A Firsthand Recount Of A GHB Overdose

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While I was in the coma a nurse asked my girlfriend “Why does he take drugs?” This is like asking the fisherman who got swept out to sea why he goes fishing, or the paraplegic whose parachute did not open why he used to jump out of planes. Obviously I did not take G with the intention of overdosing. I didn’t get my kicks from fishing or leaping out of planes; like many others, I just happened to get my kicks from experimenting with chemicals.

….

After reading extensively about GHB, I eased myself into experimenting with it. At first it seemed I had a high tolerance because I had increased my intake on successive occasions until I had taken what should have been, according to some of my reading, an overdose level, and I felt nothing, or very little. I almost stopped trying to ‘get it’, but one time, dropping back to lower levels, things came together and I got what it was about. I became an infrequent recreational user.

But there came a day when nothing made sense, when all the rules seemed to fly out the window, and I came very close to being nothing more than a memory to my friends and family, when for the sake of a bit of a kick, lives are destroyed.

There was no alcohol in my system. My girlfriend and I had driven home from a dance party. We were straight and sober and a little tired. We planned to have a bit of a wind down, maybe a snooze, and then lunch with a couple of friends, the perfect way to spend a Sunday.

We measured and drank. After a while Ann started getting drowsy. Nothing was happening with me, so after an hour and a half I had some more. Ann was deeper than she had been before. She lay back and her arms started to kind of float into the air. I was a little worried. I kept talking to her from time to time to make sure she was okay. Eyes closed, she smiled goofily and slurred her words and seemed to be having a pleasant, dreamy time. In the end I decided not to finish what little was left of my second dose. I’d had another high dose, spread over a couple of hours, but nothing was happening. I tipped the rest out and sat by Ann’s side and watched her. I talked to her occasionally and her arms, as though being controlled by a puppeteer, would drop slowly down again, only to drift up once more. It was strange to watch.

After a couple of hours I gently woke her. Our friends were due and we were going for lunch. She woke up as though coming out of a luxurious sleep.

By now it was about four hours after I had taken the first of my G, and as I started walking around and getting ready, I was surprised to feel it coming on; just a steady rise of that familiar intensity. Although enjoying it, I was a little confused about this time delay. Ann had had her full ride and was straight again, so why was mine only coming on now?

By the time our friends arrived I was buzzing, but in control and coherent and feeling like I was dealing with it fine. It didn’t slam me, it was just rising slowly and steadily. I likened it to being ratcheted up a roller coaster, and then it plateaued. I was restless and a little silly, and the others laughed. The others were having drinks, but I declined because there was obviously a lot of G still in my system. Ann was also a little puzzled by the time delay. She asked if I was sure I wanted to go to lunch – she knew that this was not normal and that something might happen. I wasn’t sure I should go and I thought about telling them to go without me, but in the end I said yes; it should be fun I thought. Walking up the road, the ratcheting started again, higher and higher. I kept grinning every now and then at the intensity of this ride. I was thinking that it was between five and six hours now, it has to be wearing off soon, or leveling out at least.

It was a slick restaurant overlooking Darling Harbour in Sydney. Such a sunny day, that wind shaking the flags with a cheerful vengeance. We sat down. My friends asked how I was. I said I was okay, but I wasn’t feeling right. I was starting to feel quite heavy. I know now that I should have taken it all more seriously, but I was starting to lose reason. I stared at the menu. I didn’t want to eat or talk. I didn’t want to do anything. Food appeared. Act normal. You want to go home? No. You all right? Yes. Put food in mouth. They mustn’t know what’s going on inside. Do you need to go to the bathroom? No. Is he all right?

I realised that I had been nodding off, drifting in and out of consciousness, but they didn’t know because I had sunglasses on. I decided that something was wrong, and that I needed to go to the toilet and maybe be sick. It’s like a hangover, I told myself, you’re sick and then you feel okay for a while. I stood up without excusing myself. A child was watching me. I stared back blankly as I walked by. I walked calmly to the toilet, and as I entered the cubicle and shut the door the last coherent thought I assembled was: there is something very, very wrong with me.

I threw up again and again. Nothing came out. Some black stuff. I put one hand on the wall to steady myself, and when I finished heaving, I just stood there swaying and sweating and breathing heavily. My mind was blank. I was just there, and that was that. No sense of self-preservation. No sense of anything. Certainly no thought of what to do next, of how to get myself out of this mess. I now know that I was fading out and fading back in again. If there was any thought, it was that I should stay on my feet. Perhaps this was some sort of primal self-preservation after all, but there were no words running through my mind. I was disintegrating, becoming little more than a breathing lump of meat.

Suddenly there was someone else in the cubicle. Ann slid half way under the door and looked up at me, and in the useless chaos of my mind, a word: cute. And then the faintest shadow of a thought: what funny game is this? I felt myself attempt a smile.

Some sense came back then as she stood up and grabbed me and unlocked the door. The front door of the restaurant was by the toilets, so we were outside very quickly. I was thinking again. I wondered briefly if we had left money for the food. We made it to a cab. I sat and watched the city speed by as we headed home. I vaguely remember thinking that now, at last, this must be the last of it. I don’t remember anything else.

What happened was this: We made it home. Apparently I was barely conscious. I slid from the cab. The cabbie, bless him, couldn’t get away quickly enough. I was unrousable. Ann was bashing me and screaming at me to try to wake me. She called an ambulance. When they arrived, they said my breathing and heart had stopped. All this eight hours after I had taken the G. This was not supposed to happen.

The utter confusion when I woke was something I hope to never experience again. White. My name. Choking. My name. Faces hovering above. Can’t talk. My name. A question: do you remember taking G? They didn’t seem to understand that I couldn’t talk. Why can’t I talk? Who are they? Am I a kid again? Waking crying from a nightmare with those headaches. My name. That tone like I am a child. My name. You have a tube down your throat – don’t try to talk. Then why ask me questions? A tube down my throat? Why? Calm down. Okay… okay. More confusion. But now I could swallow. I still didn’t understand any of this. Are these aliens? What insanity is this? Have you taken anything else? Do you remember the G? You were at a dance party. There was something wrong with all this. Something wrong with time. I couldn’t remember anything. Nothing. I just couldn’t remember the circumstances that lead to me being in a hospital. Ann was there. She had been talking in the confusion too. I was shaking my head trying to make sense of all this madness. And then, somehow understanding my confusion, Ann asked another question: do you remember the restaurant? That did it. Some memory. Why did the restaurant seem so long ago? Lunch. Yes. The restaurant. And then the memory of the total disintegration came tumbling down upon me. And then the day. And before that, the morning. I asked what time it was. It was 8pm. I had lost all that time. But suddenly I felt safe, with needles and tubes and machinery and nurses and clean walls and bright light, I was safe.

The doctor asked me again if I had taken anything besides G. He didn’t look like he believed me. Then he asked if I could feel any numbness in my limbs. I couldn’t raise my left arm, and there was a numbness in my left ankle; they were holding my arm down and had put my leather wrist band over my left ankle to check if I was working properly. They took the tube from my penis and the needles from my arms and I slowly sat up, clarity settling over me.

I apologised to Ann – God those hours, what had I put her through? She had been with me in the ambulance and seen them getting my heart going. She saw the seizures in full flight, saw them put the rubber wedge between my teeth, saw them wheel me away. And then she waited. Hours and hours as victims of crime or addiction or simply fate came and left. They told her they were running tests to see if I had been permanently brain damaged, making her wonder if our life had changed forever. The doctor asked her if she was sure I hadn’t taken anything else, if it was possible that I had taken heroin without her knowing. It seemed this was a pretty severe overdose.

Sitting there on the bed, my shirt hacked open, my chest shaved, every muscle in my body aching, my throat raw, I looked around and made a small joke, and as Ann laughed a little I realised that she had been watching me closely, looking for signs of me. She was still worried that some permanent damage had been done, and when at last I made this joke, she knew she still had me. I was still there and maybe I was all right after all. The nurse pulled back the curtain just as we laughed quietly, and she smiled, also relieved that I appeared to be all right. Sometimes when people come out of a full blown G coma, they panic because it is so frighteningly alienating. I had been relatively co-operative. The nurse said that she was glad I was laughing already. I told her, believe me, I am not laughing at this, I am deeply embarrassed and so very sorry. I thanked her. She was cool. She said she was just glad I was all right. She told me that I should take the day off work tomorrow. Sitting on the edge of the bed, I nodded at this. I looked at Ann and try as I might, I could not think of what my job was. For several long, confusing moments I just couldn’t remember what I did for a living. I actually had to ask… my job… what do I do? Ann looked worried. She hesitated, then told me, and it all came back as though that was the last piece to fall into place. Just to be sure, I ran through who I was, who my friends were, names and places. It all seemed to be there. It seemed that whatever it is that makes me who I am had withstood this violent onslaught.

At home, Ann called our lunch friends and told them I was okay. She said she had taken me to the hospital to have a check up, because I didn’t want anyone to know just how bad it had been. At the hospital and now at home I could still feel minor waves, and they scared me. Ann went to bed. She was tired and exhausted. She asked me to come to bed, but I was scared to go to sleep. I sat on the couch and thought about it all, and for the entire night I stayed awake because I felt that if I went to sleep I might never wake up. Irrational I know, but that’s how I felt. I sat with the light on, thinking about all the what ifs: what if I had passed out while Ann had been unconscious; what if I had stayed home alone while they went to lunch; what if Ann had been unable to get into the cubicle. It was the longest night of my life.

In the morning Ann left for work, and although I knew I should take the day off, I decided to go to work. I showered and dressed and arrived at the office feeling in more pain than I had in my whole life. I wore long sleeves to conceal the needle marks and bruises. My voice was deep and raspy (have a big weekend did we?). Muscularly, I felt worse than I had post half marathon. My chest was itchy and the bruising there was unbelievable. I spent the day in pain, my secret wrapped around me, and found everything faintly meaningless or trivial. But I was glad to be there, glad to be doing things, glad to be doing anything. No one in the office knew what had happened. They still don’t. Only a couple of my closest friends know the full story, because there is a lingering feeling of shame whenever I think about it.

It has been several years since this happened. In those years, life has gone on complete with all its ups and downs. I have written quite a lot – that is my job. I write a fair bit of humour, which might come as a surprise after reading this account. But since then I have written a lot of humour, and I have seen strangers laughing at my columns. I have had emails from friends in other cities telling me they embarrassed themselves on public transport reading my stuff. I have listened to great music and seen exciting live theatre and interviewed some amazing people. I have celebrated a new year at the harbour’s edge with friends and traveled to Turkey to see a solar eclipse in the middle of a dance festival. I have helped start a fledgling retail business from scratch and have met strangers who have become an important part of my life. A friend died and another is about to give birth to twins and life has gone on in its wild and unpredictable way, and I came so very close to missing it all.

I’m not going to preach because I haven’t turned over a new leaf or become a new person; I’m really not that good a person. But I am here and I am fortunate and grateful, and I try not to take things quite so for granted. I’m flawed and weak and a hedonist at heart, but I doubt very much that I’ll ever touch GHB again. A minor misjudgment and the whim of circumstance and for the sake of a kick it could be all over. And there’s just too much life to be lived for that; it’s short enough as it is.

Written by Lee Bemrose.

Via Mens Health