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View all search resultsBurning inside out: GERD’s quiet toll on young women
Young women are arriving at clinics across the country, their chests burning and sleep eroding, their bodies quietly protesting a life of overwork, skipped meals and unrecognized stress.
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Finding balance: Women work on their laptops on Nov. 11, 2024, at Morning Mama cafe in Banda Aceh, Aceh, as demanding routines can blur the lines between work, sleep, meals and moments of rest. (AFP/Zikri Maulana)
Putri Yuni Utami
Contributor/Yogyakarta
Apin Imun was in the middle of revising her thesis when her body started sending warnings she did not recognize.
The Yogyakarta-based writer and content creator is now 35, but she remembers the pattern clearly: nausea, a crushing headache and a stomach that turned when she skipped a meal to squeeze in more work. She thought it was nothing, so she pushed through.
Then one night, she woke to a stomach so empty and hostile that anything she swallowed came back up within seconds. She was taken to the emergency room, and doctors told her there were sores on the lining of her stomach. She was hospitalized for several days.
"Before that," Apin recalled, "I thought it was just ordinary gastritis.”
It was not. It was gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD), a chronic condition in which stomach acid repeatedly flows back into the esophagus that, over time, can erode tissue and trigger pain that may radiate into the chest, jaw and throat.
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