This is gonna be a long one, so I'll tl;dr at the bottom. For reference:I'm a 5'4" female weighing around 160lbs.
To start off: I'm an idiot. We've all been there, felt like life was hard and one thing after another is going wrong, so what's the harm in giving yourself a little fun release, right? You've done a substance before, carefully calculated doses and studied trip reports and set up everything to go as well as possible. But you're feeling a little down, so you you're just a little less cautious this time. You know you shouldn't trip in a bad mindset, but it's a dose you've done before and you're hydrated and have a few days off work so everything should be fine.
Monday 6/11. I woke up and did laundry and cleaned the house and was a good functioning human. Still hurting from a breakup, I figured I could take my mind off of things by having a little DXM trip. The only thing I have available are the generic version of Triple C's, but I have bad allergies so I'm occasionally prescribed high doses of antihistamines to help, so I'll be fine. Dosage: 480mg DXM, 64mg Chlorpheniramine. Basically, one whole box of the stuff. Very stupid, but it all went off well like a normal DXM trip does. It was fun, I enjoyed myself and had a nice heart-to-heart conversation with myself in my mind, solving lots of issues I've been dealing with.
Tuesday 6/12. Feeling a nice afterglow from last night, I go about my day enjoying life much more than I have in a while, and decide to dose a slightly higher amount to account for the tolerance buildup, while still staying in the "safe" range of what I've dosed in the past. This was also only the second time I've ever had a daytime trip, as DXM is usually my choice for at night when I can enjoy OEVs in the dark. Around 1pm I dose: 600mg DXM, 80mg Chlorpheniramine. I stay up on my computer most of the day, enjoying how trippy music and music videos are. In the back of my mind I feel a dark presence, which I write off as the stress of recent life events making itself known. But this is a time for enjoyment, not sadness, so I push it away and resume engrossing myself in YouTube. Total so far: 1080mg DXM, 144mg Chlorpheniramine.
Wednesday 6/13. I sleep in pretty late as I has a restless night of nightmares and CEVs making it hard to stay asleep. I still have a nice afterglow tinged with a splash of hangover, which presents as nausea, dehydration, and an inexplicable inability to poop, which I later realize is because I sustained myself the previous day on half a small bag of barbecue chips and three bottles of water. I do a bit of grocery shopping with a family member, and accompany them to renew my driver's license, which I'm surprised I managed to do while appearing sober, if a bit under the weather. The second I got home though, I was craving another dose. I've always prided myself on not having an addictive personality: hell, I even dabbled in smoking cigarettes for a while just to keep myself energized during college finals, but never felt the urge to have another. In fact, they were so gross I had to force myself to smoke each one, and ended up throwing them away in favor of massive doses of caffeine and sleep deprivation. But I'm getting off-topic.
Around 4pm I give into the urge, thinking, what could really go wrong? I've done this much and feel fine, a little more won't hurt. I take yesterday's dose again, 600mg DXM and 80mg Chlorpheniramine. As I wait for the comeup I realize I forgot to take tolerance into consideration, so I log into chat.tripsit.me and ask how much more I should take to overcome my tolerance and be able to actually trip. Nobody knows but people sound a little concerned, which I think is sweet but ignore in favor of downing an additional 300mg DXM which has another 40mg Chlorpheniramine. At this point it all starts to hit me, and hard. I'm trying to communicate with people on the irc but I'm in a state of euphoria combined with the massive confusion that I can only identify as Ego Death, which I'd experienced before on pure DXM gelcaps but to a much lesser extent.
At this point, over the course of three days I've consumed 1980mg DXM and 264mg Chlorpheniramine, my heart won't stop racing, I have a vague understanding that I'm a conscience piloting a meat suit but I don't understand why or how, but I'm pretty sure none of it matters because a tiny voice somewhere remembers reading that anything over 60-100mg Chlorpheniramine has been recorded to cause heart attacks and permanent brain damage, so I'm as good as gone and might as well enjoy my final moments of the trip. Through the body I view the universe in, I stare in amazement at these things I can control that some people call "fingers" while wondering why they move so weirdly. Oh wait, fingers is a word, what are words? How did that come to mind? What is a mind? Wait, I'm a mind! And a body, a body which is being massaged by this mattress thing, but wait mattresses aren't animate, but I'm unable to move, so I must be imagining things, whoa this must be what a trip is, why do people do this, oh god never do this again the body is gonna puke but wait it can't because there's nothing that's been ingested for days now.
At some point I black out, and wake up the next day with an overwhelming feeling of dread, sickness, confusion, and the worst migraine I've ever had, combined with the cold harsh panic of how is the thing called me still alive and will it die today? Cue chugging as much water as possible and trying to sleep it off, because oh fuck I have to work tomorrow.
Friday 6/15. I go to work with the tail end of a migraine and a shitload of confusion, paired with weakness from not feeding the body for days on end. I somehow manage to make it through the day, with only one coworker telling me I'm talking weird, but we haven't interacted much before because I'm kinda new so it must just be my accent that she never noticed before! And a manager had to correct a few things, but I'm still new so I must just not be familiar with all of the policies yet. I make it through the day, get a ride home, force myself to eat half a meal and sleep until I wake up for work today.
Which brings me to today. It's Saturday. I keep reminding myself that. It keeps me grounded in reality, as I slowly remember what it means to be a human, and how to act and do things. The human brain is amazing, how it keeps us on autopilot when the conscious mind is unable to take control. The body is amazing, at how it can heal itself after we put it through things it was never meant to survive.
So that leads me to this, the TL;DR: Don't be an idiot. Don't trip when you're in a bad mindset. Don't let yourself redose when you know you shouldn't because that's what leads to addictive behaviors and things far worse than ego death. And for fuck's sake, listen to the people of the internet when they sat to stay away from Triple C's. If you're gonna do DXM, get yourself some robocough or gelcaps, because the risk of death, or making yourself so sick you wish you could die, isn't worth something as short-lasting as a trip.
Stay safe,thanks for reading, and if anyone from the tripsit irc is on here, thanks for being a voice of reason that saved my life this week. <3 raptorista.