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A Scary Climax to an Addiction
Caffeine
Citation:   Stereophonic. "A Scary Climax to an Addiction: An Experience with Caffeine (exp45826)". Erowid.org. Nov 16, 2007. erowid.org/exp/45826

 
DOSE:
400 mg oral Caffeine (pill / tablet)
  1 glass oral Caffeine (liquid)
  1600 mg oral Caffeine (pill / tablet)
  1 glass oral Caffeine (liquid)
  400 mg oral Caffeine (pill / tablet)
BODY WEIGHT: 210 lb
[Erowid Note: The dose described in this report is very high, potentially beyond Erowid's 'heavy' range, and could pose serious health risks or result in unwanted, extreme effects. Sometimes extremely high doses reported are errors rather than actual doses used.]

I didn't like mornings. In fact, I hated mornings. I hated getting up, getting dressed, getting out and to University to sit in some boring class when I would much rather be sleeping. Paying thousands of dollars to sit in that particular class, however, might change my mind and me think, perhaps I should even pay attention to this. A friend and I found a nice alternative to chugging 2 dollar lattes like all those other chumps. We were smart. For 10 dollars, we could buy OTC 'wake ups'. 100 of the babies with 200mg of go-go-go fuel. It seemed perfect. Everyday we'd pop two and zing! We'd be sitting up straight, raising our hands, total keeners for whatever the day had to hand to us. After the morning, we'd start to feel a bit sluggish, a bit irritable. No problem, take another pill. Soon it began to get ridiculous. Our bodies became acclimated to the dosages we were feeding it. We'd get moody and irritable without our daily hit. We were without a doubt addicted to caffeine in a very legal way.

With that in mind, I'll now begin on what was a very scary way to stop taking what is equivalent to about three pots of coffee a day. As University students, we did like to go out and imbibe substances and dance and club and do whatever else we do. We were often exhausted from working or school beforehand, so we'd pop a few pills beforehand and be raring to go all night. These events almost always pimped out things such as Red Bull as well.

We went to one particular one which was basically dead. Beforehand, we took about two pills each. Then we imbibed a caffeinated drink each, one coke is barely a drop in the water in terms of caffeine for me, however, there is a high sugar content. So we were buzzed off of sugar by that point but I was still feeling tired so I took three more pills. We hopped into the car and were off. When we got there, the music was pumping and people were dancing. We tried dancing for a little but eventually I succumbed to my exhaustion and sat staring sluggishly at the rest of the bodies. My friend found me and grabbed my hand. He slid 8 more pills into it which I chased with a red bull. I still didn't feel anything happening after an hour, so I took 2 more for a grand total of 15 200mg pills of caffeine or about 3000mg or caffeine. The party still sucked, so we left. I drove him home first and then drove to my apartment.

It began shortly after I got home. I couldn't sit down. I felt nervous and anxious and paced the room, mumbling out loud to myself, talking to my cat. I decided I needed to eat something so I tried to gag down a bowl of cereal but I felt far too nauseaous. I went online and tried to talk to someone but my brain scrambled and all I could manage to type was incoherent gibberish because synapses were misfiring. I felt alone. That was when my heartbeat became irregular. And terrifically loud. I went everywhere in the house and all I could here was my heart. In my ear, over my shoulder, stalking me, thumping offbeat and irratically, like I was running a marathon. I began to think I was going to die. That I was dead. How did I know the difference between death and reality? What if I had just stopped existing but I was still living in this dreamworld? If that wasn't the case, I was definately dying.

I sobbed over a goodbye note that I wrote my family in case of the inevitable. I drove myself insane. I went over every embarassment and failure that had ever happened to me. I sweated. I panicked. I wanted to scream. I picked up the phone at around 4am and called my mother. She was confused and sleeping and I kept repeating that I was dead, dead, dead. My mom got the hint and hung up to come over to my place. She found me wandering around in my underwear on the sidewalk, freaking out over whether the world was real because I didn't think it was real. It couldn't be real, how could we know? She called me a few names but put me to bed.

I lay awake and twitched for about half an hour before exhaustion truly took over. I woke up intermittently to look over at my mom snoring softly in a chair beside the bed and I'd fall into a fitful sleep. I don't remember my dreams but there were terrifying and vivid because I'd wake up terrified by something I had seen. I woke up around noon and it still felt my heart was beating out of my chest. I still felt scared. So I took myself to the E.R. I spent 4 hours under the nurses watchful eye, getting pulse and whatnot taken until I finally got an EKG to check my heart out. The Doctor said I'd be fine but that it was probably not a good idea to do that again. I was discharged but the drug was still working it's way out of my system. It managed to trigger several more panic attacks in that day alone. I was up all night the day after and even went for a run at 2 in the morning because I still had so much nervous energy pulsing through my veins. Eventually I bottomed out, crashed and slept but goddamn if I'll ever do that again.

Exp Year: 2004ExpID: 45826
Gender: Female 
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Nov 16, 2007Views: 40,604
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Caffeine (11) : Retrospective / Summary (11), Difficult Experiences (5), Health Problems (27), Train Wrecks & Trip Disasters (7), Addiction & Habituation (10), Overdose (29), Bad Trips (6), Various (28)

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