Something about shuttling from NYC to Buffalo finally did my immune system in and I got some serious allergies earlier this week. I woke up with blood shot burning eyes, highly irritated upper airways and sneezed a million times. I had a meeting later in the day and I decided to take the most logical course - a scaled-up dose of benadryl.
25 mg hardly made a dent in clearing my bloody conjunctiva, so I somehow persuaded myself to go up to 50mg and then 75mg. An evil little voice kept telling me that it was important to not look murderous during the meeting and the drug was just blocking some unseen little histamine receptors somewhere on the surface; how bad could it possibly be?
It was bad.
In fact, it turned out to be the most colossally illogical trippy mistake of the year. I had to write a paragraph-long email to cancel the meeting - a feat that took nearly 1.5 hours to compose. Not only was I nauseous for 4 hours, I was convinced at some point that the everyone in Buffalo downtown was dying. A detail-oriented pedantic voice was telling me that it was important to note that ONLY people with a roof over their heads were dying. I went to the kitchen to wash my face and get rid of the voice, but I could see there was was some REALLY significant p-value to back up this argument in the plaster-cracks just above the sink on the walls...
It followed logically then that I should at least try and bail out of my window. Luckily for me I couldn't get the screen out in a coordinated fashion so I gave up after a while, drank as much water as I could and went back to a sleep-pee-drink-some-more-water-pee-sleep-drink-even-more-water-cycle till I was finally persuaded that everything was fine with my world (well, except for the missed meeting) late in the evening.
No more benadryl for me. I now know what to list under medications to avoid.
(e:metalpeter) had a valid point when he pointed out that my low body weight could have had a role in the overdose... I don't think I was even paying attention to the whole body-weight overdose issue once I started on a single-minded mission to clear my bloodshot eyes.
This was probably the single most scary experience after the one where I was pinned immobile to my seat in an automobile collision on an extremely foggy day. I could clearly see my driver with his skull bashed-in by the windshield slumped right in front of me, but I couldn't do anything to help till the police/emergency folks arrived and wrenched me out.
So I can count on you being the second member of freecycle@roswell? :-)
Ya, I wonder what the hold up is on a program for that. Maybe it just needs someone like you.