Five years ago, I was in Hawaii when I received a warning of an incoming missile. It was a false alarm, but the fear that I was going to die was very real.

• It has been five years since the people of Hawaii received a warning about an approaching missile.

• It turned out to be a mistake, but as I ran to find shelter, I thought that was the end.

• The stress of this experience still affects me today and has completely changed my view of island life.

Five years ago, I was looking out at the calm Pacific Ocean with sand between my toes when my phone buzzed.

“Ballistic missile threat en route to Hawaii. Seek shelter immediately. This is not a drill.”

Oh, I thought, it’s just a test of the system.

Then I realized what I had read.

“THIS IS NOT A DRILL.”

Earlier that morning—our last on Hawaii’s Big Island before flying home to New York City after a week-long vacation—my husband and I had left our hotel, jumped into our rental car, and headed to the beach for one last dip in the ocean.

Now I looked over at him as he stood by the water. His eyes were on his phone.

Feeling helpless, having no one to ask what to do, and not knowing how long we had to find accommodation, we made a split-second decision to return to the car and run to our hotel.

We sat in tense silence as my husband sped past the moon-like volcanic landscape. There were no other cars around. I turned on the radio, desperately searching for guidance on what to do, where to go, how to hide, but the radio blared music as if it were any other day.

But that wasn’t the case: we were going to die.

Finally, I found an article online that said we had about 15 minutes between receiving a warning and a missile hitting the ground. That’s how long it would take us to get back to the hotel. I peered up into the sky, not really sure what I was looking for.

My sister, who had been staying with us for the week, sent us a text from Honolulu airport saying that security was freaking out.

“Take care of yourself!” I answered hopelessly.

Finally, the sign of our hotel came into view. A policeman was standing in the middle of the street, waving his arms. We stopped next to him.

“False alarm,” he said. “There is no missile.”

My husband later told me that he wanted to return to our hotel so that we could be more easily identified if our bodies were found.

The stress lasted for weeks

We later learned that the alert, sent to all phones and broadcast on TV and radio at 8:07 a.m. local time on January 13, 2018, was sent in error by an employee during a Hawaii Department of Emergency Management drill. It took 38 minutes for the agency to send a retraction.

In the hours and days that followed, we didn’t know how to process what had happened – the feeling of having escaped death, even though in reality we hadn’t even been close to it.

“This stress has cost me several years of my life,” I wrote to my sister ten minutes after we got the all-clear.

“I thought the game was over for us,” she replied.

Others thought it was the end, too. We read accounts of people driving too fast to reach their loved ones in time. Videos showed desperate parents shoving their children into manhole covers. State Rep. Matt LoPresti and his family took shelter in the bathtub and prayed.

And we had no reason to doubt that the attack was real.

The warning came amid renewed nuclear threats between the US and North Korea. Hawaii – a strategically important US military outpost that a North Korean missile could reach within 20 minutes – had already begun drawing up preparedness plans. In addition, President Donald Trump had taunted North Korea two weeks earlier, tweeting that North Korea had a “far bigger and more powerful” nuclear button than its leader Kim Jong Un.

When I returned to New York a few days after the warning, I laughed when I thought back about the experience. But it didn’t seem funny to me, and even five years later, it still doesn’t.

The experience changed my view of island life

Although the initial shock has worn off, the experience has affected me in other, surprising ways.

I remember feeling incredibly vulnerable in those frantic minutes because of Hawaii’s geography. The archipelago seemed like an easy target. There was no easy way out – the single-lane highway wouldn’t take me across the border. I felt like the island was really small and really lonely.

A few years later, I traveled to Cyprus, an island I have been visiting since I was a child. But this time, being on a small island triggered feelings of panic. I felt really vulnerable and unprotected. Now, when I think of idyllic escapes, a walk on the beach is the last thing that comes to mind.

The sound of an emergency call on my sister’s phone makes her heart race. And I understand that. Because even though we all ended up being OK, I can still feel the stress of those 38 minutes five years later.

Read the original article on Insider