Oh God. I thought I was immune.....that it could never happen to me. But it did......that drug experience from hell. Following are some of the details of the sordid tale.
Mistake #1: Drinking three sour apple vodka coolers in preparation to drop the pills. I had some pre-high anxiety and wanted to kill it before I dropped the MDMA.
Mistake #2: Buying 5 pills with roughly 220mg of MDMA each for a mellow experience at home.
Mistake #3: 20mg of Cialis
Saturday night, 8:00pm: I won't linger long on the details of the high itself. It was beautiful. Over the course perhaps six hours I consumed 3 pills of MDMA (roughly 600mg) & 20mg of Cialis. It took me back to the early days of MDMA, where you can hardly keep your eyes open and you float in pleasure and euphoria. Toward the end, hallucinations were quite astonishing. Lines of colour lined the white curtains as I lay in bed with my partner. On a previous high dose of MDMA, everyone in the club was wearing glasses, and now that elusive hallucination was back in full force. His blue eyes glowed like a demon. The lights on the ceiling morphed into a truck, a go cart, they shrank and grew and breathed. I felt too euphoric to care and lay there quietly describing all that was happening. After taking a piss, snowflakes quietly swirled up out of the toilet and spun around my head, just like on my one other high dose experience. I briefly question whether I maybe had MDA and not MDMA, but then I remember the high dose.
Sunday morning, 8:00am: The comedown begins in earnest. It is a good comedown. I feel no sketch; the only feeling is one of being tired. There are occasional waves of mild nausea followed by some sweating. I lay down to get some rest and a burning pain etches across my chest. It is sharp and focused below my left rib, radiating around to my back. As long as I lay elevated on my back, it is tolerable. If I turn to one side or the other, it flares into an almost unbearable knife like agony. I have no appetite but try to force down food. With every swallow the pain again surges with a fury that makes me grab my stomach and beg for relief. My partner is concerned. And so it is I spend my day on the couch. Sleep doesn't come...what little cat napping is done is spent in a tortuous dream loop. I am filling in boxes with numbers, and if I can fill them all in, I will be fine. As soon as I get to the last box, all the numbers in the column disappear and I start over.
Sunday night, 8:00pm: The mental comedown kicks in with a vengeance. I haven't eaten in over 24 hours. I am so weak I feel that I can't sit up without assistance. We are watching the Canadian Juno Awards on TV and the emotion is too much for me to take. Once every minute or two I am hit with a wave of emotion so strong I want to wail out at the weight of humanity that is on my shoulders. I cover my face with my hands so my partner doesn't see the tears that stream out of my eyes. The wave of emotion lasts perhaps five to ten seconds and then is gone as fast as it comes. The waves are relentless and they don't stop. The pain in my abdomen increases and I begin to tell my partner that I am dying. Over and over I tell him I can't live anymore and that my body is dying. I try to write an e-mail to my boss to tell her I'm sick and can't make it into work for Monday, but the task is too great. After ten minutes I work up the strength to sit up on the couch and turn on the computer. It takes twenty minutes to type a two line message......my partner is concerned.
Sunday night, 11pm: We go to bed. I lay on my back and try to rest but the pain is building. I turn on my right side for comfort and I hurt so bad that I can barely breathe. I moan and groan and writhe on the bed, begging for relief. I've never felt pain so bad. My partner jumps out off bed and says we're off to the hospital. I put on clothes and away we go.
Sunday night, 11:30pm: After six years in Canada, my first experience in a Canadian hospital. There's no subtle way to enter an emergency room and blithely tell the staff that you've just ingested illicit drugs and Cialis and alcohol and need help. The triage nurse at the admitting desk eyes me cautiously when I mention the Ecstasy. I'm trundled off to a bathroom to fill a cup with pee.
A man is hustled through the doors. He has a wet towel to his red, blistered and peeling face. His coworker explains that he was washing some screens and the tank exploded and the boiling water hit him in the face, hand and down his back on the right side. Another man in a bathrobe enters and begins to yell at the triage nurse that he's been sick for three days and needs help immediately. My Ecstasy addled brain cannot handle the drama and emotion. I want to wail and sob at the horrors of the human condition.
Apparently I'm a high priority because I bypass the waiting room and everyone waiting there and am hussled into a hospital bed. A flurry of activity ensues after it is ascertained that my heart rate is 156 bpm. IV's are started, blood is drawn, I'm hurried to the x-ray department, the heart cart comes by and I'm hooked up to electrodes to read my heart. I hear whispered conversation about my racing heart as the doctors and nurses look at my charts. The pain continues.
By the time it's said and done, I have to explain to no less than 3 people that I've taken Ecstasy. One would think there would have been some reaction, but it was taken in stride. No doctor nor no nurse ever batted an eye. Granted, St. Paul's hospital in downtown Vancouver is full of heroin addicted and other drug addicted patients on a regular basis, so I'm just another druggie....it's all in a night's work.
And so I lay in pain listening to the sounds of suffering around me in the emergency ward. A dying man wheezes, gasps and rasps for air in the bed across from me. Across the curtain an 82 year old woman who has sustained a fall panics when she sees a white coat, convinced they will need to start an IV. She begs and cries and pleads for mercy, unable to comprehend that they are telling her she only needs an x-ray and not a needle. She is inconsolable. She hyperventilates and in breathy squeaks begs "No, No, No...please no, no."
An IV is attempted to be started in the dying man. He speaks no English, only Cantonese. He is blind. The IV attempt is botched and again and again we watch the needle go into his arm....he moans and pulls away and the procedure is repeated.
A loud, mentally unstable man across the curtain on the other side gives detailed instructions on how his IV should be hooked up so that he can grab it and run to the bathroom when he needs to puke and "run" as he put it. He asks for a bucket so he can sit and shit and throw up at the same time. Periodically we hear, "Oh no...it's time to run" and there is a flurry of activity as he runs past pushing his IV stand with him.
I'm at the breaking point. Suffering and pain are all around. I'm in a world of hurt. The waiting for test results is eternal. I'm an emotional wreck. Finally the results are in...they can find nothing wrong. I'm somewhat disappointed. God forbid I am in serious condition, but it would have been better to find out something was treatable instead of having to live with this pain. I protest and am told that the emergency room is not a place to treat this kind of condition...that I need a family doctor. I explain I don't have one...I am brusquely told to find one. I have white blood cells in my urine, so they prescribe Cipro for a bladder infection, even though I have no symptoms. Over the curse of the night in the hospital, my heart rate and blood pressure return to normal.
Monday morning, 5:00am: We make our way home. I'm not sure what to do. I try to eat and the searing pain wrenches at me again. I lay elevated on the couch and in exhaustion fall into a five hour nap. The sleep is good and I awaken thinking I will be fine. I try to eat some lunch and the pain is intolerable, so it's off to find a family doctor.
He tells me immediately he knows what's wrong. I have acid reflux disease and he says the alcohol is the likely culprit. With acid reflux I have a burned spot in my esophagus and the alcohol has caused an erosion.....the skin has sloughed off and now the acid washes back into my throat and burns. He says the pain can be intolerable but that in a week it should subside. The pain when I swallow is from the rough food scraping along the exposed tissue. He prescribes Gaviscon, 300mg Ranitidine daily for up to a month and Tylenol. I come home and take the Gaviscon. The pain starts to disappear immediately.
I'm now resting quite comfortably. It's much better just knowing that I'll be okay, even if it takes some time. Light foods and water will be the diet for the week. The mental comedown went away very quickly. By 1.5 days after the high, I started to feel like my normal self.
It has been a wake-up call that drugs are not child's play. There is a serious side to drugs...one that I forgot some time ago. I don't know if Ecstasy will ever be the same for me because this rather unpleasant experience will now be a part of my memories of the high. I've also become to careless with my approach to MDMA. There was a time not long ago when taking more than one pill would have been unthinkable. I took the equivalent of nearly 6 average pills in one fell swoop. I'm not swearing off MDMA because I know that's not likely. What I will do is be much more cautious with what I have available to me when high when my judgement is impaired.
Mistake #1: Drinking three sour apple vodka coolers in preparation to drop the pills. I had some pre-high anxiety and wanted to kill it before I dropped the MDMA.
Mistake #2: Buying 5 pills with roughly 220mg of MDMA each for a mellow experience at home.
Mistake #3: 20mg of Cialis
Saturday night, 8:00pm: I won't linger long on the details of the high itself. It was beautiful. Over the course perhaps six hours I consumed 3 pills of MDMA (roughly 600mg) & 20mg of Cialis. It took me back to the early days of MDMA, where you can hardly keep your eyes open and you float in pleasure and euphoria. Toward the end, hallucinations were quite astonishing. Lines of colour lined the white curtains as I lay in bed with my partner. On a previous high dose of MDMA, everyone in the club was wearing glasses, and now that elusive hallucination was back in full force. His blue eyes glowed like a demon. The lights on the ceiling morphed into a truck, a go cart, they shrank and grew and breathed. I felt too euphoric to care and lay there quietly describing all that was happening. After taking a piss, snowflakes quietly swirled up out of the toilet and spun around my head, just like on my one other high dose experience. I briefly question whether I maybe had MDA and not MDMA, but then I remember the high dose.
Sunday morning, 8:00am: The comedown begins in earnest. It is a good comedown. I feel no sketch; the only feeling is one of being tired. There are occasional waves of mild nausea followed by some sweating. I lay down to get some rest and a burning pain etches across my chest. It is sharp and focused below my left rib, radiating around to my back. As long as I lay elevated on my back, it is tolerable. If I turn to one side or the other, it flares into an almost unbearable knife like agony. I have no appetite but try to force down food. With every swallow the pain again surges with a fury that makes me grab my stomach and beg for relief. My partner is concerned. And so it is I spend my day on the couch. Sleep doesn't come...what little cat napping is done is spent in a tortuous dream loop. I am filling in boxes with numbers, and if I can fill them all in, I will be fine. As soon as I get to the last box, all the numbers in the column disappear and I start over.
Sunday night, 8:00pm: The mental comedown kicks in with a vengeance. I haven't eaten in over 24 hours. I am so weak I feel that I can't sit up without assistance. We are watching the Canadian Juno Awards on TV and the emotion is too much for me to take. Once every minute or two I am hit with a wave of emotion so strong I want to wail out at the weight of humanity that is on my shoulders. I cover my face with my hands so my partner doesn't see the tears that stream out of my eyes. The wave of emotion lasts perhaps five to ten seconds and then is gone as fast as it comes. The waves are relentless and they don't stop. The pain in my abdomen increases and I begin to tell my partner that I am dying. Over and over I tell him I can't live anymore and that my body is dying. I try to write an e-mail to my boss to tell her I'm sick and can't make it into work for Monday, but the task is too great. After ten minutes I work up the strength to sit up on the couch and turn on the computer. It takes twenty minutes to type a two line message......my partner is concerned.
Sunday night, 11pm: We go to bed. I lay on my back and try to rest but the pain is building. I turn on my right side for comfort and I hurt so bad that I can barely breathe. I moan and groan and writhe on the bed, begging for relief. I've never felt pain so bad. My partner jumps out off bed and says we're off to the hospital. I put on clothes and away we go.
Sunday night, 11:30pm: After six years in Canada, my first experience in a Canadian hospital. There's no subtle way to enter an emergency room and blithely tell the staff that you've just ingested illicit drugs and Cialis and alcohol and need help. The triage nurse at the admitting desk eyes me cautiously when I mention the Ecstasy. I'm trundled off to a bathroom to fill a cup with pee.
A man is hustled through the doors. He has a wet towel to his red, blistered and peeling face. His coworker explains that he was washing some screens and the tank exploded and the boiling water hit him in the face, hand and down his back on the right side. Another man in a bathrobe enters and begins to yell at the triage nurse that he's been sick for three days and needs help immediately. My Ecstasy addled brain cannot handle the drama and emotion. I want to wail and sob at the horrors of the human condition.
Apparently I'm a high priority because I bypass the waiting room and everyone waiting there and am hussled into a hospital bed. A flurry of activity ensues after it is ascertained that my heart rate is 156 bpm. IV's are started, blood is drawn, I'm hurried to the x-ray department, the heart cart comes by and I'm hooked up to electrodes to read my heart. I hear whispered conversation about my racing heart as the doctors and nurses look at my charts. The pain continues.
By the time it's said and done, I have to explain to no less than 3 people that I've taken Ecstasy. One would think there would have been some reaction, but it was taken in stride. No doctor nor no nurse ever batted an eye. Granted, St. Paul's hospital in downtown Vancouver is full of heroin addicted and other drug addicted patients on a regular basis, so I'm just another druggie....it's all in a night's work.
And so I lay in pain listening to the sounds of suffering around me in the emergency ward. A dying man wheezes, gasps and rasps for air in the bed across from me. Across the curtain an 82 year old woman who has sustained a fall panics when she sees a white coat, convinced they will need to start an IV. She begs and cries and pleads for mercy, unable to comprehend that they are telling her she only needs an x-ray and not a needle. She is inconsolable. She hyperventilates and in breathy squeaks begs "No, No, No...please no, no."
An IV is attempted to be started in the dying man. He speaks no English, only Cantonese. He is blind. The IV attempt is botched and again and again we watch the needle go into his arm....he moans and pulls away and the procedure is repeated.
A loud, mentally unstable man across the curtain on the other side gives detailed instructions on how his IV should be hooked up so that he can grab it and run to the bathroom when he needs to puke and "run" as he put it. He asks for a bucket so he can sit and shit and throw up at the same time. Periodically we hear, "Oh no...it's time to run" and there is a flurry of activity as he runs past pushing his IV stand with him.
I'm at the breaking point. Suffering and pain are all around. I'm in a world of hurt. The waiting for test results is eternal. I'm an emotional wreck. Finally the results are in...they can find nothing wrong. I'm somewhat disappointed. God forbid I am in serious condition, but it would have been better to find out something was treatable instead of having to live with this pain. I protest and am told that the emergency room is not a place to treat this kind of condition...that I need a family doctor. I explain I don't have one...I am brusquely told to find one. I have white blood cells in my urine, so they prescribe Cipro for a bladder infection, even though I have no symptoms. Over the curse of the night in the hospital, my heart rate and blood pressure return to normal.
Monday morning, 5:00am: We make our way home. I'm not sure what to do. I try to eat and the searing pain wrenches at me again. I lay elevated on the couch and in exhaustion fall into a five hour nap. The sleep is good and I awaken thinking I will be fine. I try to eat some lunch and the pain is intolerable, so it's off to find a family doctor.
He tells me immediately he knows what's wrong. I have acid reflux disease and he says the alcohol is the likely culprit. With acid reflux I have a burned spot in my esophagus and the alcohol has caused an erosion.....the skin has sloughed off and now the acid washes back into my throat and burns. He says the pain can be intolerable but that in a week it should subside. The pain when I swallow is from the rough food scraping along the exposed tissue. He prescribes Gaviscon, 300mg Ranitidine daily for up to a month and Tylenol. I come home and take the Gaviscon. The pain starts to disappear immediately.
I'm now resting quite comfortably. It's much better just knowing that I'll be okay, even if it takes some time. Light foods and water will be the diet for the week. The mental comedown went away very quickly. By 1.5 days after the high, I started to feel like my normal self.
It has been a wake-up call that drugs are not child's play. There is a serious side to drugs...one that I forgot some time ago. I don't know if Ecstasy will ever be the same for me because this rather unpleasant experience will now be a part of my memories of the high. I've also become to careless with my approach to MDMA. There was a time not long ago when taking more than one pill would have been unthinkable. I took the equivalent of nearly 6 average pills in one fell swoop. I'm not swearing off MDMA because I know that's not likely. What I will do is be much more cautious with what I have available to me when high when my judgement is impaired.
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