So, here's a picture of me in a hospital bed looking disturbingly chipper. If I recall, I was happy and smiling because Dan had arrived to cheer me up. The medical staff had also just decided to kick me out of the hospital, which was also quite cheering. I had gone by ambulance to the hospital and had survived, which was probably the best thing that had happened to me in the past 24 hours.
The story begins way, way back when I was very young and my mom was trendy before her time. My mom was all-natural, raw, and organic before 95% of the civilized population would even touch plain yogurt with cream on the top. I have terrified memories of mom's special smoothie that I nicknamed Hair for its hair-like, mangled threads of an unknown green vegetable. A few of my siblings were even subjected to cloth diapers. They functioned like regular diapers, except with pins and periodic visits from the diaper truck (I'd love to know if they still exist) to remove the stinky diapers and provide mom's victims with clean diapers. Long after my mom realized that American mothers overwhelmingly swore by Pampers for a reason, the clean diaper extras hung around our house as cleaning rags. Yes, our dining room table was wiped down for years with diapers. Ponder that statement for a moment. There were other awful things, too, like cod liver oil at breakfast. I'm surprised I lived past the age of twelve.
At any rate, for many years, unfortunately coinciding with most of my childhood, my mom was so hardcore healthy that she didn't do other important things like Tylenol. Actually, I'll qualify that. She did do Tylenol, but only when we were sick, like fever and chills sick. We didn't do Tylenol for, you know, pain. Headache? Pain. Twisted ankle? Pain. Muscle aches? Pain. She told me one time that Advil was bad because it altered your DNA, or something wonky like that. (For the record, my mom saw the errors of her ways after she took Advil once for a migraine and it did things like take away pain. She no longer engages in most of the questionable practices detailed above.) MomLogic was such that meds were bad and would kill you. Pineapple juice infused with two cups of kale was magical.
Understandably, when I was 18, the first thing I did was buy some Tylenol. Then I registered to vote, and because I'm boring, that's all I did with my legality. I'd pop those pills whenever I hurt for more than two or three hours at a time, which was actually pretty rare (no, it wasn't the power of cod liver oil). But I must have popped the pills often enough, because....
In my senior year of college, I had cramps. I took Tylenol. Tylenol did zilch. I took two Tylenol. Two Tylenol did zilch. I was in the library at the time, and I sat down on a chair and just started crying because it hurt so much. I was in quite a bit of pain, but I managed to get myself up to the campus health center. The nurse gave me some kind of pills for the pain. I don't remember what they were, but they worked very well! No pain! The nurse told me to take them every few hours as needed. And so I did, remaining pain-free for the rest of the day. I went to sleep as happy as a clam.
I woke up at 3 AM with my heart beating very rapidly. I was sweating and shaking. I am generally healthy (as in I don't usually get sick, but I do have a lot of fatigue/physical issues) and I didn't know what the heck was happening. I called the ambulance on myself and got a free ride over to the hospital (thanks, insurance that lapsed soon afterwards!).
Once I was admitted, I started to get very anxious. I usually experience anxiety physically before I become anxious mentally. But once I start getting physical symptoms, my mental anxiety goes through the roof. I was so nervous at the thought of kicking the bucket right there and then that I felt like I was crawling out of my skin.
I've found that there are two ways to calm myself down a bit if I am anxious. I can try to out-logicize myself and determine the actual versus the perceived dangers of the situation. Since I was currently possibly near death, I couldn't use that technique. I can also try to distract myself by talking. Sometimes it makes me feel better to just talk about the situation; sometimes it helps to talk about something totally random. And that's how the hospital intern got a quick overview of the development of feudalism. I hope he enjoyed it. Serfs up!
So while I was precariously balancing on a tiny footpath spanning the Great Chasm of Life and Death, they ran a few tests and took an x-ray. After what seemed like an eternity, wait, no, I wasn't there yet because I wasn't dead yet, so after what seemed like very close to an eternity, the intern came back to deliver the death sentence.
Long and short of it, I had accidentally overdosed on the generic pain meds from the health center. At the same time, I hadn't actually taken more than the prescribed dose. I was kind of mystified. How had I overdosed? Well, explained the intern, the pills contained caffeine. I had way too much caffeine, and it had made my heart race.
Let me reiterate.
I had overdosed. On caffeine. Because I had apparently put the equivalent of a Red Bull into my system.
Caffeine.
Caffeine!
On the plus side, I'm sure I couldn't have been the only person out there who mistook the symptoms of too much caffeine for the symptoms of a heart attack. And I was already the weirdo who coped by spouting random information about feudalism, so the intern probably thought I was just a little kooky, not a hypochondriac.
I blame this little episode on my mother. Caffeine was not good for children. Soda with caffeine was particularly evil. Up until that point, my caffeine intake was probably the equivalent of two cups of coffee per year. I just had no idea what too much caffeine felt like.
I was discharged shortly thereafter, but not before Dan snapped my picture as a commemoration of my discovery of the highly popular stimulant of caffeine. The intern told me that next time I should just take an Advil or two because it worked differently than Tylenol.
I went home and I bought some Advil. While it's probably not news to the rest of the world, I'd just like to say that I do take Advil for most aches and pains, and it works quite well. I do ration the stuff like crazy, though. I have no wish to built up a tolerance.
I also started drinking coffee from that point forward. I discovered I liked coffee. I drank decaf and regular mixed together for a while, but I'll now drink a fully-caffeinated cup as a coping mechanism for my energy-draining job. Hopefully I won't die, and I hope that if I ever get carted off again, I'll have overdosed on something a little less wimpy than caffeine.
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