DOSE:

600 mg

oral

Diphenhydramine

(pill / tablet)

BODY WEIGHT:

155 lb

I'm writing this so people won't have to go through what I did with the over the counter allergy medicine called 'Benadryl'. Before you even think about swallowing a whole box of these, try reading about what it did to me. Well, It started out with me and my friend being bored. Generally being bored with him leads to drugs. So we go to CVS and and buy a box of 48 (24 for each of us). We were down at the shore (2 hours from my house), and we weren't sure on the dosing of it. I had forgotten what I read online. I assumed 600mg for each of us (again, 24 pills each) would be sufficiant. Well, I was wrong. It was more then sufficiant, it was horrifying.

--this is going to be really long, so grab some snacks--

So we open them in my car and down them all with some water. Then we got out, grabbed our towels, and headed to the ocean. I thought 'tripping' on the beach would be fun. It wasn't in any sense of the word. The hundreds of people didn't make things any better. We had crumb cake and a few energy drinks with us that we had recently bought. He drank the entire can on the way to the beach, I never touched mine throughout the day, I don't know why. This was his first mistake.

We settled down on the beach and I had to go to the bathroom, so I got up and started walking towords it. This is where the benedryl hits me out of nowhere. All of a sudden it feels like the gravity was turned up 10x. I got used it pretty quickly and continued to the bathroom. I couldn't go, or even had to go anymore. I went back to him and sat next to him. He seemed unable to talk, unable to communicate at all. I was a little worried, but I figured it'd pass. About a minute after looking around the beach like I had never seen one before, he taps me and tries to ask me where the bathroom is. I try to respond, but can't really talk. I just pointed to it. He started to get up, but then collapsed and started throwing up on his towel. This is where I start to get scared, worried, and extremely confused.

I just sit there and watch helplessly, getting more and more upset the more he throws up, almost to the point of tears. I couldn't move without getting extremely nauseous. Despite that, I tried my best to make it to the water. I get there, and the feeling of nausea is too much for me to even stand up, so I go back to the towels. I found him in the same position: huddled over with his arms over his head and a pool of vomit right below his head.

I just stared, with such a mix of feelings, that it was almost like I felt nothing. He was hyperventilating in random spurts, which also made things a lot worse for me. He told me to call the ambulence, but I had the feeling that it wasn't quite that bad (later on he thanked the fact that I didn't call an ambulence). I looked down at my legs, and started to remember all the experiances I had read online about people seeing spiders and worms on their skin when they're on this and think to myself 'why now....'.

Sure enough I saw the spiders crawling all over me. Hundreds of little translucent spiders about the size of a pencil tip. Sometimes they'd make patterns and usually when I couldn't see them, I could feel them (on my back, under my arms, ect.). I kept telling myself to calm down because I knew freaking out would make it worse. I looked at the clear blue sky and took it all in. I decided to try and get to the water again. The same exact thing happened again: I got there and turned around because of the nausea.

This time when I was coming back, some random lady asks me if I'm having a good time. Who the hell would do that? I'm still unsure if that was a hallucination or not, because I never actually saw her, but I had a feeling she was sitting on a towel in front of me. I just bit my lip because I was still having a hard time creating sentences. Well I started walking away and to my own towel and she just starts flipping out. Screamed something like 'Oh, that's a nice response!!' and going on and on but I didn't catch the rest of it. She has even more part in my story then this too.

I get back to the towel and my friend is still in that same position. By now it's been like 45 minutes. There was a second point where he tried to get to the bathroom again and the same thing happened. I repeated this 'going to the water' scenario another 5 or 6 times at least. Each time while I was sitting on the towel, seeing and feeling the spiders. One of those times as I was walking back, this old woman sitting in a chair with an umbrella asks me why I can't make up my mind. I paid no attention, trying not to get the same reaction as last time. I wasn't sure if these women talking to me were hallucinations or not, but it was best not to draw attention by talking into thin air if they were.

Eventually I mustered up the concentration and strength to go up to the boardwalk and walk around. I invited my friend to come along, he said yes but didn't move. He started going on and on about how bad of a friend I was and what an a**hole I was. This came out of nowhere, we're pretty good friends and he doesn't really have a reason to say that stuff, but again, I wasn't sure if that was him or me hallucinating. The next time I looked at him, his face was extremely mutated, like something out of the movie 'The Hills Have Eyes'. I tried closing my eyes and opening them again and he still looked the same. After a few minutes he looked normal again though. I asked him again after sitting there for 10 minutes, and he just gave me some money, so I decided to go alone.

I could not, for the life of me, walk in a straight line. I would drift back and fourth as I was walking. This was probably the worst thing I could've done in this situation. People are cold and relentless when they think they're right. This experiance on benadyl wouldn't have been as bad as it was if it wasn't for the people I had to deal with. Then again, I may have hallucinated it all, and that's a question that's going to haunt me for a long time.

The auditory hallucinations were far beyond anything I imagined this drug could do. I felt like I had schizophrenia the entire time I was on the boardwalk. It was very unsettling. There wasn't a point on the boardwalk, of all the time I was on it, that someone wasn't yelling my name. They were extremely convincing. I'd turn around and find no one or two people talking to each other. It was always a friend of mine, a group of friends, or my own mother of the voices I was hearing. There were far too many of these to go through them all, but there a few that were extremely confusing to me. At one point, I heard my friend (the one who was laying on the beach) run up behind me and start talking to me, and if I didn't pay attention he would start screaming my name and start chasing after me. It was only when I turned around that it would all cease. Eventually I learned to look at the ground and look for a shadow behind me, and if I didn't see one, I would ignore it. The ones where my mom was angrily yelling my name were extremely hard to ignore, but I knew if I turned around there'd be nothing.

As I got to the end of the boardwalk, I heard a group of 19 year old boys saying something like 'Yeah, look at you wobbling down the boardwalk.' This was pretty creepy because I couldn't, as with the rest of the auditory hallucinations, discern if it was real or not. About 2 minutes later I heard an announcer to one of the boardwalk games say something like 'We've got great smoking devices here, for tobacco or anything else. And you might not want to wobble down the boardwalk, because that's a first-class ticket to get the cops attention.'

After that crap I decided I'd had enough of the boardwalk. I continued walking after I got off the boardwalk into a parking lot, still hearing friends of mine trying to get my attention. I walked passed an old man in a wheel chair and when I got about 50-feet ahead of him, he tried asking me if I could 'help him in'. I was assuming he meant into a car. Now usually I'd help someone like that, but not today. I just continued to walk, confused and scared out of my mind, not understanding whether he was real or not. I got in my car, which I sat in for a bit. The lady that was flipping out on the beach flew past my car with someone driving and her in the passenger seat. She screamed some pretty nasty obscenities at me as they sped off. Then there was this guy walking down the street talking on a cell phone. He said 'Now honey, he didn't know, it's not his fault' and a few other things that tried to relieve me. He wasn't anywhere near her car. I don't even know if her car made it down the street or disappeared. I was so lost.

For the next 3 hours I was looking for my friend nonstop. I was walking up and down the boardwalk, looking in arcades and stores, and going up and down from the beach and walking all over it, all the time still having people yelling my name, even people I didn't know (which made things even more difficult). One of the times I was down on the beach, I noticed a seagull with a kite string coming down and about 6 inches about the sand, this insane purple-ish bat was wizzing through people with unmatched agility. It took me a bit to understand that that was the seagull's kite (which makes absolutly no sense). Eventually the beach emptied down to 50 or 60 people, which made him easy to spot. I walked up to him, unsure if he would disappear before I got to him. I sat next to his head. He was looking into infinity. He was just staring straight across the beach. We talked a little. Not much though. I got him up and we walked back to my car talking of our experiances and bit and other random things.

We got my car and that's pretty much the end of all hallucinations. Although while in the car I did see the spiders a bit more. I saw that old man 3 more times throughout the night though. Making him yet another unsure thing.



This experiance scarred me a bit. I do not ever want to go back to Seaside Heights. Unfortunatly it turns out we're going there in 3 weeks. This has also made me want to completely stop using drugs. I know that won't happen, but from now on the only OTC drug I will ever use will be DXM.

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 55413
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jun 16, 2009	Views: 51,245
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Diphenhydramine (109) : Small Group (2-9) (17), Bad Trips (6), Difficult Experiences (5)