In 2020, during a period of severe insomnia, I took one drop of CBD oil hoping it would help me sleep. At the time, CBD was described everywhere as natural, gentle, and safe. I had read stories about people using it for sleep, anxiety, and pain. I was desperate for rest, but I was also cautious. I did not take a large dose. I took one drop.

What followed changed my life.

Soon after taking it, I felt terrifying sensations inside my head and neck. Pressure built inside my skull. I felt seizure-like convulsions deep in my brain. My body no longer felt safe. I called emergency services multiple times because I genuinely believed something catastrophic was happening inside me.

But I was not taken seriously. I was told it was probably just a side effect. Later, when I reached the hospital, my symptoms were quickly placed into a psychiatric frame. I was referred to psychiatry, sent to a mental hospital, and treated as someone whose problem was mainly psychological or substance-related.

But inside my body, it did not feel psychological. It felt neurological. It felt physical. It felt like my brain and nervous system had entered a crisis that I could not control.

Over the next months and years, I experienced repeated episodes of head pressure, breathing difficulty, tremors, weakness, strange sensations in my neck and chest, and terrifying nights where I thought I would not survive until morning. I went through emergency visits, psychiatric hospitalizations, medications, neurological testing, and long periods of uncertainty.

Some tests came back normal. Some findings did not fully explain what I was feeling. That made everything harder, because when medicine cannot clearly measure a patient’s suffering, the suffering can become easier to dismiss.

I am not writing this to claim that CBD oil causes the same reaction in everyone. I cannot prove with absolute certainty that one drop caused everything that followed. I can only say what happened in my life: Before that night, I was struggling with insomnia and stress. After that night, my body and brain entered a crisis that changed the course of my life.

The most painful part was not only the symptoms. It was the feeling of not being believed.

When a patient says, “Something is terribly wrong inside my body,” that statement deserves careful listening. Even if the cause is unclear. Even if the symptoms do not fit neatly into one diagnosis. Even if anxiety is present. Fear does not automatically mean the illness is imaginary. Sometimes fear is the natural response to a body that feels like it is failing.

I understand that doctors work under pressure. Emergency rooms are busy. Psychiatry has its place. Mental health matters. But psychiatric explanations can become dangerous when they stop further investigation too early.

A label can help a patient. But it can also silence them.

For years, I kept searching because I knew my experience was real. I read, tested, questioned, documented, and tried to survive. I wanted someone to look beyond the easiest explanation and ask: What if this patient is describing something we do not yet fully understand?

That question matters.

Patients with complex, unexplained, or unusual symptoms often fall into the space between medical specialties. Neurology may not find enough evidence. Psychiatry may become the default. Emergency medicine may focus only on whether the patient is dying in that moment. But the patient still has to go home and live inside the same body.

That is where the loneliness begins.

I wrote my book because I did not want my experience to disappear. I wanted to describe what it felt like to live through years of neurological suffering, medical uncertainty, psychiatric labeling, and the fight to be heard.

My story is not medical advice. It is not a warning that every person will react to CBD oil the way I did. It is a testimony from one patient whose suffering did not fit the simple story he was given.

If there is one message I hope doctors, patients, and families take from my story, it is this: Please listen longer.

Before deciding that a patient’s symptoms are “just anxiety” or “just psychiatric,” ask what might still be unknown. Ask what has not yet been tested. Ask what the patient is actually feeling inside their body.

Because sometimes being heard is not a small thing. Sometimes it is the first step toward survival.

Tomislav Doslic is a patient advocate.