Is it possible to overdose on nitrous oxide?

[Sapphic Geometry]

I usually hear people describe nitrous as harmless aside from some small details like taking your vitamins and remembering to breath oxygen, but I'm wondering where exactly the line is drawn. Is it actually feasibly possible to overdose on nitrous oxide? For example, I know that you can get a regular punch balloon pretty full without it becoming physically dangerous, but what if you got an even bigger balloon to put it in? Is there a rough number of chargers you can use at once before you're really starting to push it?

 

[One Thousand Words]

If you go for long enough you will eventually notice someone's face and lips turn blue. This is usually due to oxygen deprivation, which while not technically an overdose, will have the potential kill you all the same. You will normally pass out before you actually overdose. In dental and medical setting with the correct mix of oxygen pregnant women can sit on nitrous for hours without any ill effect.

More danger exists from long term abuse such as peripheral nerve damage and vitamin b deficiencies.

 

[sekio]

If you keep doing nitrous and not breathing any air, then you'll eventually die of asphyxiation. People have died when they hook up a mask to a nitrous tank and just leave it running, they pass out, and then there's no oxygen and they just never wake up.

 

[Sapphic Geometry]

Thanks for the responses guys, though those are both really just from lack of oxygen. I'm not really worried about asphyxiation, I know how to use nitrous properly. What I'm actually taking away from those posts (particularly from the hospital setting) is that I should be fine as long as I continue to breath air in between hits, is that correct? Just to give an extreme example to make my point... if I was to get one of those huge latex balloons and put like twenty-something chargers in it all for myself, it should still be safe as long as I get that oxygen?

 

[Transgender Panda]

Your main concern when dealing with nitrous oxide is oxygen displacement in a sealed environment i.e if one put their head in a trash bag filled with No2 they would surely asphyxiate. When using balloons,canisters, or other harm reduced methods of inhaling there is a far lessened risk of depriving yourself of oxygen because even if your body passes out from the rapid No2 consumption it will immediately start to breath the oxygen rich air in their environment.
There have however been some associated health issues with No2 abuse in the long term such as Vitamin b12 loss, and the very controversial Onley's lesions could be a possible yet unlikely health concern.

Hope that helps, pretty much just do not create a closed circuit method of ingestion that lacks oxygen and you are fine.

 

[Sapphic Geometry]

That does help, thanks so much. I only ever use a balloon for nitrous, so I'm good there. I always take multiple 40,000% vitamin B12 supplements whenever I do one too, so I'm not too worried about that.... I actually am on the side of thinking that dissociative neurotoxicity probably does occur in humans too, but I don't think my nitrous use would be a problem with that. In animal tests they failed to produce any detectable irreversible damage without using a steady anesthesia of between three and eight hours, and I only use it infrequently. They also found that NMDA antagonist neurotoxicity is inhibited by 5-HT2A agonists, which is a handy coincidence for me.

I've got some like freaking huge balloons on the way now lol. I can call them party balloons....