DOSE:

repeated

oral

Diphenhydramine

(pill / tablet)

BODY WEIGHT:

90 lb

[Erowid Note: The doses described in this report are potentially life threatening. The amount taken is beyond a heavy dose and could pose serious health risks or result in unwanted, extreme effects. Doses such as this have been known to cause hospitalizations and/or deaths. Sometimes extremely high doses reported are errors rather than actual doses used.]
I'm writing this to document and share three of my personal experiences with having overdosed on the antihistamine medication diphenhydramine .

I am writing this 5 months after the last time I overdosed, which was in February, but the experiences are various accounts from most of the year of 2014-February 2015. I cannot say for certain when throughout the year these particular events occurred, with exception to the last and final time I overdosed.

I want to start by giving some basic information to give an idea of what my state of 'normal' was for the entire year.

Around April 2014 I started to take the Diphenhydramine daily to help cope with actual allergy symptoms of being itchy and sniffly, and I knew there was a possibility I'd become addicted, and at first I managed to only take the one a day. Due to my inability to control my mental health problems, though, I very quickly began then taking 2 daily, and then 2 pills, 3 times daily, and so on. For most of the summer I was taking probably around 15 pills a day, 5 at a time, whenever I regained some semblance of real consciousness. I'd begun to determine that I didn't really wanna be alive anymore, but felt I should try to wait and have one last Christmas with my family. It became increasingly difficult to get through the day, and I wasn't sure most of the time if it was worth it to wait until then to try to die. So, I spent the rest of the time I overdosed, until February, just sort of wishing at some point what I was doing would kill me, but not actually trying to die.
Which, I realize sounds dumb, but, it was just where my mind was at.

By September I was taking 20-30 pills every day, 500mg-750mg, and this is when I started to periodically overdose on a more extreme scale, and leads me to describing the three occasions on which I took 1250mg, 1750mg, and 2500mg.

Due to how sick I was constantly making myself, the lack of sleep, and intense suicidality I was experiencing, I feel it's important that during the entire timespan I overdosed on Diphenhydramine I weighed between 95 and 86lbs and am 5'3'. I'm unsure how this effects the outcome exactly, but just for the record, that was my weight at the time.

When I took the 1250mg overdose was actually the worst overdose experience that I've ever had. The night I took the pills, I had taken the normal 15 pills in the morning that I had been taking at that time, and proceeded to take the 1750mg that evening, though I don't remember exactly why. It honestly didn't feel that much weirder than it normally did, I had chills and was shaking, teeth chattering, until I fell into a restless sleep until my husband got up for work in the morning at 4:30am.

While he was getting ready for work, I went to feed our 2 cats, but got distracted because I noticed a few piles of cat puke, got the mini bathroom trashcan, and proceeded to clean it up. My husband is a zombie in the morning, and due to my standard state of being, didn't notice my frantic cleaning and anxious explanation that the cats had puked EVERYWHERE, and left for work. After he was gone, I spent an hour cleaning pile after pile of endless cat puke, which made me puke into the mini trashcan numerous times. I started to notice all these bugs on the carpet, sorta near the puke, and started to kill them one at a time. I heard them crunch and felt them pop under the paper towels I had previously been using for the puke because I was barefoot.

As I was killing bugs, and becoming panicked because I kept noticing more and more of them appear, in my peripheral the cats kept throwing up, again and again. At this point, I determined that the cats were sick because they were ingesting the obviously-poisonous bugs, and despite my efforts, and because the bugs were EVERYWHERE, I couldn't get the cats to stay away from them. I kept shouting at them and wildly gesturing them to stay in the bathtub, which for some reason was bug-free, but they kept getting out and circling my feet and investigating the areas with the bugs.

At this point, 2 hours had gone by and I had given up on killing all the bugs, which were mostly very spindly spiders, and a few beetles. I got on the bed, for some reason it felt safer being up high, and peered off the side of the mattress at the spiders trying to get up to where I was. I noticed a dew-like sheen across the entire floor, roughly an inch above the ground, and realized it was the spider web. I couldn't understand how they had built such a big web overnight and how my husband hadn't noticed. After shrieking loudly repeated times and sobbing hysterically, I bravely ventured out and grabbed my cellphone from the living room where it all began. and was frantically calling my husband even though he was at work. I kept leaving messages about how he needed to call and exterminator and bugs were everywhere and that I was freaking out.

He eventually called back when he was able, somewhere around the 3 hour mark, and agreed to come as soon as he could, which was about 45 minutes later. I had just been preparing to call an exterminator myself, put the cats in the bags we take them to the vets in, and go outside, where, for some reason I felt there had to be less bugs. I was on the bathroom sink when he got here, perched on it, cowering and staring at the doorway to the room, and smushing every bug as it came in to have one
room without many bugs.

He proceeded to tell me that there were no bugs, at which point, I kept shouting that there were bugs everywhere, and shaking. I could tell he believed that I was seeing them, and it took him 30 minutes to coax me off the sink, and over an hour to believe that there really were no bugs. He is deathly afraid of spiders too, so he asked me to show him the bugs and then he touched them, which he would never do if they were really there. I made him touch each and every bug, and I made him point a flashlight at them all, one by one, and then after a LONG time, I started to believe maybe he was right. He had to go back to work, despite my pleading him not go, so I spent the whole day on the bathroom sink holding the flashlight when I needed to feed the cats again, slowly pointing it at the floor in each area. It took over 24 hours for me to stop seeing the bugs everywhere , probably around 36 total, and even though I accepted that they weren't real after a while, I still saw and felt them all.

The largest overdose on Diphenhydramine I took at one time was 2500mg, again this was in the evening and I don't know exactly how much I had taken in the morning, but again, I was typically ingesting between 25-30 pills, so it was probably around that amount. My husband and I had gotten into an argument, which escalated due to my mental health issues, and to avoid continuing to fight, he left to go see a movie. Being as suicidal as I was constantly, this pushed me very far, and even though I was still sorta determined to make it to December, especially since at this point, it was November, I couldn't control myself. I had just reached the 10 year anniversary of having been hospitalized at 14, when my issues had really started, and even though I didn't know if I'd die from the amount I took, like always, I hoped I might.

The night was actually typical for a few hours after I overdosed, at the time I didn't know where my husband had gone, or when he'd be back, so I pushed the dresser up against the bedroom door in case he came back while I had first overdosed and tried to make me puke or something. I sat on the floor knowing I'd prefer being firmly on the carpet instead of careening off the edge of the bed, played some very depressing music, and drifted for a while. After an hour or so, I somehow had the strength and ability to move the dresser back into its original place because I had decided I would try to behave as normally as possible when my husband got home, so he wouldn't know just how sick I'd made myself.

As per usual, I ended up in the bathroom, wanting to be near the toilet when I had to pee, knowing how hard it was going to be to walk at some point, and preferring to just already be there. I kept listening to 'Dark Paradise' on repeat by Lana Del Rey because my brain started to feel distraught whenever the song would change and the gap in between them would pause oddly, and the tempo changed. My husband found me there, and we had to go to bed because he had work the next day and it was late, somehow I got into bed by myself and laid there. It took the normal amount of shaking before I sorta fell asleep for 30 minutes, but, as is common, I woke up having to pee. Not wanting to piss my husband off by waking him up, I tried to get to the bathroom by myself in the dark.

Our room is arranged with my half of the bed being almost against a wall and my husband's is next to the door, I have to walk around the bed to get to the door, and the bathroom is behind the wall our bed is against. At the foot of the bed is a long coffee table with blankets for the cats to sleep on, and diagonally from the half of the table on my side of the bed is where the dresser starts. What I'm trying to say is, there is very little room between all of these objects, it was pitch black, and being that I had overdosed so heavily on Diphenhydramine, it was an obstacle course.

I fell heavily around 10 times going one direction on this first trip I made to the bathroom that night. I bashed my head on the dresser and the table, and the door-frames to both the bedroom and bathroom. I made several trips to and from the bathroom that night because, for some reason, Diphenhydramine makes me feel like I have to pee, or I kept thinking I had to anyways. I started using the door handles to maneuver my way to and from the bathroom, clinging to them for dear life, and still bashing my head against things, I crawled, but even that is almost impossible after overdosing on this. The worst things that happened that night was that I hit my eye-socket against the door-frame to the bathroom so hard that I had a black and blue bruise for over a week, I looked like I got punched in the eye, and that bone hurt severely. The other thing was I banged my head on the toilet bowl trying to get up on it to pee, and it just hurt a lot.

Somehow I made it to morning without dying on one of these bathroom trips, and my husband was about to get ready for work, and I felt so horrible physically that I asked to shower with him so that I wouldn't attempt to do so alone and get severely injured and be stranded alone all day without anyone knowing. He agreed, and I sorta knew the instance I stood up that the entire thing was probably the worst idea possible, but I am stubborn, and I got in there anyways. I started to condition my hair, and was entirely soaked when I knew I needed to get out of the shower, I knew something was very wrong, and I knew I needed to get out of the shower. I told my husband this and then told him again from a sitting position. Apparently, without my knowledge, between the first time I said,'Something's wrong, I have to get out of here', I had passed out, and repeated it again after my husband had caught me and gotten me into a sitting position, turned the shower off, and had helped me come back to consciousness.

I didn't believe him at first that I had fainted, but I knew he'd have no reason to make it up. He helped me out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, and I just laid on the floor for hours after he left for work. Unable to get up, definitely unable to rinse out my hair or actually shower. After 5 hours or so, I got into the shower in a kneeling position and rinsed my hair and finished showering, almost falling everywhere, got hurriedly dressed, and spent the rest of the day on the bedroom floor. For a while there were spiders everywhere again, but due to my last experience hallucinating them, I knew they weren't real, and I was too sick to do anything about it. I couldn't walk right for days, and even just sitting was difficult for a while.

The final experience I will describe was actually one of the smaller overdoses I had taken by then, and this time I took 1750mg. At this point, it was February, and I was taking at least 30 pills daily, often more, and I was very used to the symptoms and effects, and honestly thought this overdose would be like any other. It's funny ('odd'), because I planned on actually killing myself the day after this overdose, and this was supposed to just be a pre-suicide overdose, and, again, wasn't even the most I'd ever taken at one time.

It was around 4pm, and I had already taken some pills in the morning, this time I honestly have no idea how many, I had this glass Febreeze jar that used to have a candle in it that was cleaned out, and I had put around 400 of the 'Kroger Allergy Tablets' into it, because, why not? I dunno. I had had another argument with my husband the night before and was trying to chat with him on g-mail throughout the day to apologize and because at that point I'd decided that if whatever happened that day was negative I was going to kill myself the next day.

Around 3 he'd gotten back to me, was truly sick of dealing with me, and told me so. I begged him to come home because I knew I was probably going to do something stupid, and he became even more pissed. I proceeded to take somewhere between 75 and 80 pills total. I kept chatting to my husband, and eventually he was able to get on again, and I felt very ill by that point due to having taken the pills. I was having extreme difficulty typing, my fingers wouldn't hit the correct keys at all, but I managed to tell him I needed him to come home, that it was really bad this time. Honestly, I overdosed so often, and said this most days, so he didn't believe me that it was any worse than normal. He logged off, telling me to leave him alone, and so I did, and planned on dying the next day.

My body did feel a lot weirder than normal during this overdose, it felt as though my head was buzzing, and everything was really far away. At first I was shaking and panicking, which was normal, and I could feel and hear nothing except my rapid heartbeat for a long time. I eventually gave up entirely, it was as if my body kinda sighed and I was too numb mentally to really care anymore about what was happening. My heart was still racing, and I was shaking violently, but for some reason it sincerely felt so far away it didn't bother me. It all felt like some weird dream, and I threw up on myself (yuck), but I thought that was a hallucination, and my last conscious thought was ,'I think I might be dying'.

I woke up in the ICU some time later, I honestly have no idea how much time had passed, and only have odd flashes of random events in between. My husband and parents have given me pieces of what happened, and I keep trying to put them together, but have zero actual memory of a lot of it. Apparently my husband had gotten home, which was typically around 8-9pm, and found me unconscious on the bed covered in my own vomit, under a blanket that thankfully kept my puke off the bedding and mattress, with the laptop on my legs open to the page I had been chatting with him on.

He carried me to the bathroom where I continued to loll my head around and he had to puke my face into the toilet bowl and help me not to choke on my vomit. He told me I kept trying to say things, but as is common with Diphenhydramine, I can say things or try to say things, even think I am saying the right thing, and make absolutely no sense. He told me I kept trying to get him to leave the room and hitting my head on the toilet and counter, and that even though he had brought me in the bathroom himself, I was acting like he just got home and I was trying to pretend that I was just tidying the bathroom up (sorta OCD), and wouldn't stop grabbing at the toothbrushes and making things crash.

At some point he got me into the shower to try to clean the puke off of me, and I guess this is when I started to have seizures and he called 911, they came and got me, and I ended up in the ICU. I'm told I was asked a bunch of questions that I don't remember being asked, and truly I remember nothing between, 'I think I might be dying', and waking up with my husband next to me in the ICU, with no clue where I was.

I was there for a few days, and thought I was only there for one evening, that's how incoherent I was. I wasn't allowed to walk (obviously), and apparently kept getting up when I wasn't supposed to and making the alarms go off in my hospital gown, so my husband said everyone kept seeing my butt. Thankfully I don't remember that, but my mom has told me that I kept trying to talk to her and didn't make any sense at all, and kept reaching around for a chap-stick under my blankets that wasn't there. I guess that went on for hours with her and my husband telling me every few minutes that 'There is no chap-stick', and then about 5 minutes later I'd be searching around again, and they'd ask what I was doing and I'd say I was looking for my chap-stick. I was then taken directly from the ICU in an ambulance to a psychiatric unit and was there for a little over 4 days, and haven't overdosed on ANYTHING since.

If I had made it to the day after that last overdose, I'd be dead now. I had planned to take 300 Diphenhydramine pills, 100 Tylenol PM, and 10 anti-nausea pills I'd gotten from a previous hospital appointment with alcohol (Vodka/Whiskey).

Some symptoms I didn't mention that were constant due to my constant overdosing are: having bright red hands, legs, and feet, bruising constantly, having conversations with people that didn't really happen, hearing radios playing music at all times when there was no music, vomiting, seeing shapes in the shadows that weren't there, and light sensitivity.

Some symptoms I am still experiencing even after 5 months are frequent vertigo/dizziness, blurred vision, extreme trouble remembering things, nightmares, and difficulty telling what is real.

I hope this was at least informative.

Exp Year: 2015	ExpID: 106651
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: 24
Published: Oct 25, 2018	Views: 5,617
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Diphenhydramine (109) : Alone (16), Multi-Day Experience (13), Depression (15), Overdose (29), Addiction & Habituation (10), Health Problems (27), Retrospective / Summary (11)