dying, recurring visuals, and shrooms

hi. this is my first post, but i've been lurking in the shadows for a while. so, this post is long as fuck. i'm not sure if i'm a dick for making a long post like this asking for help my first time, but i'm sick of listening to doctor's and parent's conjecture. i want to address this to an audience with experience. i have this strange problem, and i'm not sure if it has to do with shrooms--but i'm pretty sure. i feel like there's a lot to say to explain what's going on with me; i'll try to be concise, and elaborate if anyone has questions. and lets see..i've smoked weed a lot of times (lost count about 200 times ago, hah), taken shrooms 4 times now, smoked salvia, and done some sort of barbituate (which was AWESOME). that's my whole drug history in a nutshell.

i will explain (hopefully quickly) an event in my past that i have re-lived 4 times, each time after i smoked weed. when i was three, i was diagnosed with a heart condition. one of my aortic valves is thinner than most people's. the doctors in 1985 thought they could treat this by inserting an angioplasty (or 'really thick') balloon into the valve, blowing it up, and leaving it there for a while. i was the first person this was attempted on. (incidentally, the procedure is much different, effective, and failsafe now). their balloon popped, rupturing my pulmonary artery, and i effectivley bled to death. they ripped my chest open, put me on a heart lung machine, and repaired the ruptured valve in an emergency open heart surgery. oh yeah, in all the scramble they cut through what is called a frenic nerve, which controls the movement of the lungs; consequentially one of my lungs doesn't move, and only gets half-inflated when the other one inhales (they're connected at the middle, you know?)

okay, that was a while ago. i was 3, and now i'm 21. my life has not been effected by these events in any way until recently.

so anyway, i hadn't really smoked too much weed in my life... i only bought it once before i moved up to college, and when you're poor in san diego, you buy that tiajuana shit that higher in the body-high cannoboids than in THC. then up at school i started smoking more frequently, bought my own bong, did that shit responsibly, stayed on top of my studies, chilled. i had tried mushrooms 3 times at this point. i've always been a little sensitive to drugs, so i always tripped on 1/16th oz. twice i tripped pretty hard...not a level 4 or 5 or nothing like that, but intense visuals... like staring at plants go through their entire life cycle, watching them grow into old age, die, be reborn, and go through it all again. dancing clouds, heightened BEAUTIFUL colors, those kinds of things. I understood other people as spirits, and could convey myself at a much more ground-level than in everyday conversation. my entire world-view would temporarily change into something more beautiful and honest. GOOD TRIPS. i was in control of the drugs i was using and i enjoyed them a lot.

then one day after i hadn't slept the night before i was over at my homies house and i took a fat rip off his bong. i started coughing harder than a mother fucker. i had to get up and go to the bathroom, and i just hacked my face off for like 10 minutes. i had started smoking cigarettes about a year before, which was particularly stupid for me, being that i have more or less 1.5 lungs instead of 2. so i start thinking 'oh shit, i only took one hit, my lungs are giving out on me cause ive been such a moron.' pretty paranoid at this point. then i calm myself down, and go back out where my homies are watching tv. then all of the sudden all i can see is red. then black. then red. then black. this starts going on, and i dont really know what the fuck to do, so i just sat there scared out of my mind. my mind felt perfectly clear, and i ruled out the possibility that i was high, esp. since i only took one hit. my heart starts racing, and i start thinking about how that one valve on my heart is still smaller than its supposed to be. so obviously i'm paranoid as fuck at this point about what happened to me when i was a kid. then the 'event' happened...at least, this is my best interpretation of it, and i've thought about it a lot. i started 'bleeding to death'. i could feel it right in my chest as real as anything else. "dude, matt, i'm going to die right now." i was so convinced that i was real, because i didn't feel high in any other way. i'll cut to the chase here: i went to the hospital, they put some IV in my arm, and i felt like the dumbest mother fucker on the planet. very embarassing. so let's move on...

i stopped smoking weed for a few weeks after that..but then due to some girl problems, i suppose, i started smoking in a habitual way that i had never done before. two or three times a day, everyday, for about 3 months. that fucked up death-trip didn't happen again in this period, for whatever reason. i mean, I LOVE SMOKING WEED, and i was having a good time..even though it began to trump my other responsibilities. (regarding that, fuck it--no regrets there). so then i pretty much quit for the summer and took up drinking instead, since i was in germany studying german. that brings us to about 4 weeks ago.

two days before school started, my friend rolls over with some shrooms. i had no expectations of taking them, and i didnt prepare for them at all. i hadn't eaten (good or bad?) and barely slept the night before. either way, i did not prepare myself mentally or spiritually for this. so he has them cooked into these little chocolate things, so there was no way to tell how much was in each one. he told me "i think this piece is 1/8th", so i ate half of it, he ate a whole one, and we left to go walk around campus which is beautiful at night. right away i knew i was fucked. i was saying shit like "dude i wish i wasn't on shrooms" and forcing myself to throw up. i forced myself to throw up like 3 times, thinking maybe i could prevent myself from getting as fucked up as i was already going to get, and had a couple of beers to try to mellow me out. anyway, i felt like shit during the peak, and the trees at this one forrest were giving me messages that i couldn't handle. and this bjork song kept playing in my head at this intensity level that i couldn't handle. however, after the peak, i relaxed... i didn't see any visuals, and the other effects were semi-there. i think they may have been fake shrooms, i.e. really there was LSD in those chocolates, cause every other shroom trip has always given me visuals and never such an intense auditory hallucination. but then again, there are different kinds of shrooms, and i don't really know what the fuck i'm talking about.

so, jesus christ, when is this guy going to finish. this is like, the end, i swear. sorry for going on and on, but i have been analyzing the shit out of all this for a while now. the next day i have to do dishes at my co-op so i wake up at like 1pm and smoke some weed. do the dishes, watch a movie, bam. now what? its my last day before school starts..i'm gonna smoke some more weed!!! so i rolled me a spliff and smoked it out my window when BAM. there is that existential death-crisis i-can-feel-myself-bleeding-to-death trip all over again. know what it was this time, i didnt go to the hospital. i just walked and walked and walked and walked around outside until it stopped. awesome.

gradually since that day when i flipped out from the weed, i started to see red and black static superimposed on everything that i look at. i've done some research on the internet, but most of is related to LSD; very little to shrooms, and like NONE to marijuana. some people call it 'visual snow/static' and others attribute it to HPPD. it comes and goes...lately it hasn't been as intense, but its been there all the time. its annoying as a motherfucker. for a while, this was coupled with these intense 2-3 x day panic attacks where i would not really know what the fuck is going on and would swear up and down i was dying, although i couldn't feel those memories from my earlier years like i could the other times. my doc. put me on clonodine for that, and even though i was skeptical, it has more or less stopped the panic attacks. he thinks that over time this drug will also stop the static--i'm not so sure. this god damn static is on everything i look at. its annoying as fuck.

so basically, has anyone on here gotten some shit like that before? judging from my strange medical background, is this chemically caused by the psilocybin/thc, or is it psychological? JESUS CHRIST, WILL IT GO AWAY????? and how long does that take??? i LOVE smoking weed and tripping on shrooms--will i ever be able to do them again, or will it just make this static shit worse/come back? has ANYONE gone through anything like this before, and if so what is happening now?

any comments or advice or shit-talking or whatever the fuck would be most greatly appreciated.

word
Neal

 

I've heard of some persisting visuals for 1-2 days after some high level trips, but I've never heard nor seen anything like your desciribing. Especially a month after the fact. Hopefully someone here can give you good advice or help you in some way. Good luck with your shit man.