, hear that everything looked normal, and feel relieved…

…for maybe a day. Sometimes only a few hours.

Then my brain would quietly whisper,

“Yes, but what if they missed something?”

So I’d search my symptoms again. I’d compare my experience with strangers on the internet. I’d convince myself that this symptom was different from the last one. That this time was different.

Looking back now, I realize something almost funny. Every single “this time is different” eventually became “never mind.” Every single one. The symptom disappeared. The fear moved somewhere else. And the cycle began again.

Health anxiety is incredibly creative. If one fear disappears, it’ll happily invent another.

At one point, I became so afraid of passing out that I almost expected it to happen everywhere.

The interesting part? I never actually fainted. Not once.

My body kept proving my anxiety wrong, but my anxiety simply refused to believe it.

⸻

There was one thought that stayed with me throughout all of this.

“I can’t live like this anymore.“

Not because I had given up. Quite the opposite. Because I desperately wanted my life back.

I missed driving without wondering where the nearest hospital was.

I missed watching a movie without mentally planning my escape route.

I missed going somewhere simply because I was excited to be there, not because I had calculated how quickly I could leave if something happened.

I even missed boring days. Days where nothing happened. Days where my body wasn’t the main character.

Eventually, I realized something had to change.

So, I went to see a psychiatrist.

I’ll admit, I was hesitant at first.

Part of me wondered whether I was “really anxious enough” to see one. Another part still believed that maybe there was some hidden medical condition nobody had discovered yet.

But the psychiatrist listened, asked about what I’d been experiencing, and explained something that, at the time, felt surprisingly comforting:

Anxiety doesn’t only live in your thoughts. It can live in your body, too.

That doesn’t mean the symptoms are “fake.” They’re real. You really do feel your heart racing. You really do feel dizzy. You really do feel nauseous. But the explanation behind those symptoms isn’t always the catastrophic one your brain immediately jumps to.

I was prescribed medication for anxiety and depression.

To be honest, I was nervous about taking it. Like many people, I’d heard stories. I worried about side effects. I worried about becoming dependent on it. I worried that taking medication somehow meant I had failed.

But then, I gathered enough bravery and still took it.

The medication didn’t magically erase my anxiety overnight.

What it did was much more subtle. It turned down the volume. Imagine trying to have a conversation while someone next to you is blasting music at full volume. You can still hear the other person, but it’s incredibly difficult. For months, anxiety had been that loud music inside my head. The medication didn’t silence it completely. It simply lowered the volume enough that I could finally hear myself think.

And that gave me something I’d been missing for a very long time: Space.

Space to question my thoughts instead of immediately believing them.

Space to notice that not every physical sensation needed an emergency response.

Space to slowly rebuild trust in my own body.

And recovery wasn’t linear. Some mornings I woke up feeling almost like my old self. Other days, a familiar drop wave would return out of nowhere. The first few times it happened, I panicked. Then, little by little, I started responding differently.

Instead of thinking,

“This is it.”

I started thinking,

“Oh… I’ve felt this before.”

That tiny change made an enormous difference. Because I wasn’t fighting my body anymore. I was learning to understand it.

The symptoms gradually became less frightening. Not necessarily because they disappeared immediately, but because they no longer carried the same meaning.

A dizzy spell wasn’t automatically a brain tumour.

Chest discomfort wasn’t automatically a heart problem.

A fast heartbeat wasn’t automatically the end.

Sometimes…

it was simply anxiety being anxiety.

And the more I accepted that possibility, the less power anxiety seemed to have over me. Slowly, almost quietly, I started getting pieces of my life back.

I drove a little farther.

Stayed a little longer in the cinema.

Went to concerts without constantly looking for the nearest exit.

Exercised because I enjoyed moving my body again, not because I was secretly testing whether my heart would fail.

Those victories probably looked very ordinary from the outside. Those moments sound almost laughably small. Nobody celebrates them. Nobody posts about them.

But to someone recovering from health anxiety, they feel enormous.

Because they aren’t really about driving, or movies, or running sessions.

They’re about getting little pieces of my life back.

One ordinary moment at a time.

Because recovery didn’t happen on the day all my symptoms disappeared. Recovery began on the day I stopped believing that every symptom meant I was dying. That, I think, was the moment I started trusting my body again.

⸻

Do I still think about my health?

Of course I do.

I still go for regular check-ups. I still pay attention when something genuinely feels different. I still have moments where an unfamiliar sensation makes me pause for a second.

I’m not trying to become someone who ignores his body. I’m simply trying to become someone who doesn’t immediately assume the worst. Those are two very different things.

Every now and then, I still experience what I call a “drop wave.”

A brief moment of dizziness.

A weird sensation in my chest.

A random thought that quietly asks,

“What if…?”

The difference is that the question no longer controls the rest of my day. I acknowledge it. I let it be there.

And then I continue driving.

Or finish the movie.

Or stay for the rest of the concert.

Or simply go about my day.

Not because I’m certain that nothing bad will ever happen. None of us has that certainty.

I do it because I’ve realized that waiting until I feel completely certain before living my life means I’ll never really live at all.

⸻

If you’re reading this because you’ve been feeling something similar, I want you to know something.

First of all, I’m really sorry.

People often think health anxiety means worrying too much about your health. I wish it were that simple.

Health anxiety is one of those things that’s surprisingly difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it.

From the outside, it can look irrational. From the inside, it feels completely logical.

Your symptoms feel real because they are real. Your fear feels real because it is real.

And when those two things meet, it’s incredibly easy to become trapped in a cycle that feels impossible to escape.

If that’s where you are right now, please don’t go through it alone.

Talk to someone you trust.

Talk to your family.

Talk to a friend.

Talk to a doctor.

And if you have access to one, don’t be afraid to speak with a mental health professional.

Asking for help wasn’t the moment I admitted defeat. It was the moment I finally gave myself a chance to recover.

⸻

I called this story Drop Waves because that’s what those moments felt like. They arrived suddenly. They shook me. Sometimes they made me believe I was about to drown.

But waves have something beautiful about them.

No matter how powerful they feel…

they pass.

Every single one.

Some are bigger than others. Some leave you exhausted. Some return when you least expect them. But none of them stay forever.

Recovery, I learned, behaves a lot like the ocean too.

It isn’t a straight line.

Some days the water is calm.

Some days it isn’t.

Healing doesn’t mean the waves disappear.

It means you slowly stop believing that every wave will pull you under.

⸻

Looking back now, I don’t think the biggest victory was that my anxiety became quieter. The biggest victory was that my world became bigger again.

I drive because I enjoy driving.

I go to the cinema because I love movies.

I travel because there are still places I want to see.

I spend time with people I love without wondering where the nearest emergency room is.

Life slowly stopped revolving around my symptoms. It started revolving around… life again.

And I think that’s what healing really looked like for me.

Not becoming fearless.

Just becoming excited about tomorrow again.

⸻

If you’ve somehow found your way here while searching for answers at two in the morning, convinced that your body is trying to tell you something terrifying, I hope this story has given you something else to consider.

Maybe your story won’t look exactly like mine.

Maybe your symptoms have a different explanation.

That’s why it’s always important to speak with a qualified healthcare professional about any concerns you have.

But if what you’re carrying is fear…

I hope you know that fear doesn’t have to be permanent.

It wasn’t for me.

And I sincerely hope, one day, it won’t be for you either.

Sending love to everyone who’s fighting a battle that nobody else can see.

— D.

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Disclaimer:

I’m not a doctor or a medical professional. This post is simply a personal account of my experience with chronic health anxiety and should not be taken as medical advice or used for self-diagnosis.

If you’re experiencing physical symptoms or are concerned about your health, please consult a qualified healthcare professional for a proper medical evaluation. While AI, online resources, and stories like mine can sometimes provide comfort or help you feel less alone, they should never replace professional medical care.