Alexx's Journal

I am resistant to most pain medication. This proved to be extremely problematic in the immediate aftermath of open-heart surgery last Spring. While it was necessary and life-saving, it was still major surgery, and my body was complaining a LOT. Without any working painkillers, I was getting quite sleep-deprived.

Making the best of a bad situation, I listened to audiobooks at night. Audiobooks of books that I already knew and loved, so that if I DID manage to sleep for a few hours, I wouldn't miss vital plot points.

Over the course of recovery, I tried a bunch of different painkillers, in the hope of finding one that worked at least a little. A housemate had acquired a bottle of marijuana gummis (the theoretically non-psychoactive kind) in an (unsuccessful) attempt to treat their own chronic pain, and offered them to me. I had never had marijuana (or any other "recreational" drug) before, but if there was ever a time for it, this was it. I tried one of the gummis, and it had no appreciable effect. My wife suggested that maybe I should try taking a dose of two of the gummis. I grumbled and declined, feeling that there when one didn't do anything at all, two was unlikely to help.

A few days later, in a fog of pain and sleep deprivation at bed time, I thought, "What the heck, let's try taking THREE gummis". I did, then got in bed and put in my headphones. By this point, I was working my way through the Vlad Taltos audiobook series, by Steven Brust.

Now, a bit of necessary background: There's a thing that Brust likes to do in these books. In almost every book there will be one or two sequences where Vlad is either casting a spell or in some other state of altered consciousness. During these sequences, Brust likes to play formal games with the prose, as a way of conveying that altered states of mind. While this started out as basically stream-of-consciousness, and still tend to look that way on a surface level, there is often some clever formalism hiding underneath that.

I was listening to a relatively new book (_Hawk_, IIRC), so it was one that I was a bit less familiar with. And shortly after I went to bed, it got to one of those spellcasting scenes. Now, audiobooks often turn out to have surprisingly different impacts than prose. (My favorite example of this is Neil Gaiman's _American Gods_, where a subtle clue on page 1 becomes a blatant spoiler when read aloud.) So I wasn't TOO surprised when I was listening to the spellcasting scene and went, "Huh. This is totally in the rhythm of 1950s Beat poetry. Weird choice for a fantasy novel, but I think it works."

A few minutes later, however, I realized that the spellcasting scene was over, and now we were in a normal dialogue scene – and it still sounded like Beat poetry. I remembered taking the triple-dose of marijuana gummis and started to get scared. I grew up with a very Cartesian philosophy, identifying my self strongly with my mind, and now my mind was behaving strangely, which was effectively an existential threat. On the other hand, there was the mitigating factor / additional symptom that it was also HILARIOUS!

I went downstairs and talked to some still-awake housemates and my wife for the next few hours. (My wife was VERY grumpy with me. "What happened to TWO?!") Intriguingly, I had no visual symptoms at all, it was only the language processing centers of my brain that were effected. The parts of my brain that perceived poetry, song, and humor had been dialed up WAY higher than normal. People mostly weren't (perceived as) talking to me, they were singing! Even when they attempted to speak as simply as possible, that just came through as blank verse. Also, almost everything was a joke!

I had trouble speaking myself. I normally speak with longish pauses, as I search for the proper phrasing for what I want to say. But my mind was now quicksilver, and would go off on such racing tangents thinking of different words, that I would lose track of the semantic content of what I was trying to say. Or just break up laughing.

Eventually, my wife felt I was safe enough that I could be sent to bed. About six hours later, the effects finally faded away. So that's the story of my first inadvertent drug trip.

Postscript: DID it work as a pain killer? I have no idea. It certainly distracted me from the pain for a while. But it wasn't an experience I was particularly eager to repeat. And anyways, my wife had taken the bottle of gummis away from me :-)