Just a question. Is nitrous as bad on the brain? I've had it at the dentist for brief periods but curious if regular use is harmful
Some people are more susceptible to nitrous oxide toxicity than others. There have been cases where individuals experienced toxicity from nitrous oxide from a single dental appointment, or cases in which a young guy starts abusing nitrous heavily and within a month he's suffered severe nerve damage is wheelchair bound for life.
Then there are people like me, who inhaled 50 chargers of gas a day (nearly a pound a day of nitrous oxide), holding the gas for as long as possible, taking a short breath of air, and inhaling another cartridge, with no supplemental oxygen. Aside from the nerve damaging effects of nitrous through B12 inactivation and free radical production, I was starving myself of oxygen for long periods of time.
With my new fancy nitrous setup where I use supplemental oxygen mixed in with the NOS, i wear an oxygen blood level monitor on my finger tip, and find that even with the supplemental oxygen, if I bump up the nitrous levels too high, my oxygen blood levels quickly shoot into the hypoxic range.
In fact, when using my new "safer" NOS machine, I found that in order to reach the same kind of mystic NOS visionary states that I used to get to years ago when i was inhaling straight nItrous only, I have to bump up the NOS levels so high that blood oxgen levels briefly go into the low 80% SpO2 range (anything less than 95% is a lack of oxygen).
So back when I was abusing NOS daily, im sure my blood oxygen levels were going into the 70% range for long periods of time.
Here's a chart for perspective;
So, over a decade ago, for like 18 months, every day I would inhale on average nearly a pound of nitrous oxide, no supplemental oygen, no B12 supplementation. Im sure for hours my oxygen blood levels remain in the 80% range, and dip into the 70% range.
However, I didn't seem to be impacted much after stopping. Not long after I quit NOS, I started graduate school. And unlike during my undergrad degree, which I completed with mediocre grades, I put in significant effort during grad school and graduated with a 3.96 GPA.
However, before grad school, I had to take a challenging standardized admission test (not the GRE, but a more specialized and rigorous exam -- which will remain unnamed since it could be used to dox me). While I scored fairly high on it, in terms of percentile the score wasn't nearly as high as my SAT score (1580/1600 -- taken before my heavy drug use). So the precipitous drop from the 99th percentile on the SAT to the mid-80s on the grad school entrance exam *might* indicate a decline in cognitive ability (although in all fairness, said grad entrance exam is taken by many Indian and Chinese test takers -- whose lifelong intensive schooling in mathematics shifted the entire curve on the quantitative portion of that exam). But even my verbal score suffered.
In anycase, thats my only evidence of cognitive decline, and I did not appear to suffer much else.
Well, except formy breathing. Ever since abusing nitrous oxide, my breathing feels different. It's as if I hold on to each breath a little too long, almost as if im taking a hit of nitrous.
I'll tell you this, I've inhaled a good 500 pounds of nitrous oxide in my lifetime, and I can't imagine it was good for me. But other people who have the same, or even less, have wound up in wheelchairs. So there appears to be some genetic susceptibility to this form of toxicity.