Robotripping At The Gates Of Hell

54 Comments

1. Apart from chemo, radiation and such "kill all and hope the good stuff survives" I once was given Bactrimel, apparently that may kill me faster than the stuff it's supposed to kill. Beats my allergy to brown band-aids. Big. Time.

   I usually try to keep away from any extra medication, I've got my daily dose of thyroid-crap and that's it these days.

2. Hm… not too many of these. I've had some injuries that were followed up with some questionable drugs to give a minor….

   Once I tripped on the little rug thing at a McDonalds and smashed my front teeth on the ground, and the dentist gave me some stuff that I don't remember the next couple of weeks very well….

   Then there was the time that everyone in the house got sick, and then I ended up getting sick a week later and took some of the medicine (My dad giving me the medicine HE'D taken, instead of the one my year-younger-than-me sister had), and I felt like I was floating on the ceiling.

   My brother's allergic to Penicillin though. That was fun to find out….

3. Hoooooo boy, I really wish I hadn't googled that last part. Horrifying.

   Thankfully, I haven't had anything as bad as yours but I did have some superstrength antibiotics prescribed for an abscess on my knee that fucked up my whole body for weeks afterwards: because they killed off all my antibodies or whatever, I got a nasty strep throat infection that was painful as hell, a wisdom tooth infection and another bloody abscess, this time on my back. And to top that off, the knee abscess came back within a year.

4. I am extremely weak when it comes to medicine side effects. If I take a tylenol for a headache I will pass the fuck out. But one time I threw caution to the wind and wasn’t paying attention when I asked a coworker at the call center I slaved away at for some of her allergy medicine. 5 minutes after downing the pills and an energy drink to metabolize them faster I looked up at her horror struck and asked if they were non drowsy “Nope but I never have a problem” she responded quizzically at my loud exclamation of “FUCK!” Not an hour later I began to feel all sorts of OMGWHYISTHEFLOORMOVINGUNDERMYDESK and had to be propped up any chair and babysat so I didn’t smash my face into the screen more than once or twice. I don’t remember the drive home or what happened the next day but hey my allergies weren’t bothering me.

   Oh there was the time I had my wisdom teeth removed and the pain pill cocktail made the game of plants vs zombies i in a stupor was playing invade my dreams… stupid linebacker zombie.

   I also was at one time on a bipolar medicine that’s major side effect was intense 2nd degree style skin burns. Didn’t get that side effect I got the one that made me want to beat peoples faces in because the horse tranquilizer anti anxiety sleep medicine (my friend took one and it made his 350 pounds of meat sleep for 24 hours) didn’t play well with others.

   Let me end this by stating I hate medicine (for obvious reasons) and always ask for the none rx option first but I swear to got doctors hear “please, can you make me like Michael Jackson, Whitney houston, AND Rush Limbaugh?”

5. (psst. Double word typo in panel 1, Josh is saying "I told my my dude")

   • fixed.

     • (And the alt-text should say "to" instead of "too")

       Another wildly amusing comic though!

6. Hmmm… probably my worst reaction to medication was to the Demerol they gave me when I had a kidney stone. Apparently a "standard" dose is 60mg, and they gave me 75mg because I'm larger than average and kidney stones are notably painful. When that injection didn't seem to be doing enough, they gave me another 100mg – so almost 3x the standard dose within an hour or so.

   Demerol is falling out of favor because of some of its side effects; I never have nightmares, but I had one on Demerol that literally had me wake up SCREAMING at the top of my lungs. Of course, this meant I had nurses and orderlies and whatever just piling into my hospital room and I guess I was still all goony from the stuff because explaining that no, I had no idea why I had woken up screaming wasn't at all embarrassing. What I did later find embarrassing was that I was so doped up I couldn't track the plot of an episode of Gilligan's Island I had to have seen multiple times before.

   I have taken steps to head off ever being given that crap again. I'd rather be in pain than do that waking-up-screaming thing ever again.

   Perhaps the most ironic one was when Claritin went OTC and my doctor switched me to the new version "Clarinex" (because of one of those Stupid Insurance Tricks where they won't cover an OTC drug) and it turned out I was allergic to it – how bizarre is it to have an antihistamine give you hives?! (It was probably the blue dye in the tablet or something and not the actual medication, but still.)

7. It wasn't me, but my mom was prescribed steroid injections for MS once. The neurologist wanted her to get a small dose several times a week, but the GP she went to to actually get them decided it would be better to basically give her twice the dose, half as often. Considering she had anger problems to begin with, that was a very bad idea. As she explained it later, the cat would walk across the room and it would PISS HER OFF (at one point she actually threw a printer at it.) Apparently she got off easy, though. A friend of mine got the same treatment (for a different problem) and wound up hiding under a table, convinced that aliens were coming to get her.

8. I recently recovered from a chronic pain issue* that lasted for about 2yrs and got progressively worse. About the time it got bad enough that I couldn't sleep but hadn't yet gone to the dr. (because I'm one of *those* people), I decided to swig some NyQuil, just to get to sleep. Bad. Idea. Yeah, I slept. Only, I couldn't wake up and it did nothing for the pain, so I got 8 hours of torture dreams. Good times.

   *It turned out — after several misdiagnoses — to be scurvy. No shit.

   • At least Dr. House and his team were able to diagnose you before it was too late.

     • Heh. The jackass doctors I was actually paying money to spent > a year doing progressively more invasive testing and kept coming up with "I dunno — must be fibromyalgia/similar incurable disesase with shaky diagnosability. Here, have some drugs." Since I kept degenerating — towards the end I was barely mobile and unable to stand even the lightest touch — I was unwilling to accept that diagnosis and finally a friend of mine who's a pediatrician suggested it might be scurvy. Three days and 64oz of OJ later I was able to hug my kids without whimpering for the first time in months and by the end of the week I was completely off pain meds. We call her The Docstar now.

       • I diagnosed scurvy in a firend too, when her doctor couldn't figure out why a 20+ year old injury was suddenly opening up. Doc figured it for some kind of abcess and prescribed antibiotics, but decades-old scars don't just suddenly open up– unless you have scurvy. "You finding you're having bruises without remembering how you got them? Fine. It's probably scurvy. Got any vitamin C? Take double the dose for the next three days and then just a regular dose for the next two weeks." Done. It started healing by the next morning.

         Loose teeth + bleeding gums + excessive bruising is a pretty standard set of symptoms. Add in old scars reopening and I don't know why her doctors couldn't figure it out; I don't know of anything else that does that other than cell wall degeneration due to a lack of vitamin C. I saw lots of it in my college friends back when, fresh fruit being something of a luxury, so it's not even like only 300+ year old sailors get it or what.

         • To be fair, fairly early on in the effort to figure out what was wrong with me, I was diagnosed with Von Willenbrand's Disease, so all the easy bruising/gum bleeding type symptoms were dismissed as being associated with that.

   • I know someone who suffered from extreme pain for several years, she only got up to make meals, and she was on mega painkillers. The doctors had no idea what it was after multiple tests so she went to a Naturopath who thought they should try eliminating certain food from her diet to see if she felt any better.
     She stopped eating gluten and the pain was gone almost immediately. Ironically the medical system won't believe she has a gluten allergy or celiac's disease unless she eats gluten for a few weeks, and lets them stick a probe down her throat.

     • My wife had stomach problems for the last 5 years. Then one night we realized that our daughter was 5 years old… and the problems started when she was born… sooooo…. BAM! Lactose intolerant. She made it 26 years with no milk problems at all, then suddenly after childbirth her chemistry changed. She gave up milk and the problems went away in a week.

   • Scurvy? Right on time for talk-like-a-pirate day! Yaaarrgh!

9. I found in a bad way, but not the worst way possible, that anything labeled "non-drowsy" is NOT for me to take.
   Instant knock-out pill – as I found out while driving to work at 75 mph on a busy Interstate.
   Found out I can drive to work in my sleep… but that's not really a good thing.

   • Im the same way with certain drugs and I have NO IDEA why. The more "pep" it's supposed to provide the more "i can't NOT fall asleep right now" i get. The worst part is sometimes I need something to knock me the fuck out when my brain wont turn off the night before I have to travel or something and I can never remember exactly which ones have that effect one me. I want to say Actifed is one of the culprits.

10. I Take 150-200 pills a week, and even though I have had to take so many pills over the course of my life, I have only had 4 reactions to them and only 1 was very bad. I was very about 2 years old and I needed surgery, so they used a general anesthetic called Etomidate. It took 4 strong adults to hold me down, including my 6'3" Father and my 5'3" mother who is a nurse and grew up on a farm, as I struggled to break free. I bit 3 of them and threw up on all of them. Recently they tried to give me Etomidate again, when they said it I started laughing and said "No, you don't want to do that."

11. I once took an over-the-counter cold medicine (Drixoral) and it gave me a raging fever, chills AND HALLUCINATIONS that lasted all night. Felt much better, if somewhat sleep-deprived, the next day.
    And then I forgot what medicine had brought the Vikings into my bedroom to pile animal hides on me all night, took the same stuff again some months later and went though it ALL OVER AGAIN.
    And this wasn't an overdose or a drug interaction either, this was a single dose exactly as specified on the package with no other medication involved.

12. Earlier this year, I was whipping up a giant, delicious sandwich for my wife and myself. I needed to remove the pit from the avocado, and I was feeling clever and in control, so I just stabbed the pit with the tip of my old, shitty, serrated chef's knife. I had a better knife, but it was dirty.

    Good thing I didn't use the better knife, because the pit was a weak one. The knife went straight through the pit, the flesh of the avocado behind it, and the stretchy bit where your finger meets the palm of your hand. You know, the place where your wedding ring goes.

    So, a ~15 year old Farberware chef's knife and a stainless steel metal skull ring (yes, that's my actual wedding ring) conspired to make sure I did not amputate my own ring finger. To teach me a lesson in kitchen safety, they *did* make sure I opened up my finger wide enough and deep enough to see tendons, bone, and all sorts of other weird looking shit I had no idea existed inside fingers.

    My pregnant wife knew this was serious business when I calmly walked into the living room clutching my hand with a rag and suggested that we might go to the hospital whenever she finished whatever important stuff it is that pregnant wives do while their husbands risk dismemberment hunting wild sandwiches for their ladies.

    A couple of hours and a handful of stitches later, we were home with some wonderful antibiotics and Vicodin. The next day, we were shopping at Target, and we learned that being high as a fucking surly diagnostician was keeping me from realizing that I was pretty damned allergic to whatever antibiotics I was taking. The wife figured that part out when I giggled uncontrollably and started taking off my shirt in the middle of the infant clothing aisle so that I could more efficiently scratch the ENORMOUS, BEET-RED HIVES ON MY TORSO.

    • FINISH THE STORY!

      We didn't do anything about it, continued our shopping and later that day I died.

      • Boring story ending: I called the doctor, got a new prescription, and now I actually have something I have to fucking remember when a physician asks me if I have any drug allergies.

        Better story ending: I climbed on top of the big cage that holds the bouncy balls in the toy department at Target and held a stock boy hostage at Nerf-point, demanding a ransom of a lifetime supply of Icees and stale popcorn from the snack bar. They brought me an Icee to sample, but it turned out to be a Frapuccino because it was one of THOSE Targets, so I went berserk and pranced around in various 6month infant outfits until the caffeine wore out. Earlier that day I died.

13. LOL. I was scanning the post and saw "Zyrtec and Sudaphed" and was confused as to why we were suddenly talking about "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.":) I had to read the article twice before my brain clicked in and said "Oh! They're drugs, you dumbass!" And to think, I'm not even high right now.

14. Toothache. 3 Vicodin. Half a fifth of bourbon. I had eaten a ruby red grapefruit earlier. I ended up lying on my back spewing red grapefruit and bourbon straight up in the air and laughing as it fell back down on me.

    Laundry was no fun.

    • sorry, but this made me laugh hysterically.

      • Don't be sorry, I still laugh when I think about it.

15. I don’t have any good medical-drug stories (at least none that I remember) but I do have a single close call I probably won’t forget.

    I suffer from sleep apnea (tested in a sleep lab place, average 20 apneas an hour, longest event they recorded was 90 seconds) so I tend to not get a lot of restful sleep. Compounding that, I frequently have insomnia as well.

    After a particularily bad run of insomnia I went to the doctor and explained that I wasn’t getting any sleep, like, at all. She writes me out a prescription, hands it to me, and says “That will take care of the insomnia.”

    I thank her, then as an afterthought, and kind of jokingly, I asked “Oh by the way, with my sleep apnea, is there any chance that this might accidentally kill me?”

    She looks a little alarmed, then quite serious, takes the prescription out of my hand, and tears it up. Then she writes me a new one for something completely different.

    Now I ask a lot more questions whenever people prescribe me things.

16. As an aside – I find it somewhat bizarre that what's sold as "Kaopectate" now is not the kaolin-pectin suspension I remember from my childhood (and from which the stuff quite obviously got its name), but a substance containing the same active ingredient (bismuth subsalicylate) as Pepto-Bismol. You can still get kaolin-pectin… but not under the Kaopectate brand.

    I have to wonder which "edition" was in mind during the creation of the above cartoon.

17. I was on some variety of morphine-based painkiller when I had scoliosis surgery as a teenager. The nurses mentioned that "occasionally" there might be mild hallucinations. Yeah, I woke those poor folks up every hour on the hour for three nights in a row, shrieking about the demons in the room coming for my fingernails. I feel a little bad for them, but those hallucinations were NASTY.

    • I guess they'll remember next time the definition of "mild."

18. Got a couple short ones. there was a time in my life when my allergies were kiling me. I was tried all the time and could never breathe through my nose while always having drippies come out of my eyes and nose. I usually hate taking madicine but I gave up and took benedryl. I went out that same night and decided to have a beer. I forgot about the benedryl. after drinking about half of that beer i started falling alseep on my feet. I don't know how I got home but that i did.

    another time I quit smoking and was eating like shit. i of course got heart burn. it would not go away. i waited about a week and then decided to try to take alkaseltzer to try to calm my stomach. My upper lip ended up swelling to tripple it's normal size. I never went to the doctor or anything, just took a benedryl and it was gone by the next day.

19. It's hard to choose. Misusing medication as a child to comic effect? Hallucinating scenes from the Hitchiker's Guide? Night terrors for all ages? Why not all three!

    When I was in 2nd grade, I broke my arm in gymnastics class (as an aside, they thought it was a sprain and chewed me out for being a crybaby.) The orthopedist prescribed me liquid pain meds. As I was a pretty responsible kid, a few days later my mom left me on the couch with the remote and some snacks and drinks for a couple hours while she ran some errands – I think after a few days of trying to keep a kid from running around or using an arm she was just fried and needed some mom time. She left bottle of pain meds near me but said to use it only if I really needed another dose, because it could be dangerous, and left me a long list of numbers to call if I really needed somebody (probably like half the neighbors on the block.)
    Upper arm fractures really hurt, so I took an extra dose. The pain meds really screwed with my sense of time and my inhibitions, so I took something like three doses before she got home. I'm sure she freaked out, but I don't remember anything but hallucinating an angry David the Gnome telling me something important while slowly phasing through the floor and then reappearing feet-first from the ceiling.

    When I was in 7th grade, my aunt Sally brought over this gorgeous vintage mahjong set that she'd bought at a flea market. We'd played maybe through the first wall when I started feeling incredibly shitty – I have a horrifying dust allergy. My mom gave me some Tavist-D 12-hour and I went to the TV room to lay down. I'd just read the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and I spent the next two hours floating two feet above the recliner while the infinite improbability drive ran. I came back to reality whenever I opened my eyes, but I was so tired it was almost impossible to keep them open. My arms kept extending and pinching off and being carried away by penguins. It was kind of pleasant but mostly exceedingly weird. I still itched all over, though, which made it less fun.

    My favorite was dealing with my apnea issues last year. I've been having night terrors for years, and I finally went to a sleep specialist after I woke up my boyfriend every night for a week screaming about various horrific things (and one time was backing away from something at the edge of the bed until I was sitting on him, for extra fun). Turns out I have apnea, despite not carrying any extra weight, yay skull malformations, and when I would stop breathing it would sometimes give me night terrors.
    I was prescribed a CPAP with a nose mask. For two weeks straight, I had night terrors of snakes either eating my face or crawling up my nose. I refused to use the CPAP again. When the doctor tried to convince me to "give it another month or two for you to adapt," I almost threw the machine at his head.
    I now sometimes sleep with a mini backpack full of tennis balls, but mostly I've learned that if it's dark and I'm convinced I'm going to die, it's probably just a night terror and I should lay very very still until it goes away. I still wake up in mortal terror on a regular basis, but at least my boyfriend is getting a decent night's sleep most nights.

20. I don't have any funny reaction to drugs stories but my husband does! He dislocated his shoulder while we were on a beach holiday (from a body board – he'd dislocated his shoulder twice previously), and had to go to the local medical centre to get it popped back in due to how it comes out. They gave him so much morphine he passed out, then when he came to we took him back to the holiday house to recuperate. When he was going to bed that night, I gave him 2 dolased (which I swear by whenever I have bad pain and need to pass out for a day) and sent him to sleep. The next morning he woke up and was freaking out because he couldn't remember going to bed and he hadn't had any dreams. He got over it when he had his reconstruction and was taking a cocktail of 2 nurefen plus with 2 dolased to keep him sedated as his shoulder recovered.

21. When I went to get my wisdom teeth removed I found out the hard way I'm allergic to nitrous oxide. Apparently I stopped breathing for a while there which really freaked the f*ck out of the dentist and his assistant.

    To make matters worse I also found out that I react poorly to Vicodin. I have no memory of this, but my parents swore I walked around the whole next day like a zombie answering every thing asked of me with a string of curse words.

22. Consider yourself rather lucky. I can't take practically any painkiller. Acetaminophen causes my eyes to become bloodshot and I have a nigh-inhuman tolerance to Ibuprofen.

23. I have three main ones…

    I'm allergic to penicillin and all the various things they give to those allergic to penicillin so if I get a bad infection I can't take squat. Usually break out into an intense rash that looks like I've been boiled alive.

    The other one was I was given some blood pressure tablets, which reacted to the other medication I was on (which wasn't that hard to find out after the fact, that I should never have been given them). Yay. Got so cold, that while standing in a boiling hot shower, my toes were turning blue. I couldn't stop shivering and felt like I was going to pass out. Not too much fun.

    Finally, was when the doctors put me on anti-depressants in the hopes of managing severe pain. They gave me the wrong kind and any time I got stressed, I would start scratching my arms without noticing. I worked in a rather stressful call center at this time. After one particular call, I looked down and noticed I had pretty much ripped my arm to shreds. Of course, that was the kind of meds where you have to wean yourself off them and can't stop cold turkey otherwise it does worse. Joy!

24. I once got some poison ivy on the inside of my thigh, a little above the knee. Accidentally sat in a patch of it while wearing shorts. No biggie, just apply some calamine lotion to keep it from itching or spreading.

    The next day, it was spreading up my leg and very itchy. More lotion. Another day, the stuff was creeping disturbingly close to my groin, and why the HELL does it itch so much? More lotion. One more day, CHRIST, why isn't this lotion WORKING?? It itches so bad I can't sleep, it's all scaly and scabbed and oozing, and it's eying my family jewels a little too eagerly methinks! Fuck, need more calamine . . . WAIT a minute!

    Poison ivy is, essentially, just a topical irritant that triggers an allergic reaction, right? So let's just try some hydrocortisone and, WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT? Overnight, the entire rash was gone, save for two dime-size patches just above the knee. Just to be certain, I rubbed a dab of calamine lotion on the back of my hand. It IMMEDIATELY turned bright red. And thus I learned that I'm allergic to calamine, of all things.

    Thank GOD we figured that out before the rash actually spread onto the more sensitive portions of my anatomy . . . .

25. When I came back from Japan I had to have a broken tooth pulled. The DDS knocked me out, pulled my tooth, and the first thing I wanted to know was what time it was. I was getting agitated when I asked and the nurses and doctor and they didn't answer and instead went out to grab my mom. They thought I had a stroke or something… turns out I was just asking all of my questions in Japanese. My mind would *not* let me speak English so I had to tap my watch.
    Another time, I had a seizure and went to the ER… without really asking me the doc ran a full IV of Dilantin. I'd never been on the stuff before and I became really weak, queasy, dizzy, and everyone sounded like either a robot or like they were talking through a really bad drive-thru speaker. When I told the doctor and nurses about it their only response was "Huh. That's not a normal reaction." and continued about their business. For months after that I suffered a type of aphasia and became slightly paranoid.

26. Once I had a mild stomach ache, laid in bed for a couple of hours before deciding I should take some pink stuff (generic brand ). A few minutes later I felt incredibly nauseous and ran for the bathroom (15 feet away). I was super dizzy so I fell down, vomited, then proceeded to pass out for what felt like 20 minutes (during which I had a long dream) but was only about 30 seconds. I was awakened by my husband yelling my name, I had banged my head on the door jam and was siting in a mess of all bodily fluids (sorry guys, it was gross, and kind of frightening). Drank some water, took a shower and almost felt normal an hour later. My husband wanted me to go to the emergency room but since my health kept improving, he just watched me like a hawk.
    Never been sick like that before, never had a reaction like that to the pink stuff before.

27. I may have said this in previous Joel's-sick strip, but back in high school, I had such bad acne, I needed semi-experimental meds called acutane, and it had a host of nightmarish side-effects. Worst that happened to me was exposure to direct sunlight caused my skin to dry up and bleed, like a was a vampire being mummified alive.

    Also, I had my wisdom teeth pulled, but the gave me sodium pentathol (truth serum) to knock me out so they can also cut off this bump on the tip of my tongue. For me time slowed down, I heard "Comfortably Numb" play in my increasingly-cloudy head, then blacked out. Woke up what felt like a microsecond later with a mouthful of cotton, dribble, and blood.

    • I knew a guy in highschool that took acutane (it was pretty widely prescribed by the late 90's) and it made all the skin on his palms turn red and fall off. Terrifying.

28. When I was a teenager I had terrifying daily migraines for a year and a half. Somehow I was deemed responsible enough to keep track of my constantly changing medications. Responsible enough perhaps, but eventually not coherent enough. The directions for one medication were: take two, take one an hour later if pain persists, repeat for up to six pills. I took two, got woozy and incredibly confused, forgot I took them, took two more less than fifteen minutes later, forgot WHEN I took them and took the follow-up dose less than forty minutes later, forgot I took it and took another less than twenty minutes later…after that I'm not sure. My co-worker said I was swaying in place and talking drunk. She turned to call a manager and when she turned back I was gone. This was because I had passed out. I was revived, I stood back up, she turned her back…and I passed out again. This is also the medicine that caused me to bat at shiny objects even when used in the prescribed manner.

29. Well, after reading all those comments, mine seems rather unexciting. I'm just asthmatic and allergic to albuterol (the medicine used in most inhalers). Luckily there are other medicines that I can take, but I find it fairly ironic that the first thing most people would give me to stop an asthma attack is actually the thing that's most likely to make it worse.

30. I had to be hospitalized over a weekend once for a nosebleed (which is another story). They ended up having to cauterize my nose, and, for starters, I don't come up from general anaesthesia (of IV sedation, for that matter) very well. I come up mean, and then later I start feeling nauseous. When I complained to the nurse about my nausea, they brought me phenergan, which was ostensibly supposed to help with the nausea. I promptly threw up, then proceeded to have, in rapid succession, a panic attack, followed by some period of unconsciousness, followed by another panic attack, etc. From my point of view, I started feeling very claustrophobic and kept wanting to get out of bed. When my husband called the nurse back to complain about my condition, he was told that my reaction was "very rare." Of course, we were not warned about this possible side effect before I was given the medicine.

    Also, during the same hospitalization, when I complained of being unable to sleep, they came in and injected something into my IV that was supposed to help me sleep without giving either me or my husband a chance to ask what it was. After they'd already done it, my husband asked what they'd just given me. It was Benadryl, which makes me jittery. If they had actually bothered to tell either one of us what it was before just sticking it in me, we could have told them it was not going to help me sleep. I hate hospitals.

    • Oh, I hear you. On my last hospitalization there was insane drama over the fact they didn't stock the specific form of one of my diabetes meds and instead of just getting a doctor to OK using the immediate-release form instead of time-release, they wanted to give me insulin, something I've never used! I decided to exercise a little "civil disobedience" and refused the insulin (thinking that might light a fire under them to get the immediate vs. time-release metformin issue straightened out) but what happened was one nurse took advantage of someone else distracting me to inject me with the insulin – I was absolutely furious. Since it turned out what landed me there was an excessively fast heart rate, making me that mad probably wasn't a good idea.

      As an aside – if there are a few minutes before you go to the hospital, be sure to pack a small bag with anything you can think of that might help relieve the tedium – plus the CHARGERS for anything electronic you take [such as e-book, tablet, music player, phone…]. Oh, and as hospitals really are NOT quiet places – earplugs. I had no idea I'd be in the hospital for three nights when my doctor told me to head over to the ER, and I could have taken the time to make that stay a lot less annoying.

31. when i got my wisdom teeth pulled, a variety of things happened:

    they discovered i had an extra one, back up and in on the upper right.

    the lower ones were turned at right angles and butted up against the molars in front of them, and nearly covered over by bone and gum.

    in short, when they took the lower ones and the spare out, they had to dislocate my jaw to get at them. the lower ones required breaking off some laying open of gums, breaking off of bone, and extraction, then replace and fuse bone, and stitch up gums like they were a craft project.

    i looked like i'd gone a few rounds with a pro boxer for days. for the operation, they had me on nitrous, a general anesthetic, a local anesthetic, AND a mild sedative. now, i have funny reactions to drugs(fun combination of funny metabolism, much higher body weight than i look like; as in, looked about 180 lbs, weighed almost 220. muscle and bone density through the roof.) made me merely HIIIIIIIIIIIIGH as a kite on the dosages/metering they had me on. turns out my medical record listed a weight that was several years out of date as my current weight for lord only knows what reason.

    so, while the walls and ceiling are wobbling like jello and everyone sounds all slippery, i'm giggling away while the anesthesiologist is adjusting the dosage. at one point some masked person looks down at me and i say 'ohhh, i'm STONED' like it was the most significant thing ever, and then bam lights out.

    the rest of the weekend is mostly flashes and not a lot else. i don't really remember any of it at all clearly. apparently while doped to the gills, i fixed a car, trimmed some hedges, watched a LOT of cartoons, and tripped BALLS.

    i wish i knew what they'd given me…

32. Well, back in high school, I was proscribed Prozac to counteract side-effects of the Ritalin they made me take for ADD.

    My gastric system quite violently rejected the whole deal.

    I'm still unsure if that means I'm allergic, but I'll definitely never take it again.

33. Many painkillers have a stimulant based delivery system, increase blood flow to ensure the painkiller is rapidly absorbed by the body, the novocain injections most dentists use, as well as most localized anesthetics. I am also highly susceptible to stimulants (as it sounds like you are) and also have wild panic attacks when given such painkillers. When the doctor says, "you might feel your heart speed up a bit." I say, "don't worry when I start bawling then, it will just be the result of my thinking the walls are collapsing on me." 🙂 suxorz

34. The closest I came to a harmful drug reaction was when I gave my friend a handful of active carbon pills for his diarrhea. Harmless little fuckers, unless you take them all at once (which he did), in which case they can give you a rather unpleasant case of constipation (which they did). Needless to say, I avoided him for the rest of the week since he solemnly swore he would give me a set of medical problems of my own.

    (Though I must admit, the description of the punishment he wanted to inflict on me was rather amusing. Sick, yet amusing nonetheless.)

35. all i know is that jack daniels, nyquil, and oxycontin should not mix just because you have pneumonia

    that said, they worked great

    after i was done being in a semi conscious hallucinatory stupor for a day

36. About 10 years ago, I went back to work after a bout of bronchitis. I was still feeling kinda sick, but I needed the hours so I just took some cough syrup and got back to work.

    By the time I got there, HOLY FUCKBALLS I WAS TRIPPING MY ASS OFF. Everything was in slo-mo, and I was yammering like Blurr on meth. Every voice I heard sounded like a grown-up in a Peanuts cartoon. Whenever I moved forward, the whole world moved backward. I guess the syrup reacted with whatever bronchitis meds were left in my system.

    For a good 2 hours or so, I got to see the world the way that Quicksilver does (on LSD).

37. Worst medication story? Nyquil. I had some type of mild cold and had never taken Nyquil before. Apparently my body is allergic to alcohol, because instead of mild stuffiness and muscle aches that I DID have, I was suddenly unable to close my eyes. Literally. I sat curled up in a fetal position in bed watching every second tick away on the clock. For six hours. I'm not sure what my brain was doing during this time, but I remember some kind of mild paranoia and possibly things dancing in my peripheral vision. Oh, and I still had the muscle aches and stuffiness.