DOSE:

925 mg

oral

Diphenhydramine

(pill / tablet)

BODY WEIGHT:

150 lb

In this report I’d like to describe to you in the best I can, an overdose of benadryl allergy capsules (Diphenhydramine). I’m not quite sure what that works out to in mg.

To start out I’d like to describe my life prior to the overdose. I was going through a fairly rough time in my life. A few months before the incident I was busted by my parents for smoking weed, which at the time was a pretty big deal to them. Two days before I was picked up by the cops for siphoning gas. Needless to say I was a little depressed and scared what was going to happen in court and what the parents were going to do to me.

I had done benadryl several times before the night I went to the hospital. With all the prior doses I had only minor hallucinations and slight detachment from this reality. Normally I only took around 10 or 12 pills and that was it. The night I took 37 I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I just wanted to get the full blown effects (not really knowing what they would be) and if I DID die I really didn’t care.

So now to the night it all went down. I was sitting in my room. It was roughly 10:00 and I was waiting for everyone to go to bed to pop the pills. I have a basement bedroom and as soon as I heard everyone leave the basement I cracked open almost two full packages and gulped them down in two big swallows.

And hears the bits and pieces I remember from the night. I remember sitting in my room for roughly half an hour waiting for the effects to come on. While waiting I either fell asleep or it all hit me at once. The next thing I know I’m up in the kitchen staring at my mom face to face. She asked me at least ten times, “what did you take?” The reason she knew I took something was my pupils were as big as golf balls along with other reasons I’ll mention later. After finally getting annoyed with her asked I told her I took some benadryl. Next thing I know I’m in a car on my way to the ER.

I don’t really remember the trip there, but one thing a remember crystal clear is walking into a room and being asked to lie down on the bed. I looked at the doctor for a few seconds like he was joking and then asked him, “Aren’t you going to clean the bugs off first?” He looked at me confused and then asked if I was hallucinating? I looked at the bed again and then realized what was going on. I told him no and slowly lowered myself onto the bed of beetles. I would just like to say this was probably one of the scariest moments of the night. I actually thought there were bugs but I knew they wouldn’t have bugs on a hospital been so I knew I was hallucinating.

Another thing that scared the shit out of me was the fact I had auditory hallucinations so bad that I couldn’t tell who the fuck was and wasn’t talking to me. I answered questions that my mom (who was sitting next to me the whole time) never asked me. The voices and questions they asked were completely random too. I remember being asked what type of fence is in your front yard? I answered, “Oh, it’s just a picket fence,” and my mom looked at me with complete confusion. It was at this point I stopped talking and only responded to questions if they were asked twice and I saw the speaker’s mouth physically move.

The rest of the night at the hospital basically consisted of me being given an IV of something, taking a drug test and staring out into the hallway. The reason I kept staring out into the hallway was because the whole time I was there I saw a swarm of bees just hovering there. I thought they were waiting for me to leave the room.

I was released fairly quickly only because I completely lied to the doctor and said I only took 7 pills and that I wasn’t hallucinating anymore. Which in actuality I was still trippin balls. After I left the hospital and was walking up to our van (this is what my mom told me the next day) I attempted to get into the car through the gas tank! This should give you a pretty good idea what state of mind I was in. My mom redirected me to the passenger door and we left the hospital.

I remember that bugs were crawling all over my legs on the way home. Another hallucination that kind of freaked me out was the shadows cast by street lights (more specifically the shadow of the pole). To me the shadows looked like curbs in the middle of the road. So every time we went over a shadow my body tensed up because I expected the car to bump off the road. And finally the last thing I remember seeing (and this still makes me laugh quite a bit) was a man walking on stilts down the middle of the road. I remember saying, “Whoa!” out loud. My mom asked me, “what?” and I told her she almost hit a man on stilts. Shortly after that I arrived home and crashed in my bed for the night.

What follows is the aftereffects the next morning and what my mom told me of the night before.

The next morning my eyes were still quit dilated. I wasn’t trippin anymore but they just never fully went back to normal. In school I got a few extreme anxiety attacks. I would be listening to the teacher and all of a sudden I would start to sweat and my hands would get quite shaky. No one noticed but I felt really panicky.

And now for the hilarious part. The reason the night before my mom knew I took something wasn’t just because I looked tweaked. Apparently I woke up tripping balls or it all hit me like a ton of bricks and I decided to go up stares. I speculate I woke up trippin cause she said this was around 1am. I went into the bathroom, tried to piss in the toilet but I was so fucked up I pissed on myself and all over the floor. After that I (not knowing I had pissed myself) started thrashing through the bathroom closet. This is what woke my parents. My mom asked me what I was doing and I told her, “I’m looking for sandpaper to finish my woodshop project!” She told me I was practically in tears because I couldn’t find the sandpaper! The funny thing was I didn’t even have woodshop. Another thing she told me I did, I went to change my pants to go to the hospital. I went downstairs put one leg in a new pair of pants and came upstairs with only one leg in my pants.

Overall this made a pretty funny story to look back on but not too funny during the trip. Apparently I had a heart rate of 150 and an elevated temp but nothing to critical. I just wanted to write this as a warning to people using this drug. At low doses it can be interesting but at higher doses you absolutely can not control your actions. So no matter how experienced you think you are if you take too much you’re not going to know what you’re doing.

Oh and by the way I have never touched OTC’s after this experience. It was just TOO SCARY!

And remember KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!

Exp Year: 2006	ExpID: 68454
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Apr 4, 2011	Views: 52,502
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Diphenhydramine (109) : Overdose (29), Difficult Experiences (5), Alone (16)