Meanwhile, my own health became something I finally understood instead of feared. Dr. Shah adjusted the pacemaker settings twice in the first two months, fine-tuning until the dizziness disappeared almost entirely. I started walking again — real walking, the kind where you don’t scan every hallway for something to grab onto. I went back to work part-time, then full-time. I stopped flinching every time I stood up too quickly.
And slowly, I started telling people. Not everyone, not all at once, but enough. I told my sister the whole story, start to finish, including the parts where I had almost believed Daniel and Patricia myself. I told a support group for people with cardiac arrhythmias, where a woman named Renata told me she had been diagnosed with anxiety for six years before a monitor finally caught her own conduction problem. “They call it the invisible illness club,” she said, half-joking, “except everyone in it has scars to prove they’re not making it up.”
