DOSE:
1 g
MDMA
700 ml
Alcohol - Hard
BODY WEIGHT:
59 kg
Preliminary
A reckless and thoughtless experience that I would not recommend anyone replicate. :) My drug usage was frequent and heavy for about a year and a half. I was tapering my usage off massively on the lead up to this experience as I was/am attempting to quit all together. This was a bit of a lapse.
Duration:
Trip � 2 days.
After effects � 3-4 days.
Total � 5-6 days.
Experience
This Friday afternoon began with a few drinks at the student union bar catching up with friends. My innocuous visit to this City, however, turned into 2 straight days of bad tripping with long lasting consequences.
I left the bar by myself to meet Brian and Janie in the park to continue drinking. Around 5pm the drinking got heavier. I had only eaten an egg mayo sandwich earlier that morning and was running on little sleep, so my mood was a little flat. I even declared, before events escalated, that I should eat but we were getting drunk, I got a little carried away and didn�t go out of my way to make sure I ate (bad mistake).
It was even me that was the one who suggested MDMA which Brian and Janie were up for. I used to take unnecessarily large doses of MDMA often mixed with other drugs quite regularly. This was the first time in what I considered a �while� since my last experience with it (~2 months prior). I had recently gotten into a pact with my boyfriend saying we would both quit drugs all together as I seemed to have a propensity for self-destruction when taking. It took all of 2 days from entering this agreement for me to totally disregard it and engage in the most reckless experience I�ve had with MDMA and alcohol alone.
The evening really started out at the pre drinks. I drank half my 70cl bottle of vodka (total amount I�d drank so far). It was really fun to see everyone again, all our friends from work and Uni, we were dancing to music, freshers complimented me on my shuffling and everyone was generally chatting shit. Retrospectively I see it as a shame that I ruined this potentially fun and innocent visit for myself.
Towards the end of our time there Brian, Janie and I took some big bombs of MDMA. I have lost most of my memory regarding what happened at this point. Everyone else went out clubbing but Janie was banned from where they were going so we did our own thing. There were multiple, long (I mean long), black outs. (I�ve been told by Brian and Janie that I was stumbling all over paths through town, nearly straying out into traffic where they had to stop me). The familiar effects of high dose MDMA started occurring: being unable to remember how I got to places but briefly becoming aware of where I was and what I was doing. I didn�t question it, I seemed only concerned with whatever was happening at the time. The complete inability to remember the beginning of a sentence I found myself finishing (to then be only further confused by a friend�s response which is now seemingly out of context and probably something to do with installing a plumbing system that gives you cats on tap). We were in a taxi for a bit, could not tell you where we were travelling from or the destination to save my life, engaging in typical drug-induced conversations and involving the driver. All things I�ve experienced before but never this badly.
One of the few patches of memory I have from the fugue state I�d gotten myself into was going to Stacia�s house to purchase a further 2 grams of MDMA. We�d already taken ~333mg each (Brian, Janie and I from a gram bag we�d picked up) and I was drinking throughout. Stacia sold us this stuff assuring it was �really powerful� bragging it to be �like totally tested and it�s 85-90% purity brah, proper mind bending, spirit blowing, stellar shit you get me?�
She doesn�t actually talk like that.
After popping into Stacia�s to pick up we headed back to Brian�s which is where my memory is really impaired. Arriving back at Brian�s the redosing become constant. We mixed (unknown amounts of) MDMA with water in a spoon, drew it up into an oral medicine applicator and squirted it up our asses in private (a route of administration I�ve only allowed my boyfriend to do to me in the past with cocaine). The chronological order is very difficult to estimate here. I do know that there was another black out before the tripping started.
All of a sudden the sun was up, it was almost like teleporting, and I found myself on Brian�s patio in the back garden. My entire visual field was then scudded with shards of twisting prisms, twinging as if the source of all my light was moving fast across my horizon. They were like worms of multi-coloured light burrowing in and out of the fabric of my sight. Wherever I looked; they were an Instagram filter that was applied to my vision for most of the trip. Brian and Janie�s faces would contort to form irregular, unnatural shapes. I felt as if my head was submerged in a body of water, giving it buoyancy and dulling all the sensory input I was receiving. Time seemed to pass so fast due to the black outs. Music that we had playing before was looping in my head as well as some of the bass Janie had been slapping out.
At some point this Saturday morning Brian passed out standing up and hit his head on the way down. On the floor he tensed up with his eyes closed and looked like he was about to have a seizure. It was so scary, I had no idea what to do. I was really worried about him but Brian, being who he is, brushed it off as nothing. He�s good at staying calm in bad situations, a trait that came in handy a little later on.
We were only able to figure out how much we had taken by seeing we had 3 empty bags that were once filled with a gram of MDMA powder each plus Brian had taken some out of a bag he had stashed at his. The difference in alcohol level from the beginning of the night had also changed revealing that I�d finished my 70cl bottle of vodka. We just weren�t thinking. Brian had pretty much the same to me (he�s taller and very skinny), whereas Janie had less MDMA and wasn�t drinking (she was a lot smarter than us. She�s tiny and also skinny).
[We all have fairly low masses. The mg/kg ratio of MDMA dosage to our masses for all 3 of us would�ve been very high.].
When I peed it was a weird colour, like a very pale turquoise, and there were tiny little bubbles that popped, as if it was fizzing. I may have just been hallucinating that though. I had to pee a lot, as we were keeping hydrated, but the process of peeing was very difficult. Brian spoke of seeing four letter codes in all the bricks of the walls, insects crawling all over the door and a spread of black dots on various surfaces. Janie spoke of seeing faces, I was struggling to tell the difference between my reality and what I was imagining. I read facial expressions wrong, thinking Brian was angry and tensing at me as if he was going to snap (something he would never do, Brian�s a gentle soul). I genuinely believed he was messing with me but he assured me he wasn�t. We were all experiencing extreme head rushes every time we stood up, no matter how slowly or carefully. Intense tinnitus grew in my ears and I kept experiencing mini psychotic breaks where I�d forget where I was or what was happening. It felt like I�d lost my marbles (not the first time that�s happened).
Janie fell asleep, it�s the afternoon at this point, and then Brian had to look after me while I had two major consecutive panic attacks (they were 15-20 minutes of terror each, I freaked out and cried, I was so lucky Brian was there to calm me down).
By night time I attempted to sleep in Brian�s spare room and was hallucinating that the bed was next to a set of traffic lights at an intersection of a road. It reminded me of the streets of New York (or my imagination of them at least, I�ve never been to the US). These mental traffic lights would change on what appeared to be regular time intervals and I couldn�t stop myself from being convinced that there were people crossing these imaginary streets next to the bed or that there were cars driving past me through the room. I got no sleep.
I had at some point bitten a huge ulcer into the right side of my tongue which I didn�t realise until Sunday after I�d taken 3 trains to get home. My tongue was so swollen which worried me as I thought it was an allergic reaction and that it might block my airways.
At home I spent the whole of Sunday doing nothing, putting off sleep as I did not want to royally fuck my sleeping pattern (I had work that week) and I was sat nursing a banana that I couldn�t swallow no matter how much I mushed it.
I tried to convince myself it was over but I was still seeing mini fractals and heard a ringing inside my head. Every time I moved my eyes I heard a �wub-wub� sound; it was like I had an industrial fan turning inside my ears. When I tried to go to sleep around 6pm I realised that, when I closed my eyes in the dark, I was still tripping. I saw a dance floor at a nightclub I used to work at, hearing loud electronic dance music with high tech light systems and CO2 going off everywhere. There was confetti and we (Brian, Janie, a bunch of random people and I) were dancing with a cardboard box in the middle that Janie was hiding in and she jumped out �surprise!� I could�ve done without it at that time. Then there were fireworks combusting above us in the sky as we (I) found ourselves amidst a bonfire night in a field, followed be a venture into an enchanted woods. I tried to take control of my extremely vivid imagination and turned my thoughts to the envisaged future I have with my boyfriend. I watched a really clear situation, from a third person point of view, of myself cooking dinner for him in a house we had when we were older. It turned sexual after that which kind of calmed me down. Later on I saw my own face staring back at me with huge pupils from the dark void of my closed eyelids. ~36 hours since the last redose and I still felt quite stimulated.
[I think the tripping could also be partially attributed to MDMA�s trippier, amphetamine analogue, metabolite; MDA. I may have taken a high enough dose for this to be significant. Total conjecture though!]
Because I was in such a paranoid and anxious headspace I convinced myself through the whole experience to not seek medical attention. Whether or not I should�ve gone seems unclear to me although from some time after arriving at Brian's place on Saturday morning I spent 48+ hours experiencing extreme paraesthesia (the worst was on my inner forearms but I also felt it in my shins and all over my limbs), my heart felt as if it was being subjected to huge amounts of stress, my temperature regulation was totally out of whack, I couldn�t eat for multiple days (on account of the swollen tongue).
After 3 days of no sleep and barely having any food I was getting quite delirious. I tried every trick in the book to get to sleep (warm milk, quite TV, relaxing sounds � the problem was that I was having pretty bad closed eye visuals and was dreaming awake. I�m also a bit of a hypochondriac and worry that I might have a heart attack or stroke or something). Finally achieved success with guided relaxation, I drifted in and out of a light sleep which was accompanied with very lucid dreams. I could see the room I was in from where I was lying through my closed eyelids and was seeing Brian, Janie, Homer Simpson with an emo hairstyle walking around and sitting down. One particularly vivid moment was when I watched Brian climb over my head, as clear as if I had been awake and it happening in reality. The dreams also involved bouncing up and down really high in the air on bunk beds with other people, baking the World�s largest cake, seeing container ships sail past in mid-air etc. etc.
In the following days I felt like a zombie, I had to take the whole week off work, still had ringing in my ears and felt as if my peripheral nervous system and my brain was completely fried. I struggled to concentrate on anything and had no energy. I struggled to concentrate on anything and had no energy.