Meth, two seizures, then the worst psychotic break of my life — I thought I was literally in hell
I wanted to share what happened to me because I’ve used meth before and I have NEVER been this far fucking gone.
On July 17 I had two seizures. I don’t even remember having them. One happened in front of my grandma and another happened in front of EMS. I bit my tongue and apparently was confused/combative afterward. The hospital put me on Keppra (levetiracetam) 500mg twice a day.
Looking back through my messages is fucking weird because I was having normal conversations after the seizures that I have absolutely no memory of now.
Then on July 22 I got meth. So as far as I can reconstruct the timeline, the meth did NOT cause those original seizures. They happened five days before I bought it.
Later I smoked what I thought was meth. I only took about three hits. After that I went completely fucking psychotic.
I hallucinated harder than I ever have in my life. I thought my mom had died in a car accident. When she actually came home, I started crying and told her I thought she was dead. I thought everyone was dead. I thought I was in hell. I thought the president and governor somehow knew about me and that I had somehow caused the end of the world.
I thought everything was planned.
The police eventually came. One officer resembled an NCO I hated when I was in the Army. At first I said, “You look like Sergeant Pena.” Then I became absolutely convinced he WAS Sergeant Pena. I started yelling at him that he was from Wyoming, that I knew who he was, that he was responsible for me getting kicked out of the Army and that he’d done this to me.
The cop kept telling me, “I’m not Sergeant Pena.”
Didn’t matter. I fucking KNEW he was Sergeant Pena. That’s how real the psychosis was.
I also destroyed a bunch of shit in my house and fired a shotgun through windows while hallucinating. Thank God nobody was hurt. By the time the police dealt with me I didn’t have the shotgun. They apparently realized I needed medical help instead of just taking me to jail.
I was completely disinhibited too. I was walking around naked, saying absolutely ridiculous sexual shit to cops and family, talking to people who weren’t there, replaying old memories over and over, and making weird jerky/twitchy movements.
Eventually I ended up at OSU Medical Center in Tulsa and spent about a week in the hospital.
For several days I couldn’t sleep normally. I’d close my eyes and immediately hallucinate. I didn’t know what year it was. I’m 31 and at one point I thought I was 26. I knew my full name, birthday and even my Social Security number, but huge pieces of my recent memory were just fucking gone.
At one point my thoughts became basically: “Anything is possible. Everything is happening simultaneously. I’m alive and I’m dead.”
I genuinely thought I had permanently destroyed my brain and was going to be stuck like that forever.
They treated me with medications, including Seroquel and trazodone, and gradually I started coming back. This past weekend especially, my memory and sense of time started returning. I’m recognizing which things actually happened and which things I hallucinated.
I still don’t know exactly what was in what I smoked. The hospital found methamphetamine, but that doesn’t tell me whether anything else was present. I’m also not blaming the original seizures on meth because, according to the messages I’ve reconstructed, the seizures happened before I bought it.
I’m posting this because meth psychosis isn’t just “seeing some weird shit.” I experienced an entire alternate reality that made complete sense to me while I was inside it. Real people became people from my past. Coincidences became evidence of a conspiracy. I genuinely believed I was dead and in hell.
And I could have fucking killed somebody.
I’m lucky I didn’t.
I’ve already been through residential treatment before. After this, I’m trying to get the VA to send me back to the same rehab in Texas.
I’m done with this shit.