Happy
My bad time ended fairly fast after 6mg alprazolam.
Hey Tript. Read your posts since that went up, hope you're ok? You feeling better now?
^
Thanks for your concern
I am feeling fine now and the weird symptoms stopped completely a little while ago. My blood pressure has dropped to 143/91 with a pulse of 49. I know that pulse sounds low, but I have had a pulse as low as 32 with an excellent BP 0f 109/65 before. I'm not sure but I think a low pulse is okay as long as you maintain adequate blood pressure. Some well conditioned athletes have resting heart rates in the low 20s and still have a healthy BP. My blood pressure is still significantly above the perfect level of less than 115/70 even with that low pulse. I actually think a BP more like 105/65 would be even better as life expectancy increases as BP drops unless it is so low it causes symptoms. I had a BP of around 90/50 a while back after taking some downers and had no symptoms of low blood pressure.
I am used to most of the things that I wrote was happening to me as they have been a lifelong occurrence since age five or less. If you want to read about that, it is below. The random, non-drug induced hallucinations (visual, auditory, and olfactory) and brief delusional thinking would scare me if it was new, but it is not. Likewise, the unusual but familiar to me body sensations don't provoke anxiety.
What made me so anxious was the intensity and unfamiliar types of body sensations I felt and more importantly the very hard to control thought that my eyes were disintegrating (blindness is my greatest fear). The way my mom looked in the hallucination was also quite unsettling.
I am still worried something is wrong with my brain because I was having unexplained hallucinations. I'm only slightly concerned though as I have had brief visual and auditory hallucinations since I was five years old and various other usually very brief but sometimes major visual disturbances since I was about ten y/o including an episode where I completely lost my vision for about 30 seconds around age 12 and other times that I almost went blind briefly. I've experienced hallucinated smells occasionally since then too, usually either like burnt rubber, vomit, or rotting garbage. This drug combo I did just had more physical symptoms than usual and a very scary delusional thought that made it worse.
The most interesting things are that I can rarely taste smells and smell tastes and even more rarely find that the color and shape of a piece of food influences the taste with lighter shades of brown tasting like the smell of a skunk and food that has rounded edges tastes better and sweeter when I first put it in my mouth than things that are more pointy. These synesthetic experiences are very rare for me and usually very brief when they happen. I do not have synesthesia though.
I also experience normally brief delusions (usually well under an hour) such as the one today where I thought the tissue of the eyes that holds my eye contents within the eyeball was disintegrating and I was sure I'd be blinded and blood would be pouring from the sockets. Three or four years ago I was sure I had many worms under the skin of my hands trying to get to my brain and I was sure I saw two worms inside one eyeball. The ER doctor said it was psychological and gave me a shot of lorazepam first, then olanzapine, and finally a second shot of lorazepam.
I regularly have brief often bizarre delusions but they usually pass in under 30 minutes. The worms in hands and eyes thing was an exception as I was sure they were in me for like 16 hours. These brief delusional beliefs might come 4-5 times in a month and other times I go several months without any. A variety of other symptoms tend to come with these, mostly strange sensory abnormalities, strange body sensations and sometimes a mild-moderate altered state of consciousness. Mild-moderate loss of balance with tendency to trip over things or fall when bending over has happened some but is rare. My blood pressure is usually high when it happens but my pulse is usually in the 40s or 50s and it can take several hours after an attack for BP and pulse to return to normal.
Migraines usually come on after or during the weird symptoms. As I said, this is nothing like schizophrenia. Not even true psychosis. It is not a result of drug use either since my first hallucinations were at age 4-5 and continued regularly. Age 7-8 I saw a very creepy vision of what I called bugman, saw him many times and believed he came out of shadows to take kids and do awful things to them and that he murdered a woman in the shower before I moved there. Age nine I kicked a dog and heard it say help me and seconds later an extremely strong smell of burning rubber filled my nose but I was the only one who smelled it. The smell intensity did not change when I went in the house. Symptoms continued like that until I was 13 or 14 when auditory hallucinations began accompanying the other symptoms but were generally whispers that I can't make out. By the time I was 8 or 9 I very often knew that these experiences came from within me and weren't real but sometimes there would be something I'd expect at a given location, I'd see it, and within seconds it would disappear. Now the only time I believe any of these delusions is during panic attacks which make me feel like I/parts of my body are dying or going to disintegrate or cease functioning.
I'm not sure, but the symptoms I wrote about may be some kind of migraine aura or maybe some type of partial seizure. I have an appointment with a neurologist later and I think he wants to do an EEG on me.