There’s something about withdrawals from a combination of pills that can drive you crazy. Too many possible causes equal too many possible solutions. By the time you accidentally take what you needed to get some sleep or whatever is sucking right then, you might have already taken 3 or 4 other pills that didn’t help. So you finally get to sleep but the combination you ingested was enough to kill a small elephant. (Speaking from experience here....) Then it’s the middle of the night, everyone in the house is asleep, and You wake up just before you stop breathing and don’t know what to do.
When that has happened to me I was always too scared or embarrassed to call for help. The strange combination and large quantities of pills I had taken made it pretty impossible to figure out exactly where I screwed up, but I still thought I could use it as a “learning experience” and not make the same mistake again. Never in a million years would I ever come clean about exactly what I had taken, and I probably didn’t really remember anyway.
UNLESS: If I actually thought I was about to die. There was one time when I really thought I was done for sure. Awake all night, puking my brains out, shaking uncontrollably. I felt like my heart might stop beating and explode at any moment, and it wasn’t getting any better. With my last dying breath I told the paramedics everything (what I remembered anyway).
You would think my ‘near death experience’ would have made me change. It only made me a better asshole. My fear became confidence when I felt better. After that I wasn’t afraid of that combination of stuff anymore because I knew the boundary. Before that I was afraid of overdose or a bad combination of pills, but afterwards I felt like I knew exactly when to stop.
In hindsight I can see that I was probably fine, just scared, but I probably would have benefited from a more serious reaction. A couple of days in the hospital with an IV in my arm, getting drug tested, my wife knowing the truth, getting labeled as an addict. It would have totally sucked but it would have been a great reason to quit everything. No doubt I got close to a serious overdose several times after that incident, all by accident. Who knows. But if I had died during a later overdose it would be really easy to point at that incident and say that if I had quit back then, I would still be alive.
