How to titrate cardizem drip

Just for context, I'm a 31F being treated for schizoid personality disorder. This is not a psychotic disorder like schizophrenia. You can Google the symptoms if you're unfamiliar but the relevant ones here are: lack of motivation to perform goal related tasks (avolition), lack of enjoyment of/desire for social connections, difficulty experiencing enjoyment/pleasure in general (anhedonia), and a demeanor that comes across as cold to others. Life has always just felt very blah and draining with very little reward. I've always wanted my career to be something fascinating to give me fulfillment, but I'm pretty disappointed with where I'm at due to the amount of boredom and frustration my job gives me.
I've been an RN for 3 years and thought that I would really like it. I have a history of being fine with jobs at first and hating them once the feeling of a new challenge wears off. I've been job hopping since graduation and am on my third nursing job. It's relevant that I have some PTSD from my first year as a new grad during the pandemic. I live in a rural area so families were all convinced that we were killing our patients because COVID was a hoax, etc. There was a lot of ugly death and I got called a murderer a lot. That was a very difficult time, but it's over with and I'm now feeling bored, completely detached from patient outcomes, and socially drained to the point of resentment toward everyone I have to interact with. I've always kind of felt this way in general, but COVID made it worse. Also, the newness has worn off so a lot of it isn't all that challenging anymore and I dread having to force myself to do it. I'm only interested when my patient is crashing.
I have made myself the most comfortable I can manage by working nights in an ICU float position. A lot of my patients are unresponsive/sedated, families typically don't all spend the night, and my coworkers aren't consistent enough to make me feel like I have to make friends to seem normal.
I still struggle. Family members are usually emotionally needy, irrational, and clearly find me to be not warm enough despite me trying. We clash, even when they get along with other nurses, and it leads to a lot of frustration because I just want to do my job without being bothered. I also hate the big, arrogant, condescending personalities who work in critical care. Also, some coworkers are just too talkative and it annoys me I think an unusual amount.
Don't get me started on the patients. My assessment is that dumb, frustrating people get hospitalized more than normal people because they are less compliant with medical advice/do a bad job of caring for themselves. That, or most people are stubborn idiots. Either way I'm pretty hit or miss with getting along the ones who are awake and even normal pleasant people just chitchat too much and I find that intolerably draining/annoying. Sometimes I'm getting screamed at, insulted, and physically assaulted. Other times, I'm just putting on a mask while I scream internally because I want intolerable, needy, annoying people to shut up and leave me alone. This feels like death by a thousand papercuts. I'm outwardly nice, but it takes all of my energy to make them feel like I like them and it leaves me totally drained and bitter.
With that said, I make 110-150k depending on OT and only have to work 3 days a week. That's pretty cake. I just don't see myself doing this for much longer because my compassion fatigue is severe and it bleeds into my personal life to the point that I have less patience for everyone. I also think my PTSD is low key getting triggered a lot and it's exacerbating all of my social issues.
I used to work as an inpatient pharmacy tech at the start of nursing school and I basically got to be alone in the flow hood making IVs all day. It was peaceful, but I would really struggle with my motivation to get things done because I just didn't care/wasn't interested and there was no fire under my ass (I need adrenaline to actually get things accomplished, it seems). I also would ruminate in negative thoughts the whole time without any distractions and I ended up really depressed most of the day and dreading work. I felt isolated and even started to miss the stressful rush of being a waitress (which I hated). This is what made me believe that direct patient care was right for me. Now, I think I need an environment that offers interesting, intellectually challenging distractions and limited human interaction.
The final concern I have about my current job is that I make way more than the normal rate in my area. If I lost this job or wanted to quit, I would probably have to take a 60-70k salary. That's not terribly low, but it's a significant decrease from what I currently make. That leaves me feeling stuck and financially unstable.
I've thought a lot about CRNA school since there is close to zero interaction with alert patients, even less interaction with their families, and you have more autonomy with less peer interaction. I also really like the pharm/patho of critical care and enjoy titrating drips to get everything just right. I've been shadowing and looking up online communities to get a feel for it. I like the idea of having my own corner of the OR to work mostly independently, but I hate dealing with surgeons (they're mostly dicks) and I've gathered that anesthesiologists and CRNAs have social friction as well. I'm scared of going to school for 3 years, paying 100k in tuition, taking out cost of living loans (you can't work while doing these programs), all to only tolerate it for a year and then be bound by golden handcuffs. That's kind of where I'm at now, but I would be making twice my current salary with way more debt, so it would be much larger handcuffs. I don't think it's possible for me to shadow enough to get the experience of a year's worth of burn out to see what it's like. Being stuck in the OR all day might be a nice controlled environment, or something I will dread every day until retirement.
The CRNAs I've shadowed say that surgeons tend to be dicks to everyone in general, so they've just learned to not take it personally. They also said they're typically not angry with anesthesia in particular, but I'm not sure what that really means. One has thrown a tantrum every day that I've shadowed, but it was just annoying shouting/complaining about things not being exactly how they want it. I can't decide if that would be really difficult for me to deal with in the long term.
Is there something else I should be looking into? A career path I'm missing that's not completely restarting? Am I stupid for giving up my current job? What is an outside perspective on the CRNA idea? I can't be honest about my mental health issues with random people at work so I'm not able to fully bounce this off of anyone in the healthcare environment, and the CRNA sub gets inundated with posts from people asking if they should go to school for it so they are not super responsive.
Help me please! I'm miserable.

The fact she is unable to read directions and use COMMON sense scares the shit out of me. Her inability to figure out how to push buttons correctly on a machine that’s not even suppose to be difficult is astounding. I’m sorry but I cannot picture Anna working in a PICU where you have to apply critical thinking skills and taking cares of complex and super sick kids. On a daily basis you are using your brain and titrating, managing drips, analyzing and interpreting hemodynamic numbers, making life saving decisions, discuss professionally with family and your interdisciplinary team members, and calculating medication dosage for every single medication that kid is on. Thinking about the scope of practice that a PICU I cannot fathom Anna doing any of that. She has already proven to us multiple times she’s doesn’t care about her job, she’s unsafe with her dangerous poor sleeping habits, and now she’s showing us she can’t rely on herself to do independent research on how to figure out her fuckin coffee machine.
Anna if you’re reading this we know you are just working as an icu nurse for clout, quit before god forbids you make a serious medication error or sentinel event because you aren’t applying yourself.

I’m a new grad and next week is my last week on orientation and it’s freaking me out. I’m on a stepdown ICU floor and we get 4 patients. Some of these patients are really sick, some are on insulin drip where we have to do q1 glucose checks, and some are on cardizem drip, some are trach patients. We still get 4 patients even if they are on drips. I have been struggling with time management, especially if it’s the first night working with new patients. I spend around 45 minutes to an hour on each patient during their initial head-to-toe assessments because I like to be through. And most of their mediations are due when I do their assessments. I would start my assessments around 7:30-8 and finish my last patient around 10-11. And I am struggling. I’ve watched other nurses do assessments and they do it so quick like how?? Also I like to chart while I’m doing their assessments because I will forget about specific details if I don’t chart while doing it. Is this normal with new grads and any tips?

Hi everyone! Baby nurse here, graduated in May 2022 and spent a year in the OR. Ended up leaving due to toxic environment and wanting more direct patient care. I’m now on a cardiac PCU with a ratio of 5:1… sometimes 6:1 (which definitely sucks), but 4:1 if we are the cath nurse or if we have titratable cardizem drips. I’ve been on this floor for 6 months and on my own for 4 months. I do enjoy my unit and I have great coworkers for the most part, it does feel kind of cushy if that makes sense.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still learning everyday and gaining confidence in my skills… but apart of me is already getting bored of the 90 year old full code meemaws with afib or CHF. Plus, I feel we are more a med-surg tele floor at times and other times I feel we are more like a step down unit just with higher ratios….both sides are frustrating bc when I have higher acuity patients, I just don’t have the time to do the things I would want to do with a more critical patient. Then when I have a more med-surg like assignment, I get tired of all the BS and nonsense that goes with that.
I’m in no rush to leave my unit at this point as I’m still very early in my career, but I feel eventually I’m going to want more. I want to learn more and challenge myself more, I guess I feel that eventually I’m going to “cap out” on my unit if that makes any sense? I’ve always considered the ER or ICU, but not sure which direction would be best. Do you guys have any advice or can talk from personal experience on how you chose your specialty?

Hi I work on a stepdown unit in a small community hospital. We seem to be the dumping ground for all patients that are “too sick” for med surg but not sick enough for ICU. It is a constant battle with the critical care intensivist who is a NP on night shift. The attending or house officer has to call the critical care NP to see if they will accept the pt to ICU. Which majority of the time they find every reason not to unless the pt coded. It’s incredibly frustrating. More times than not we have 6 pts to 1 RN, and the aides have 8-11 pts. I’m just wondering what everyone’s ratios are and what are your thoughts on an NP being able to dictate what comes to the ICU and how an NP can d/c transfer orders when an MD orders it. Also what is the best way to get the hospital CNO to understand 6:1 on a stepdown unit is impossible. I know they only care about money but it is getting more stressful and lots of nurses on my unit are burnt out. We have 4 nurses leaving, 2 from dayshift and 2 from nights. I’m sure the answer is to find a different job but I have worked on this unit for 12 years and this is the worst it has been. I am one of 2 nurses on night shift who have stuck around for this long. We get NIVs, high flow, cardizem, , amio, heparin drips, stroke pts, CHF, total care trach/peg pts, ETOH W/d, frequent iv meds. It’s a disaster waiting to happen. Is the grass ever greenier on the other side?
Also they closed the progressive care unit and transitioned most of the pts that use to go there to our unit- they were 1:3 or 1:4 but somehow we are 1:6. No difference day or nights. It’s difficult on nights but I don’t know how our dayshift nurses do it. The only types of pts we don’t take that the pcu did are insulin drips and levo/precedex/nitro d/t us not having monitors in the room just the portable tele in the pocket. Also the med surg/med tele/ and obs have the same ratios but yet we take pts that those units deem are not appropriate for their floors bc our floor can monitor them more closely. We also get rapids from other floors for various reasons. How is this okay? Sorry for the rant had a terrible shift last night and PMSing.

We have a new manager who is making work miserable for everyone……
-if you don’t have your drink at the hydration station, it will be thrown away (this includes Stanley’s, yeti cups, anything). Thrown in the trash.
-the “customer is always right”. Family and/or patient complains about you….doesn’t matter what your side of the story is. You don’t even get to defend yourself. It’s a former complaint filed about you and it goes in your file. You took too long to bring them a blanket or ice…doesn’t matter your other patient was actively coding.
-personal cellphones must be left in locker all day. Write up if found with it out.
-forget to chart on your all important care plans? You get written up for that. Don’t chart your IV drip titrations right? You are practicing medicine and will get written up for that.
-have someone who is willing to pick up your shift when you are in a bind? Oh sorry, can’t do that. It puts them in Overtime so you just have to have a callout and let that shift suffer with one less nurse.
-literally gives zero f’s about anyone. Claims they don’t make friends at work so don’t even try to small talk with them because they don’t care about your life. SOO unapproachable, nobody likes them and it’s making work an even more miserable place to be.
Don’t know how much longer I can work for someone like this. Only there for themselves. Zero give, all take.

The screaming from my basement kept me up at night. The women I had kidnapped and chained down there often wept or yelled until dawn, and I knew things couldn’t continue like this. They were disturbing my sleep, making my life intolerable, and that made me furious to the point where my vision turned white with rage every time they woke me up. I would go beat them any time that happened, but they still kept screaming, and I knew I would have to find a better way to immobilize them.
I had originally bought barbiturates, benzos and fentanyl off the dark web. I also bought medical supplies like plastic tubing as well as machinery to titrate IV drugs. After a few experiments gone wrong where I accidentally overdosed a couple of them and had to administer Narcan, I found I could keep them incapacitated with a very low dose of fentanyl combined with high doses of IV benzodiazepines. But then my dark web connection disappeared, likely busted by the DEA or FBI, and I knew I had to find another way.
I read about legal drugs, and one of them caught my eye. It was a red-and-white mushroom by the name of Amanita muscaria, commonly called “fly agaric”, a mushroom that appeared in pop culture references from the Smurfs to Alice in Wonderland to Super Mario Brothers, but one that almost no one realized was psychoactive and totally legal. It had incapacitating effects, often causing out-of-body experiences and catatonic states.
“This is peeeeerfect,” I said to myself, smiling and feeling elated. I immediately ordered some Siberian fly agaric, and as soon as it came in the next day, I started extracting the active ingredients and diluting them in distilled water for placement in the IV bag.
As I went out to check the mail, I saw a male about my height far away in the forest, running away in a panic from something behind him, something that appeared to drag itself forward at an amazingly fast speed on its arms, yet had no legs. But when I turned to look at it directly, they had disappeared into the thick brush. I had no neighbors, the nearest one being over a mile away in the other direction, so I wondered who would be out here.
I lit a cigarette and stayed on my porch, watching and waiting, but after no more sightings or noises came, I gave up and went back inside.
Whistling to myself, I brought the IV bags down to the basement. The three women I kept there were currently all quiet, likely either asleep or just staring blankly up at the ceiling. They were all naked, chained to the gurneys. I only unchained them when they needed to use the bathroom or eat, but then I would immediately chain them back up again. They were all beautiful with blue eyes and blonde hair parted in the middle, lithe bodies and very light, Irish skin.
I walked down the creaking cellar stairs, moving next to my nearest victim. I didn’t usually bother to learn their names, but this one was a hitchhiker and had told me when I picked her up. She said her name was Ally and that she was a college student. She was beautiful and young. She was sleeping when I started hanging the new IV solution of fly agaric up to the medical pole next to her bed.
As the fluid began to drip through the clear plastic tubing, she woke up. Her deep blue eyes regarded me with hatred for a moment, then she turned away, not saying anything. Her face had a look of hopelessness and despair on it that I had seen dozens of times before. Whenever any of my victims neared the end of their lives, that kind of vacant hopeless stare was all that was left on their faces, sometimes accompanied by tremendous pain and fear, sometimes accompanied by acceptance and peace.
Whistling to myself, I began to walk around the room, checking the other two women for infections, making sure their chains were tight and that they were still alive. I was about to grab the padlock key to unchain them one at a time, letting them use the bathroom and get some food and water quickly so I could keep them alive longer, but then something started to happen from underneath Ally’s bed.
I heard a deep growling sound. Spinning around, I saw Ally’s pupils had expanded to cover her entire iris. Her eyes were staring blankly past me with a thousand-yard stare, and the room seemed to shimmer and glow around her. Underneath her bed, I saw a face with dozens of glowing white eyes staring out at me from the shadows. I backed up slowly, reaching into my pocket for the switchblade I always carried on me. It used its front limbs to crawl out, leaving a trail of reeking blood behind it and filling the room with the smell of iron and rot.
The monstrosity looked like it was rotting from the inside. Its skin fell off in fetid bluish-purple layers, its mouth was full of blackened teeth embedded in sickly brown gums, but its dozens of eyes were what truly caught my attention. They were all blue, just like the eyes of my victims. Some were icy blue, like an Alaskan lake, while others were the deep blue of a tropical ocean. To my horror, I could even recognize some of the eyes and which of my previous victims they had belonged to.
It dragged itself forward at a tremendous speed using its arms, with exposed muscle and bone showing through the worn, decaying layers of maggot-infested skin that covered them. It had no legs, but only bleeding stumps that left two thick trails of blood behind it on the floor. It had no clothes on, but the decay and constant squirming of maggots and insects in its body gave it a unique covering all its own.
“You can flee,” it said to me with dozens of overlapping, harsh voices, “but I know you better than you know yourself. You think you are evil, but the true evil is coming that will tear you to pieces. Run!” The last word was so loud that the entire cellar shook, sending clouds of dirt falling down from the ceiling, and I turned and ran up the stairs. I heard a rapid scuttling, dragging sound as the monster behind me gave chase.
“Ah oh no oh shit oh no,” I said to myself quickly as I ran right through the cellar door, not even stopping. It slammed against the wall, shutting itself again from the impact as I passed by. I ran out into the kitchen and towards the front door, which I always kept locked with two deadbolts as well as a knob that locked. I was serious about my security, but right now it was working against me. My shaking fingers quickly undid the two deadbolts as I heard the monster break through the cellar door.
“Jaaacckk…” it said to me, dragging my name out as it slid on its belly behind me. I had just gotten to the last lock, the turnkey on the doorknob, when I felt it grab my leg. I kicked back as hard as I could, smashing the bottom of my steel-toe boot directly into its face through pure luck, and felt the knob turn suddenly. I flung the door open, but just as I was running through it, I felt myself pulled back by the grasping arms of the eldritch monstrosity behind me. It spun me around to stare into its rotting face. I felt like I could do nothing for a moment but look into those countless eyes. Then, with a superhuman speed beyond my vision, it rapidly bit my right thumb off with its blackened teeth.
For a moment, there was no pain, just shock. I stared down at my spurting hand, the blood soaking into my white shirt, then a fiery burning sensation shot up my arm. Screaming and thrashing, I fell back through the door, kicking with all my might at the thing’s eyes and face. But though I made contact over and over, it just started laughing, a demonic and deep sound that rattled the windows and doors of the house.
Laying flat out on my back on the porch, I began to scoot backwards as fast as I could while it came towards me. Fumbling in my pocket, I found the key for the deadbolt I kept on the basement door, pulled it out, and unthinkingly shoved the piece of metal into the center of its eyes. It made a direct hit into one of them, sending warm vitreous fluid covered with squirming maggots shooting out onto my left hand. The smell was so pungent and the sensation of the insects so horrifying that I started to gag. But it bought me enough time to push myself up and begin sprinting into the woods. I held my mutilated hand with my good one, wrapping the cloth of my shirt around it to try to slow the bleeding. I knew if it kept spurting like it was, I would begin to lose consciousness from the blood loss, then that thing would have me.
The daylight was growing soft and weak as the sun set, but it was enough to see the brushes and brambles as I ran blindly ahead. After a couple minutes, I came into a clearing, where I saw myself standing in the center of the field. I stopped suddenly, looking behind me for the creature, but there was no sign of it. Then I turned back to me and started moving forwards. I saw he only had one shoe on.
“What the fuck is this?” I asked loudly. My doppelganger only smiled at me.
“We’ve made a huge mistake, Jack,” he said.
“Who are you?” I said.
“I’m you, obviously. Look!” He raised his bandaged right hand, the strips of a white shirt wrapped tightly around the dismembered thumb.
“How is this happening?” I felt like I was about to wake up at any moment, as if I were trapped in a nightmare.
“You didn’t do enough research into that drug you gave the young woman,” he said to me. “Not only did you accidentally kidnap and torture a psychic who has supernatural powers, but then you gave her a drug that causes time-loops and out-of-body experiences. Her mind is so powerful that it is disrupting the flow of space and time all around us. You are caught in the same loop now that she is subjected to inside of her nightmare state.” I shook my head.
“That sounds totally impossible,” I said. “There’s no such thing as psychics.”
“Before today,” he said, “we also thought there was no such thing as monsters. Yet didn’t you see the one who bit off our thumb? It had the eyes of every girl we’ve killed. She has recruited their spirits and pieces of their decomposing bodies to reform into a vessel for justice. You’re being hunted, and you don’t have much time. You have to listen to me and stop asking questions.” I nodded at him, and he went on.
“Your only chance now is to run out the clock. That drug, the fly agaric mushroom, only has enough active chemicals in that one bag to keep Ally in a time-loop for twenty or twenty-five hours, depending on how fast the drug begins to wear off when the IV bag is depleted. If you can survive the entire time, you might be able to make it out of this alive. Her powers should start to fade back to normal once the drug has dissipated…” He turned, looking. “Did you hear that?”
I was about to respond, saying that I didn’t hear anything, but then I realized I did hear something. It sounded almost subaudible, like the tremors of an earthquake deep underground just out of the reach of human hearing, but as I listened, it grew louder and the ground started to shake. Thousands of black, decomposing hands began to reach out of the ground, sprouting from the forest clearing like rows and rows of corn stalks, and I screamed in terror.
I was much closer to the forest than my doppelganger, so I began to back away rapidly. Some of the hands grabbed at my jeans and shoes, and I lost one shoe in the process of escaping, but within a few seconds I was back under the cover of the trees. My doppelganger wasn’t so lucky.
He tried fighting, kicking at the nearest hands and pulling a switchblade from his pocket, which he used to begin stabbing and slicing at the dozens of hands that now grabbed his legs, feet and torso. I saw black liquid dripping from the slices he made, but the hands were totally unaffected. They began to return to the earth, dragging him down with them. He shot me one final, terrified glance before he disappeared beneath the ground.
“Found you!” a monstrous gurgling said from behind me. I turned around and saw the monster there, one of its eyes deflated and still dripping, its mouth opened in a grin that stretched across its face like a Glasgow smile, its cheeks ripping open from one corner of its face to the other as its grin kept widening.
“Please, leave me alone!” I said, using my good hand to pull my switchblade out of my pocket. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to. I have no fight with you.” The thing laughed, a deep and disturbing sound that echoed through the rapidly darkening forest.
“You killed me, over and over,” it said, “and now I come to repay the favor. A life for a life, the ancients said, but your debt is overdue. You have only one life to trade, so I’m going to make this fun for us. You can have a sixty-second head start.”
I turned around and sprinted blindly across the forest, until I eventually found an abandoned shack. I took out my phone and tried calling for help. I called 911, but the only voice that came through was the voice of the monster, gurgling and laughing.
The internet worked, so I began to write up my story. I know I can’t survive for twenty hours. I’ve seen myself die already. These things are just toying with me before they finish me off for good.
I just wanted the world to know what happened to me, though. Maybe I do deserve to die, but at least I can give others a warning.
Stay away from the fly agaric mushroom.

The screaming from my basement kept me up at night. The women I had kidnapped and chained down there often wept or yelled until dawn, and I knew things couldn’t continue like this. They were disturbing my sleep, making my life intolerable, and that made me furious to the point where my vision turned white with rage every time they woke me up. I would go beat them any time that happened, but they still kept screaming, and I knew I would have to find a better way to immobilize them.
I had originally bought barbiturates, benzos and fentanyl off the dark web. I also bought medical supplies like plastic tubing as well as machinery to titrate IV drugs. After a few experiments gone wrong where I accidentally overdosed a couple of them and had to administer Narcan, I found I could keep them incapacitated with a very low dose of fentanyl combined with high doses of IV benzodiazepines. But then my dark web connection disappeared, likely busted by the DEA or FBI, and I knew I had to find another way.
I read about legal drugs, and one of them caught my eye. It was a red-and-white mushroom by the name of Amanita muscaria, commonly called “fly agaric”, a mushroom that appeared in pop culture references from the Smurfs to Alice in Wonderland to Super Mario Brothers, but one that almost no one realized was psychoactive and totally legal. It had incapacitating effects, often causing out-of-body experiences and catatonic states.
“This is peeeeerfect,” I said to myself, smiling and feeling elated. I immediately ordered some Siberian fly agaric, and as soon as it came in the next day, I started extracting the active ingredients and diluting them in distilled water for placement in the IV bag.
As I went out to check the mail, I saw a male about my height far away in the forest, running away in a panic from something behind him, something that appeared to drag itself forward at an amazingly fast speed on its arms, yet had no legs. But when I turned to look at it directly, they had disappeared into the thick brush. I had no neighbors, the nearest one being over a mile away in the other direction, so I wondered who would be out here.
I lit a cigarette and stayed on my porch, watching and waiting, but after no more sightings or noises came, I gave up and went back inside.
Whistling to myself, I brought the IV bags down to the basement. The three women I kept there were currently all quiet, likely either asleep or just staring blankly up at the ceiling. They were all naked, chained to the gurneys. I only unchained them when they needed to use the bathroom or eat, but then I would immediately chain them back up again. They were all beautiful with blue eyes and blonde hair parted in the middle, lithe bodies and very light, Irish skin.
I walked down the creaking cellar stairs, moving next to my nearest victim. I didn’t usually bother to learn their names, but this one was a hitchhiker and had told me when I picked her up. She said her name was Ally and that she was a college student. She was beautiful and young. She was sleeping when I started hanging the new IV solution of fly agaric up to the medical pole next to her bed.
As the fluid began to drip through the clear plastic tubing, she woke up. Her deep blue eyes regarded me with hatred for a moment, then she turned away, not saying anything. Her face had a look of hopelessness and despair on it that I had seen dozens of times before. Whenever any of my victims neared the end of their lives, that kind of vacant hopeless stare was all that was left on their faces, sometimes accompanied by tremendous pain and fear, sometimes accompanied by acceptance and peace.
Whistling to myself, I began to walk around the room, checking the other two women for infections, making sure their chains were tight and that they were still alive. I was about to grab the padlock key to unchain them one at a time, letting them use the bathroom and get some food and water quickly so I could keep them alive longer, but then something started to happen from underneath Ally’s bed.
I heard a deep growling sound. Spinning around, I saw Ally’s pupils had expanded to cover her entire iris. Her eyes were staring blankly past me with a thousand-yard stare, and the room seemed to shimmer and glow around her. Underneath her bed, I saw a face with dozens of glowing white eyes staring out at me from the shadows. I backed up slowly, reaching into my pocket for the switchblade I always carried on me. It used its front limbs to crawl out, leaving a trail of reeking blood behind it and filling the room with the smell of iron and rot.
The monstrosity looked like it was rotting from the inside. Its skin fell off in fetid bluish-purple layers, its mouth was full of blackened teeth embedded in sickly brown gums, but its dozens of eyes were what truly caught my attention. They were all blue, just like the eyes of my victims. Some were icy blue, like an Alaskan lake, while others were the deep blue of a tropical ocean. To my horror, I could even recognize some of the eyes and which of my previous victims they had belonged to.
It dragged itself forward at a tremendous speed using its arms, with exposed muscle and bone showing through the worn, decaying layers of maggot-infested skin that covered them. It had no legs, but only bleeding stumps that left two thick trails of blood behind it on the floor. It had no clothes on, but the decay and constant squirming of maggots and insects in its body gave it a unique covering all its own.
“You can flee,” it said to me with dozens of overlapping, harsh voices, “but I know you better than you know yourself. You think you are evil, but the true evil is coming that will tear you to pieces. Run!” The last word was so loud that the entire cellar shook, sending clouds of dirt falling down from the ceiling, and I turned and ran up the stairs. I heard a rapid scuttling, dragging sound as the monster behind me gave chase.
“Ah oh no oh shit oh no,” I said to myself quickly as I ran right through the cellar door, not even stopping. It slammed against the wall, shutting itself again from the impact as I passed by. I ran out into the kitchen and towards the front door, which I always kept locked with two deadbolts as well as a knob that locked. I was serious about my security, but right now it was working against me. My shaking fingers quickly undid the two deadbolts as I heard the monster break through the cellar door.
“Jaaacckk…” it said to me, dragging my name out as it slid on its belly behind me. I had just gotten to the last lock, the turnkey on the doorknob, when I felt it grab my leg. I kicked back as hard as I could, smashing the bottom of my steel-toe boot directly into its face through pure luck, and felt the knob turn suddenly. I flung the door open, but just as I was running through it, I felt myself pulled back by the grasping arms of the eldritch monstrosity behind me. It spun me around to stare into its rotting face. I felt like I could do nothing for a moment but look into those countless eyes. Then, with a superhuman speed beyond my vision, it rapidly bit my right thumb off with its blackened teeth.
For a moment, there was no pain, just shock. I stared down at my spurting hand, the blood soaking into my white shirt, then a fiery burning sensation shot up my arm. Screaming and thrashing, I fell back through the door, kicking with all my might at the thing’s eyes and face. But though I made contact over and over, it just started laughing, a demonic and deep sound that rattled the windows and doors of the house.
Laying flat out on my back on the porch, I began to scoot backwards as fast as I could while it came towards me. Fumbling in my pocket, I found the key for the deadbolt I kept on the basement door, pulled it out, and unthinkingly shoved the piece of metal into the center of its eyes. It made a direct hit into one of them, sending warm vitreous fluid covered with squirming maggots shooting out onto my left hand. The smell was so pungent and the sensation of the insects so horrifying that I started to gag. But it bought me enough time to push myself up and begin sprinting into the woods. I held my mutilated hand with my good one, wrapping the cloth of my shirt around it to try to slow the bleeding. I knew if it kept spurting like it was, I would begin to lose consciousness from the blood loss, then that thing would have me.
The daylight was growing soft and weak as the sun set, but it was enough to see the brushes and brambles as I ran blindly ahead. After a couple minutes, I came into a clearing, where I saw myself standing in the center of the field. I stopped suddenly, looking behind me for the creature, but there was no sign of it. Then I turned back to me and started moving forwards. I saw he only had one shoe on.
“What the fuck is this?” I asked loudly. My doppelganger only smiled at me.
“We’ve made a huge mistake, Jack,” he said.
“Who are you?” I said.
“I’m you, obviously. Look!” He raised his bandaged right hand, the strips of a white shirt wrapped tightly around the dismembered thumb.
“How is this happening?” I felt like I was about to wake up at any moment, as if I were trapped in a nightmare.
“You didn’t do enough research into that drug you gave the young woman,” he said to me. “Not only did you accidentally kidnap and torture a psychic who has supernatural powers, but then you gave her a drug that causes time-loops and out-of-body experiences. Her mind is so powerful that it is disrupting the flow of space and time all around us. You are caught in the same loop now that she is subjected to inside of her nightmare state.” I shook my head.
“That sounds totally impossible,” I said. “There’s no such thing as psychics.”
“Before today,” he said, “we also thought there was no such thing as monsters. Yet didn’t you see the one who bit off our thumb? It had the eyes of every girl we’ve killed. She has recruited their spirits and pieces of their decomposing bodies to reform into a vessel for justice. You’re being hunted, and you don’t have much time. You have to listen to me and stop asking questions.” I nodded at him, and he went on.
“Your only chance now is to run out the clock. That drug, the fly agaric mushroom, only has enough active chemicals in that one bag to keep Ally in a time-loop for twenty or twenty-five hours, depending on how fast the drug begins to wear off when the IV bag is depleted. If you can survive the entire time, you might be able to make it out of this alive. Her powers should start to fade back to normal once the drug has dissipated…” He turned, looking. “Did you hear that?”
I was about to respond, saying that I didn’t hear anything, but then I realized I did hear something. It sounded almost subaudible, like the tremors of an earthquake deep underground just out of the reach of human hearing, but as I listened, it grew louder and the ground started to shake. Thousands of black, decomposing hands began to reach out of the ground, sprouting from the forest clearing like rows and rows of corn stalks, and I screamed in terror.
I was much closer to the forest than my doppelganger, so I began to back away rapidly. Some of the hands grabbed at my jeans and shoes, and I lost one shoe in the process of escaping, but within a few seconds I was back under the cover of the trees. My doppelganger wasn’t so lucky.
He tried fighting, kicking at the nearest hands and pulling a switchblade from his pocket, which he used to begin stabbing and slicing at the dozens of hands that now grabbed his legs, feet and torso. I saw black liquid dripping from the slices he made, but the hands were totally unaffected. They began to return to the earth, dragging him down with them. He shot me one final, terrified glance before he disappeared beneath the ground.
“Found you!” a monstrous gurgling said from behind me. I turned around and saw the monster there, one of its eyes deflated and still dripping, its mouth opened in a grin that stretched across its face like a Glasgow smile, its cheeks ripping open from one corner of its face to the other as its grin kept widening.
“Please, leave me alone!” I said, using my good hand to pull my switchblade out of my pocket. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to. I have no fight with you.” The thing laughed, a deep and disturbing sound that echoed through the rapidly darkening forest.
“You killed me, over and over,” it said, “and now I come to repay the favor. A life for a life, the ancients said, but your debt is overdue. You have only one life to trade, so I’m going to make this fun for us. You can have a sixty-second head start.”
I turned around and sprinted blindly across the forest, until I eventually found an abandoned shack. I took out my phone and tried calling for help. I called 911, but the only voice that came through was the voice of the monster, gurgling and laughing.
The internet worked, so I began to write up my story. I know I can’t survive for twenty hours. I’ve seen myself die already. These things are just toying with me before they finish me off for good.
I just wanted the world to know what happened to me, though. Maybe I do deserve to die, but at least I can give others a warning.
Stay away from the fly agaric mushroom.

The screaming from my basement kept me up at night. The women I had kidnapped and chained down there often wept or yelled until dawn, and I knew things couldn’t continue like this. They were disturbing my sleep, making my life intolerable, and that made me furious to the point where my vision turned white with rage every time they woke me up. I would go beat them any time that happened, but they still kept screaming, and I knew I would have to find a better way to immobilize them.
I had originally bought barbiturates, benzos and fentanyl off the dark web. I also bought medical supplies like plastic tubing as well as machinery to titrate IV drugs. After a few experiments gone wrong where I accidentally overdosed a couple of them and had to administer Narcan, I found I could keep them incapacitated with a very low dose of fentanyl combined with high doses of IV benzodiazepines. But then my dark web connection disappeared, likely busted by the DEA or FBI, and I knew I had to find another way.
I read about legal drugs, and one of them caught my eye. It was a red-and-white mushroom by the name of Amanita muscaria, commonly called “fly agaric”, a mushroom that appeared in pop culture references from the Smurfs to Alice in Wonderland to Super Mario Brothers, but one that almost no one realized was psychoactive and totally legal. It had incapacitating effects, often causing out-of-body experiences and catatonic states.
“This is peeeeerfect,” I said to myself, smiling and feeling elated. I immediately ordered some Siberian fly agaric, and as soon as it came in the next day, I started extracting the active ingredients and diluting them in distilled water for placement in the IV bag.
As I went out to check the mail, I saw a male about my height far away in the forest, running away in a panic from something behind him, something that appeared to drag itself forward at an amazingly fast speed on its arms, yet had no legs. But when I turned to look at it directly, they had disappeared into the thick brush. I had no neighbors, the nearest one being over a mile away in the other direction, so I wondered who would be out here.
I lit a cigarette and stayed on my porch, watching and waiting, but after no more sightings or noises came, I gave up and went back inside.
Whistling to myself, I brought the IV bags down to the basement. The three women I kept there were currently all quiet, likely either asleep or just staring blankly up at the ceiling. They were all naked, chained to the gurneys. I only unchained them when they needed to use the bathroom or eat, but then I would immediately chain them back up again. They were all beautiful with blue eyes and blonde hair parted in the middle, lithe bodies and very light, Irish skin.
I walked down the creaking cellar stairs, moving next to my nearest victim. I didn’t usually bother to learn their names, but this one was a hitchhiker and had told me when I picked her up. She said her name was Ally and that she was a college student. She was beautiful and young. She was sleeping when I started hanging the new IV solution of fly agaric up to the medical pole next to her bed.
As the fluid began to drip through the clear plastic tubing, she woke up. Her deep blue eyes regarded me with hatred for a moment, then she turned away, not saying anything. Her face had a look of hopelessness and despair on it that I had seen dozens of times before. Whenever any of my victims neared the end of their lives, that kind of vacant hopeless stare was all that was left on their faces, sometimes accompanied by tremendous pain and fear, sometimes accompanied by acceptance and peace.
Whistling to myself, I began to walk around the room, checking the other two women for infections, making sure their chains were tight and that they were still alive. I was about to grab the padlock key to unchain them one at a time, letting them use the bathroom and get some food and water quickly so I could keep them alive longer, but then something started to happen from underneath Ally’s bed.
I heard a deep growling sound. Spinning around, I saw Ally’s pupils had expanded to cover her entire iris. Her eyes were staring blankly past me with a thousand-yard stare, and the room seemed to shimmer and glow around her. Underneath her bed, I saw a face with dozens of glowing white eyes staring out at me from the shadows. I backed up slowly, reaching into my pocket for the switchblade I always carried on me. It used its front limbs to crawl out, leaving a trail of reeking blood behind it and filling the room with the smell of iron and rot.
The monstrosity looked like it was rotting from the inside. Its skin fell off in fetid bluish-purple layers, its mouth was full of blackened teeth embedded in sickly brown gums, but its dozens of eyes were what truly caught my attention. They were all blue, just like the eyes of my victims. Some were icy blue, like an Alaskan lake, while others were the deep blue of a tropical ocean. To my horror, I could even recognize some of the eyes and which of my previous victims they had belonged to.
It dragged itself forward at a tremendous speed using its arms, with exposed muscle and bone showing through the worn, decaying layers of maggot-infested skin that covered them. It had no legs, but only bleeding stumps that left two thick trails of blood behind it on the floor. It had no clothes on, but the decay and constant squirming of maggots and insects in its body gave it a unique covering all its own.
“You can flee,” it said to me with dozens of overlapping, harsh voices, “but I know you better than you know yourself. You think you are evil, but the true evil is coming that will tear you to pieces. Run!” The last word was so loud that the entire cellar shook, sending clouds of dirt falling down from the ceiling, and I turned and ran up the stairs. I heard a rapid scuttling, dragging sound as the monster behind me gave chase.
“Ah oh no oh shit oh no,” I said to myself quickly as I ran right through the cellar door, not even stopping. It slammed against the wall, shutting itself again from the impact as I passed by. I ran out into the kitchen and towards the front door, which I always kept locked with two deadbolts as well as a knob that locked. I was serious about my security, but right now it was working against me. My shaking fingers quickly undid the two deadbolts as I heard the monster break through the cellar door.
“Jaaacckk…” it said to me, dragging my name out as it slid on its belly behind me. I had just gotten to the last lock, the turnkey on the doorknob, when I felt it grab my leg. I kicked back as hard as I could, smashing the bottom of my steel-toe boot directly into its face through pure luck, and felt the knob turn suddenly. I flung the door open, but just as I was running through it, I felt myself pulled back by the grasping arms of the eldritch monstrosity behind me. It spun me around to stare into its rotting face. I felt like I could do nothing for a moment but look into those countless eyes. Then, with a superhuman speed beyond my vision, it rapidly bit my right thumb off with its blackened teeth.
For a moment, there was no pain, just shock. I stared down at my spurting hand, the blood soaking into my white shirt, then a fiery burning sensation shot up my arm. Screaming and thrashing, I fell back through the door, kicking with all my might at the thing’s eyes and face. But though I made contact over and over, it just started laughing, a demonic and deep sound that rattled the windows and doors of the house.
Laying flat out on my back on the porch, I began to scoot backwards as fast as I could while it came towards me. Fumbling in my pocket, I found the key for the deadbolt I kept on the basement door, pulled it out, and unthinkingly shoved the piece of metal into the center of its eyes. It made a direct hit into one of them, sending warm vitreous fluid covered with squirming maggots shooting out onto my left hand. The smell was so pungent and the sensation of the insects so horrifying that I started to gag. But it bought me enough time to push myself up and begin sprinting into the woods. I held my mutilated hand with my good one, wrapping the cloth of my shirt around it to try to slow the bleeding. I knew if it kept spurting like it was, I would begin to lose consciousness from the blood loss, then that thing would have me.
The daylight was growing soft and weak as the sun set, but it was enough to see the brushes and brambles as I ran blindly ahead. After a couple minutes, I came into a clearing, where I saw myself standing in the center of the field. I stopped suddenly, looking behind me for the creature, but there was no sign of it. Then I turned back to me and started moving forwards. I saw he only had one shoe on.
“What the fuck is this?” I asked loudly. My doppelganger only smiled at me.
“We’ve made a huge mistake, Jack,” he said.
“Who are you?” I said.
“I’m you, obviously. Look!” He raised his bandaged right hand, the strips of a white shirt wrapped tightly around the dismembered thumb.
“How is this happening?” I felt like I was about to wake up at any moment, as if I were trapped in a nightmare.
“You didn’t do enough research into that drug you gave the young woman,” he said to me. “Not only did you accidentally kidnap and torture a psychic who has supernatural powers, but then you gave her a drug that causes time-loops and out-of-body experiences. Her mind is so powerful that it is disrupting the flow of space and time all around us. You are caught in the same loop now that she is subjected to inside of her nightmare state.” I shook my head.
“That sounds totally impossible,” I said. “There’s no such thing as psychics.”
“Before today,” he said, “we also thought there was no such thing as monsters. Yet didn’t you see the one who bit off our thumb? It had the eyes of every girl we’ve killed. She has recruited their spirits and pieces of their decomposing bodies to reform into a vessel for justice. You’re being hunted, and you don’t have much time. You have to listen to me and stop asking questions.” I nodded at him, and he went on.
“Your only chance now is to run out the clock. That drug, the fly agaric mushroom, only has enough active chemicals in that one bag to keep Ally in a time-loop for twenty or twenty-five hours, depending on how fast the drug begins to wear off when the IV bag is depleted. If you can survive the entire time, you might be able to make it out of this alive. Her powers should start to fade back to normal once the drug has dissipated…” He turned, looking. “Did you hear that?”
I was about to respond, saying that I didn’t hear anything, but then I realized I did hear something. It sounded almost subaudible, like the tremors of an earthquake deep underground just out of the reach of human hearing, but as I listened, it grew louder and the ground started to shake. Thousands of black, decomposing hands began to reach out of the ground, sprouting from the forest clearing like rows and rows of corn stalks, and I screamed in terror.
I was much closer to the forest than my doppelganger, so I began to back away rapidly. Some of the hands grabbed at my jeans and shoes, and I lost one shoe in the process of escaping, but within a few seconds I was back under the cover of the trees. My doppelganger wasn’t so lucky.
He tried fighting, kicking at the nearest hands and pulling a switchblade from his pocket, which he used to begin stabbing and slicing at the dozens of hands that now grabbed his legs, feet and torso. I saw black liquid dripping from the slices he made, but the hands were totally unaffected. They began to return to the earth, dragging him down with them. He shot me one final, terrified glance before he disappeared beneath the ground.
“Found you!” a monstrous gurgling said from behind me. I turned around and saw the monster there, one of its eyes deflated and still dripping, its mouth opened in a grin that stretched across its face like a Glasgow smile, its cheeks ripping open from one corner of its face to the other as its grin kept widening.
“Please, leave me alone!” I said, using my good hand to pull my switchblade out of my pocket. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to. I have no fight with you.” The thing laughed, a deep and disturbing sound that echoed through the rapidly darkening forest.
“You killed me, over and over,” it said, “and now I come to repay the favor. A life for a life, the ancients said, but your debt is overdue. You have only one life to trade, so I’m going to make this fun for us. You can have a sixty-second head start.”
I turned around and sprinted blindly across the forest, until I eventually found an abandoned shack. I took out my phone and tried calling for help. I called 911, but the only voice that came through was the voice of the monster, gurgling and laughing.
The internet worked, so I began to write up my story. I know I can’t survive for twenty hours. I’ve seen myself die already. These things are just toying with me before they finish me off for good.
I just wanted the world to know what happened to me, though. Maybe I do deserve to die, but at least I can give others a warning.
Stay away from the fly agaric mushroom.

The screaming from my basement kept me up at night. The women I had kidnapped and chained down there often wept or yelled until dawn, and I knew things couldn’t continue like this. They were disturbing my sleep, making my life intolerable, and that made me furious to the point where my vision turned white with rage every time they woke me up. I would go beat them any time that happened, but they still kept screaming, and I knew I would have to find a better way to immobilize them.
I had originally bought barbiturates, benzos and fentanyl off the dark web. I also bought medical supplies like plastic tubing as well as machinery to titrate IV drugs. After a few experiments gone wrong where I accidentally overdosed a couple of them and had to administer Narcan, I found I could keep them incapacitated with a very low dose of fentanyl combined with high doses of IV benzodiazepines. But then my dark web connection disappeared, likely busted by the DEA or FBI, and I knew I had to find another way.
I read about legal drugs, and one of them caught my eye. It was a red-and-white mushroom by the name of Amanita muscaria, commonly called “fly agaric”, a mushroom that appeared in pop culture references from the Smurfs to Alice in Wonderland to Super Mario Brothers, but one that almost no one realized was psychoactive and totally legal. It had incapacitating effects, often causing out-of-body experiences and catatonic states.
“This is peeeeerfect,” I said to myself, smiling and feeling elated. I immediately ordered some Siberian fly agaric, and as soon as it came in the next day, I started extracting the active ingredients and diluting them in distilled water for placement in the IV bag.
As I went out to check the mail, I saw a male about my height far away in the forest, running away in a panic from something behind him, something that appeared to drag itself forward at an amazingly fast speed on its arms, yet had no legs. But when I turned to look at it directly, they had disappeared into the thick brush. I had no neighbors, the nearest one being over a mile away in the other direction, so I wondered who would be out here.
I lit a cigarette and stayed on my porch, watching and waiting, but after no more sightings or noises came, I gave up and went back inside.
Whistling to myself, I brought the IV bags down to the basement. The three women I kept there were currently all quiet, likely either asleep or just staring blankly up at the ceiling. They were all naked, chained to the gurneys. I only unchained them when they needed to use the bathroom or eat, but then I would immediately chain them back up again. They were all beautiful with blue eyes and blonde hair parted in the middle, lithe bodies and very light, Irish skin.
I walked down the creaking cellar stairs, moving next to my nearest victim. I didn’t usually bother to learn their names, but this one was a hitchhiker and had told me when I picked her up. She said her name was Ally and that she was a college student. She was beautiful and young. She was sleeping when I started hanging the new IV solution of fly agaric up to the medical pole next to her bed.
As the fluid began to drip through the clear plastic tubing, she woke up. Her deep blue eyes regarded me with hatred for a moment, then she turned away, not saying anything. Her face had a look of hopelessness and despair on it that I had seen dozens of times before. Whenever any of my victims neared the end of their lives, that kind of vacant hopeless stare was all that was left on their faces, sometimes accompanied by tremendous pain and fear, sometimes accompanied by acceptance and peace.
Whistling to myself, I began to walk around the room, checking the other two women for infections, making sure their chains were tight and that they were still alive. I was about to grab the padlock key to unchain them one at a time, letting them use the bathroom and get some food and water quickly so I could keep them alive longer, but then something started to happen from underneath Ally’s bed.
I heard a deep growling sound. Spinning around, I saw Ally’s pupils had expanded to cover her entire iris. Her eyes were staring blankly past me with a thousand-yard stare, and the room seemed to shimmer and glow around her. Underneath her bed, I saw a face with dozens of glowing white eyes staring out at me from the shadows. I backed up slowly, reaching into my pocket for the switchblade I always carried on me. It used its front limbs to crawl out, leaving a trail of reeking blood behind it and filling the room with the smell of iron and rot.
The monstrosity looked like it was rotting from the inside. Its skin fell off in fetid bluish-purple layers, its mouth was full of blackened teeth embedded in sickly brown gums, but its dozens of eyes were what truly caught my attention. They were all blue, just like the eyes of my victims. Some were icy blue, like an Alaskan lake, while others were the deep blue of a tropical ocean. To my horror, I could even recognize some of the eyes and which of my previous victims they had belonged to.
It dragged itself forward at a tremendous speed using its arms, with exposed muscle and bone showing through the worn, decaying layers of maggot-infested skin that covered them. It had no legs, but only bleeding stumps that left two thick trails of blood behind it on the floor. It had no clothes on, but the decay and constant squirming of maggots and insects in its body gave it a unique covering all its own.
“You can flee,” it said to me with dozens of overlapping, harsh voices, “but I know you better than you know yourself. You think you are evil, but the true evil is coming that will tear you to pieces. Run!” The last word was so loud that the entire cellar shook, sending clouds of dirt falling down from the ceiling, and I turned and ran up the stairs. I heard a rapid scuttling, dragging sound as the monster behind me gave chase.
“Ah oh no oh shit oh no,” I said to myself quickly as I ran right through the cellar door, not even stopping. It slammed against the wall, shutting itself again from the impact as I passed by. I ran out into the kitchen and towards the front door, which I always kept locked with two deadbolts as well as a knob that locked. I was serious about my security, but right now it was working against me. My shaking fingers quickly undid the two deadbolts as I heard the monster break through the cellar door.
“Jaaacckk…” it said to me, dragging my name out as it slid on its belly behind me. I had just gotten to the last lock, the turnkey on the doorknob, when I felt it grab my leg. I kicked back as hard as I could, smashing the bottom of my steel-toe boot directly into its face through pure luck, and felt the knob turn suddenly. I flung the door open, but just as I was running through it, I felt myself pulled back by the grasping arms of the eldritch monstrosity behind me. It spun me around to stare into its rotting face. I felt like I could do nothing for a moment but look into those countless eyes. Then, with a superhuman speed beyond my vision, it rapidly bit my right thumb off with its blackened teeth.
For a moment, there was no pain, just shock. I stared down at my spurting hand, the blood soaking into my white shirt, then a fiery burning sensation shot up my arm. Screaming and thrashing, I fell back through the door, kicking with all my might at the thing’s eyes and face. But though I made contact over and over, it just started laughing, a demonic and deep sound that rattled the windows and doors of the house.
Laying flat out on my back on the porch, I began to scoot backwards as fast as I could while it came towards me. Fumbling in my pocket, I found the key for the deadbolt I kept on the basement door, pulled it out, and unthinkingly shoved the piece of metal into the center of its eyes. It made a direct hit into one of them, sending warm vitreous fluid covered with squirming maggots shooting out onto my left hand. The smell was so pungent and the sensation of the insects so horrifying that I started to gag. But it bought me enough time to push myself up and begin sprinting into the woods. I held my mutilated hand with my good one, wrapping the cloth of my shirt around it to try to slow the bleeding. I knew if it kept spurting like it was, I would begin to lose consciousness from the blood loss, then that thing would have me.
The daylight was growing soft and weak as the sun set, but it was enough to see the brushes and brambles as I ran blindly ahead. After a couple minutes, I came into a clearing, where I saw myself standing in the center of the field. I stopped suddenly, looking behind me for the creature, but there was no sign of it. Then I turned back to me and started moving forwards. I saw he only had one shoe on.
“What the fuck is this?” I asked loudly. My doppelganger only smiled at me.
“We’ve made a huge mistake, Jack,” he said.
“Who are you?” I said.
“I’m you, obviously. Look!” He raised his bandaged right hand, the strips of a white shirt wrapped tightly around the dismembered thumb.
“How is this happening?” I felt like I was about to wake up at any moment, as if I were trapped in a nightmare.
“You didn’t do enough research into that drug you gave the young woman,” he said to me. “Not only did you accidentally kidnap and torture a psychic who has supernatural powers, but then you gave her a drug that causes time-loops and out-of-body experiences. Her mind is so powerful that it is disrupting the flow of space and time all around us. You are caught in the same loop now that she is subjected to inside of her nightmare state.” I shook my head.
“That sounds totally impossible,” I said. “There’s no such thing as psychics.”
“Before today,” he said, “we also thought there was no such thing as monsters. Yet didn’t you see the one who bit off our thumb? It had the eyes of every girl we’ve killed. She has recruited their spirits and pieces of their decomposing bodies to reform into a vessel for justice. You’re being hunted, and you don’t have much time. You have to listen to me and stop asking questions.” I nodded at him, and he went on.
“Your only chance now is to run out the clock. That drug, the fly agaric mushroom, only has enough active chemicals in that one bag to keep Ally in a time-loop for twenty or twenty-five hours, depending on how fast the drug begins to wear off when the IV bag is depleted. If you can survive the entire time, you might be able to make it out of this alive. Her powers should start to fade back to normal once the drug has dissipated…” He turned, looking. “Did you hear that?”
I was about to respond, saying that I didn’t hear anything, but then I realized I did hear something. It sounded almost subaudible, like the tremors of an earthquake deep underground just out of the reach of human hearing, but as I listened, it grew louder and the ground started to shake. Thousands of black, decomposing hands began to reach out of the ground, sprouting from the forest clearing like rows and rows of corn stalks, and I screamed in terror.
I was much closer to the forest than my doppelganger, so I began to back away rapidly. Some of the hands grabbed at my jeans and shoes, and I lost one shoe in the process of escaping, but within a few seconds I was back under the cover of the trees. My doppelganger wasn’t so lucky.
He tried fighting, kicking at the nearest hands and pulling a switchblade from his pocket, which he used to begin stabbing and slicing at the dozens of hands that now grabbed his legs, feet and torso. I saw black liquid dripping from the slices he made, but the hands were totally unaffected. They began to return to the earth, dragging him down with them. He shot me one final, terrified glance before he disappeared beneath the ground.
“Found you!” a monstrous gurgling said from behind me. I turned around and saw the monster there, one of its eyes deflated and still dripping, its mouth opened in a grin that stretched across its face like a Glasgow smile, its cheeks ripping open from one corner of its face to the other as its grin kept widening.
“Please, leave me alone!” I said, using my good hand to pull my switchblade out of my pocket. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to. I have no fight with you.” The thing laughed, a deep and disturbing sound that echoed through the rapidly darkening forest.
“You killed me, over and over,” it said, “and now I come to repay the favor. A life for a life, the ancients said, but your debt is overdue. You have only one life to trade, so I’m going to make this fun for us. You can have a sixty-second head start.”
I turned around and sprinted blindly across the forest, until I eventually found an abandoned shack. I took out my phone and tried calling for help. I called 911, but the only voice that came through was the voice of the monster, gurgling and laughing.
The internet worked, so I began to write up my story. I know I can’t survive for twenty hours. I’ve seen myself die already. These things are just toying with me before they finish me off for good.
I just wanted the world to know what happened to me, though. Maybe I do deserve to die, but at least I can give others a warning.
Stay away from the fly agaric mushroom.

Seven weeks ago (Feb 16th) I abandoned low carb and began seeking the way of the Croissant.
Immediately prior, I'd been trying to get carnivore to work for me, and it just ... didn't. Never felt satisfied. Got really freaking tired of meat. Felt alienated from humanity and all familiar food traditions.
Plus, my chronic acid reflux came back. For years, I've blamed it on carbs, and have mostly managed it by avoiding carbs. (Except, looking back, all those carbs were drizzled in seed oils, and on carnivore it came roaring back when I ate piles of bacon, so ... it's the PUFAs, isn't it.)
For the past seven weeks, I have been strictly avoiding all oils, all monogastric animal fat, and all nuts and seeds. I cook with beef dripping, suet tallow or butter. There's been two or three instances where I ate a baked good with a bit of chopped walnuts, or a piece of mystery grocery store sheet cake, or a McDonald's bun. I'm not sweating that.
When I let myself eat as I please, protein seems to consistently fall right around 10%. For years I've been forcing that higher. Fighting myself to eat more meat, more eggs, more cheese, scolding myself for secretly only wanting piles of pasta and bread and fruit. Eventually it became second nature, but it never felt natural. For years I've been struggling to hit 150g/day of protein. As soon as I stopped pushing it, that fell automatically to 70g. And it feels great. Maybe I'll crave more when I get further away from that recent carnivore stint, or when I'm no longer carrying around ~50lbs of extra weight. We'll see.
This is a long post. There's three stages. (TMI warning for frank discussion of digestive issues.)
Part One: Very Swamp, Much Hunger
I was scared of carbs. For years, I've believed them to be the root of all my woes. But I couldn't deny the success stories here, especially the people having good success on high carb low everything else, which absolutely exploded my mental model of How Nutrition Works.
Plus, I had powerful cravings for croissants, chocolate, and potatoes. So I quit fighting my desires and dove in. Butter croissants. Hot cocoa made with heavy cream and 70% chocolate. Ice cream. Bread with butter and jam. Mashed potatoes with sticks of butter. Apple cider. Orange juice. Pasta from my favorite Italian place, slathered in vodka cream sauce with bits of beef sausage. Oatmeal with bananas and butter. More heavy cream, drunk straight from the bottle.
I was ravenous. Remember, I was coming straight off carnivore. For the previous month I'd been forcing myself to be content with piles of steak and fried fat trimmings. For most of the previous year, I'd kept carbs low, always hoping I'd eventually reach the promised land of fat adaptation and boundless energy but slowly feeling worse and worse.
So I ate.
I started on 2/16 with that incredible pasta, off-limits for so many months. Next morning, despite the sudden influx of carbs, the scale read a new low. (This is a known phenomenon in keto-land, where sometimes one day of carbing up results in an overnight "whoosh.") Then for the next week I gained rapidly and steadily, six pounds in seven days. That was exactly as I expected: the water weight regain after going off keto as I replenished glycogen stores, intestinal bulk, etc etc.
What I didn't expect was the deep sense of wellness that pervaded me. The calm, quiet joy. The boundless energy.
My focus at work improved. On carnivore, time had stretched out to a crawl, hours feeling interminable. Now back on carbs, I was losing myself in projects and glancing up to discover it was already lunchtime. I suddenly had surplus mental capacity again and started experimenting with VBA and working through a SQL tutorial in spare moments. I've always had a bent toward self-teaching, but for ages I haven't had the energy to take on anything extra.
I biked to work, zipping along as fast as I could for the pure glee of it, grinning like a fool, feeling like I was ten years old again with an inexhaustible well of power and energy inside me.
Carbs really are the preferred fuel of the body! Why did I shun them for so long??
For two weeks, I tried to hit "croissant" ratios, keeping fat and carb roughly equal by gram. I ate completely ad libitum but tracked everything meticulously. Looking through my logs, I averaged 3611 Calories/day: 67g protein, 247g fat, 280g carb. In other words, 7% P, 62% F, 31% C.
The only way I could get the fat that high was by drinking lots of heavy cream. For the protein, I cooked ground beef with veggies and tomato sauce and shredded kale. Then the rest of the day I'd eat oatmeal with butter and potatoes. Lots of potatoes. Potatoes until I got tired of eating potatoes and then cream sipped straight from the jug until I was satiated.
All potatoes work for some people. All cream works for others. "Wouldn't it be funny," I thought, "if ad lib potatoes + cream worked for me?"
It did not. The first week's rapid weight gain didn't concern me. The second week, though, didn't quite level off, instead trending gradually up. The ravenous hunger wasn't abating. I was still eating and eating, feeling like a bottomless pit. And after drinking all the cream I wanted, I felt bloated and sluggish, like a huge python unable to move while it digests its meal.
One day, after a three-hour post-lunch nap, I decided something had to change.
Part Two: Less Fat, More Potassium
At first I thought, "well, drastic change #1 didn't work, time for drastic change #2! cut the fat right out! go high carb low fat! that's what everyone else seems to be doing!"
The next day, as an experiment, I tried HCLFLP (80% carb, 10% fat, 10% protein right on the money). As one-day proof-of-concept it demonstrated I could be surprisingly satisfied with all carbs all the time (quite the shock after years of believing that carbs are just "empty calories!").
Then I came to my senses and remembered that gradual changes usually work better than drastic ones. Leapfrogging from one extreme to the next may skip over vast swathes of workable territory. Changing things a bit at a time and seeing what happens? That's where the magic is.
So, rather than full 80/10/10 high carb, what if I just eased my way a bit further toward the carb side of the swamp? I'd been hitting 60% fat 30% carb. What if I tipped that balance the other way?
I swapped my morning heavy cream hot chocolate for a big soft bowl of oatmeal. I made more rice. I started a sourdough starter and began making pancake-bannock-things with the discard.
I'd already stopped pushing protein on myself. Now I stopped pushing fat. No more melting whole sticks of butter into my mashed potatoes or drinking cream just to hit a certain ratio. Just spreading however much butter onto my bread felt right.
Over the next two weeks, I averaged 2,541 Calories: 68g protein, 93g fat, 358g carb, or 11%P, 33%F, 56% C. Whaddya know. Following the inner butter voice landed me right where I wanted.
The other thing I changed in this period was potassium.
I've gone keto multiple times. I know all about electrolytes. Despite the strict minimums recommended over at keto, I've always gone largely by feel. Mix the ketoade, sip on it, if it tastes like the best thing ever then chug, if it tastes nasty don't bother. Whenever I fiddle my carbs down, I watch for salt cravings or the weird muscle twinges of low potassium.
Somehow, it did not occur to me that going the other way would need any particular care.
I went from 80g/day of carbs to 350g/day, put all the water weight back on after a year without it, and it took me two damn weeks to think "wait, I bet the electrolytes are out of whack again."
I mixed the goddamn ketoade.
Usually I shoot for roughly LMNT ratios, which is to say way more sodium than potassium. Easiest way to do that is half LiteSalt, half regular salt, lemon juice and honey or sugar to taste.
This time, that tasted too salty. But I was getting the weird muscle twinges, and all the Slime Mold Time Mold business about potassium was on my mind. So I tried again with just LiteSalt, lemon juice, and honey.
BEST THING EVER.
Tasted so good that I guzzled down about 10,000mg of potassium that day. A couple days later, the same again. Then it stopped tasting quite so good and I leveled off around 5,000mg most days.
The insatiable hunger abated, but a new problem presented itself.
You know what happens when you take in absurd quantities of potassium? The Shits. That's what happens. I was in the bathroom every hour, sometimes multiple times, shitting my absolute guts out and then happily slurping down more potassium brine.
Don't be like me. When you decide to experiment with potassium, TITRATE UP SLOWLY THE WAY THEY TELL YOU TO. Don't just slam 10g of K and think your intestines will magically be immune.
Eventually I wised up and laid off the potassium brine. Immediately the toilet explosions ceased. I've been sprinkling LiteSalt on my food to get a bit of extra potassium but no more brine guzzling.
Part Three: HCLFLP
I quit tracking everything I'm eating, cause it's ad lib anyway and I got tired of weighing things. But my fat intake keeps trending down. I'm still following the inner voice of butter desire, but the desire has been fading. I don't feel as good after eating fat. I keep gravitating toward big bowls of plain oatmeal with honey, pancakes with maple syrup but no butter, bread with jam, pasta with marinara sauce, lots of fruit.
When y'all first told me about HCLFLP foods I couldn't imagine being satisfied on them but they're so good??? I feel amazing.
I dropped some water weight during the osmotic diarrhea week and regained it after, but now my weight seems to be stable on HCLFLP. Last couple times I tracked my food it's hovering at 70-80% carbs, 10-15% fat and 10-15% protein.
Gut microbiome is still adjusting. Can hardly blame the little critters: I spent most of last year insisting that they adapt to low-carb high-fat and then I did an abrupt U-turn. But yikes. The gas is foul, y'all. It's slowly improving but... yikes.
I feel like I should be trying to lose weight now, with fasting or something? But I have no motivation at the moment. I'm too happy just hanging out here eating as much as I want, enjoying the carb energy, getting used to how hunger feels on high carb. I'm still ~50 lbs overweight and I want to fix that, but... not quite ready I guess.
TL;DR: Stopped pushing arbitrary macro targets and started listening to my body. Protein dropped automatically to ~10%, followed by fat. Fucked around with potassium and found out. Carbs are life.

I work at a step down unit, and this patient has a cardizem drip running for a-fib with RVR. Most cardizem drip instructions say to titrate until you achieve a heart rate under 100. But recently that I've been getting patients that have instructions to achieve a heart rate below 80. I feel like that's a bit much, and more of a small window considering that u don't want the heart to go below 60 either. Are your cardizem drips the same or is it also 100?

Because baby clock in then as one if you think you know it all. I love the techs that are helpful and stay within their capabilities, but I’m so sick of some of them thinking they can do whatever and give incorrect patient education, take unstable patients off bipap, and argue with me about how much juice a patient should get with a 70 blood sugar. I’ve been a tech for 3 years prior to becoming a nurse (nurse for 4yrs) and I’ve never been this fucking bold as a CNA
EDIT TO ADD since some of yall think I treat CNAs/techs shitty, let me give a little more context. Last night a CNA pulled my patient off bipap for a “break” even though they were maxed out and dependent on it. She ended up not putting it back on correctly (left the room with all the alarms going off) and the patient desatted FAST into the 70s. This particular CNA also tries to titrate cardizem with no one’s knowledge. I’ve spoke to the manager time and time again for this behavior. So yeah I kinda have a right to be a lil salty. This and one other tech does things like this all the time. All the others I have no issue with in fact, I work very well with. I don’t boss them around and have a good relationship with them. I am not the type of nurse to treat them like slaves or make them do my dirty work. I always listen to their concerns if they have any because again, I used to be one prior to obtaining my license.

Hi all, I have a question about Cardizem drips and titration parameters. I had an order for a cardizem drip last night that stated to start the drip at 5mg/hr and titrate q30 mins to maintain a MAP between 60-80. The order stated to titrate no more than 2.5 mg/hr. How many mg do you titrate the drip by every time you titrate?
I got ripped into by my charge nurse because I was titrating by 0.5 every time I needed to titrate to stay within the parameters. For example, after the initial loading dose of 5mg/hour, my MAP was 58, so I reduced the drip to 4.5mg/hour. My charge was telling me I was supposed to titrate by 2.5 every time I titrated, so in the previous check, I would have reduced the drip from 5 to 2.5mg/hour. If I needed to titrate twice within an hour, it would be a 5mg total change. Isn’t that against what the order states? There was no indication in the order of how many mg titrate by every time a titration is needed. This is only my second time having a cardizem drip and I could have sworn in my training, I was told to titrate in increments of 0.5mg.
Please advise me, as I’m probably going to have this patient back tonight and I don’t want to make the same mistake if I was titrating incorrectly.

To give some context I am a 1st year at TMU in a relatively easier science major!
Long Vent
The hard truth is for most people (90%) your social life goes from 100 to 0 as soon as you get into university. Majority of your highschool friendships are built on YEARS and YEARS of TRUST and knowing each other.
You have all suffered togeather with sweat dripping everywhere during the beep test and mezz or gym class, laughed togeather, failed titrations by overtitrating togeather, ate lunch togeather, got a crappy mark on a hard assignment or test togeather, laughed togeather, developed inside jokes that only those around you would understand, laughed at things only you would understand, you know each others personalities well!
(I was lucky to go to the same highschool that everyone from my middle school and elementry school went to, so I know most of my friends for 6-12 years)
The friends you make at university aren't actual friends, you will make plenty of fake friends/ business partners/colleagues to either get their notes, job oppurtunities or network. Making friends at university feels like talking to the old guy at work to get a promotion, network or just to pass time lol.
You have a few months left with your TRUE friends who you trust and respect, spend as much time as you can with each other. I went from laughing everyday and being in classes with people I have known for years, trusted and respected, I never ever ate lunch alone.
All of that went away when I got to university...
Please, please, please, ENJOY every second of highschool as you are surronded by people you like, trust and know, I always thought my social life would be just like high school in university, but its not.
TALK to everyone, ENJOY every titration, gym class, every remaining moment you get to struggle togeather. This is the last time you will be surronded by people who you are familiar with and enjoy being around (unless you have a fun/social job).
To the people who say "just join a club" lets be honest when have you ever made friends by joining a club? Most of your friends are made through hardship and years of knowing each other.
Just wanted to add I consider myself and the people around me average and relatively extroverted, I don;t so being introverted is not the issue at uni.
I have also asked a few of my homies how there friendship situation is going, here is what they said
Ontario Tech Engineering homie (dorm)- yea i just make fake friends to get through the group projects
York U psychology homie (dorm) - yea i just talk to the smart kid to get his notes
U of T kin homie (commute) - nah mfs dont really talk to each other, only during labs and its just small talk to pass time
TMU CS homie (commute) - yea Im just friends with a few people only for the group projects
York U psychology homie 2 (commute) - i just made a few fake friends so I can get good marks on the group projections and get notes when I want to skip lectures.
Edit: I wanted to add that it is absolutely possible to make friends but very difficult as you need to invest a lot of time and lets be honest most of you in this sub are pursuing relatively hard majors (engineering, compsci, health sci, life sci etc), this means you probably won't have time to make genuine friends as you gotta use your time to study 😭.
Most teachers usually say that university was the best time of their lives, but you gotta remember they did uni in the 80s and 90s, during this time everyone was wayyy more social in general.
Regardless, good luck; be grateful for the TRUE friends you have around you as of now and enjoy the remaining months of highschool :)

Friendly neighborhood paramedic, with something a little bit different.
Here's the case. Transporting patient from critical access hospital to larger hospital. Patient is septic, but during her time in the original ED, she was... let's say sick but stable. I take over care, we get on the road, and whelp, patient decides it's time to crash. 80\P blood pressure and falling, increasing AMS, the works.
We've already been bolusing fluids per the sending docs orders, so my next step is pressors. My only pressor is epi. Shoot 1mg of epi in a liter bag, hang, and get ready to rumble.
So, this is where I might be wrong. I don't have a pump on the rig. We're bouncing shimmying and shaking down wonderful rural roads. Yes, according to all best practices, I should be counting drips and calculating my exact dose. Realistically, I'm carefully titrating to a SBP of 90-100 and resolution of the AMS. I managed to get there, we got the patient in the ED.
NP who's involved with the care asks to speak to me privately once the patient is settled in. He then proceeds to, albeit politely, chew me out. It started with "why no pump on this vasoactive medication?" Then we got into him wanting to know my exact starting dose, infusion rate, all while telling me how reckless it was to start a drip in those situations.
Now, I'm up for learning, and the guy isn't being a complete jerk, so I ask what would be a better idea for next time. I wasn't trying to be a smartass, I legitimately wanted to know if there was a better way. At this point he does get rude, and basically storms off with a "And this is why medics kill people."
I mean, I get it, it doesn't sound the best when you say "well, I started at 1mcg\min and titrated to stabilize", but on the flip side, all I got on the truck is myself, limited equipment and meds, and a book of protocols.
Would you have done anything differently, either on the ambulance, or interacting with the NP?

Hi all, I have been offered two spots at a hospital as an RN and I have no one to ask about how to pick. One is like a med surg obs unit that is still very new and in the managers words is kind of like a pilot program. It’s 11 beds, no isolation patients, 2 RNs and a PCT. The other is like a critical care step down unit where you get drips, IV pain meds, and IV cardizem and is more like a progressive unit. This unit has 24-28 beds with some semi private rooms and your ratio is either 1:6 with a tech or 1:12 with an LPN and a tech. Both are night shift and come with a very nice sign on bonus that is not taxed upfront. I am not new to the nursing world and I have 12 years of experience behind me between being a CNA and being an LPN. The thing is, the manager from a critical care unit I really liked emailed me as well to talk but they do not have the sign on bonus that I really need to get by right now. The terms of the sign on are two years on nights which isn’t a problem for me, I’ve already worked for the same hospital for almost 10 plus years off and on. I just don’t know which one is the best option and how to pick. Anyone have any insight to this or have worked on similar units with similar patients and ratio?

Would be helpful if the person answering is familiar with cernepowerchart. Lets just use a hypothetical scenario. You receive a handoff report for a patient with multiple lines. How do you know when iv fluids are due or need to be ceased. basically all fluids (mag, k+, NS, D5w, epi, nicardipine, etc…). fyi im still a student. My preceptor often has to move quickly so its hard for me to get a step by step instruction of how you guys actually do this. . il try splitting this into two questions.
1)for IV meds like crystalloids, does the provider order a set vtbi and once that amount is infused into the patient, you turn off the pump or will you keep the IV fluids running until the provider gives an order to shut off the pump. During clinicals, I can see these meds under the MAR, but have no idea when the nurse decides it time to start and stop these things, especially if they are already set up once she gets there. How do you know how much has already been infused from the previous shift? Im thinking you can just check the pump to see but how do you know you’re not on a 2nd-3rd bag already. is that given on the handoff report or you can just pull that information up on your charting system?
2)for pressors I believe i have some baseline understanding of whats done. For patients with unstable bp/map, I can see on the mar if i press this more info button, there is a starting dose (ex:5ng), and then you can titrate at your discretion in increments (ex:2.5-5ng q15min) so you can achieve whatever the goal map/bp is for the pt. At that point, you just keep the drip at that rate. Problem is I often have to leave clinical before seeing what happens next. Do you just keep him on the pressors until the md thinks the pt’s bp is stable enough to take off the drip and switch to some type of oral med? or is there ever some scenarios where they just want to infuse a set amount of the pressor, then you can just take them off it after that amount is given.

EDIT the Third: Trying multiple spacing in the list. Sorry guys.
2nd Edit: I don't know how to make those damned symptoms list look like a list. I tried and tried. Sorry! More apologies if you're on mobile!!! It looks fine when I look at it in edit, but as a post I see what you're seeing. Sorry. EDIT: All paragraphs went missing!!! Formatting.
I got first-wave sick, spring of 2020, so four years for me. The first 2 years I was bedbound, the third year a combo of bed- and housebound. This past year I have been able to do some things out of the house, more frequently, without nearly as horrific PEM and POTS consequences.
Here's a partial list of some of the things I've experienced, and then an update of what is different. Partial because I don't remember much of the first 3 years.
POTS
PEM
Dysautonomia
Vertigo
Dizziness
Falls, sometimes due to Vertigo or Dizziness, and sometimes due to my legs giving out
Depression, severe, whatever they call that diagnosis exactly
Intermittent psychosis
Constant convulsions
Constant confusion - like about everything
Unable to speak coherently
Confusing languages and not knowing I was doing it
Broken nose from a fall
Ridiculous, soul-crushing whole-body joint and muscle pain
Vomiting and diarrhea all day, every day
Incontinence (choose your warrior, I had it)
Aphasia, 3 different types
Heart palpitations
Chest pain
Hypoxia
Shortness of breath/gasping for air regardless of oxygen level
Sleeping for days on end
Nausea so bad I couldn't even sip water
Severe dehydration, for months on end
Gallbladder stuff, pancreatitis
Constipation so bad that if unremediated would last a month (maybe more, that's just as far as I let it go)
Severe weight loss and muscle atrophy
Depression
Anxiety
S****de attempt
Useless psych hospital stay for above-mentioned decision
Partner bought house and told me I couldn't come (hence the attempt and subsequent involuntary "vacation"): this was in the first year, when I couldn't even walk and slept all day every day
On oxygen
Constant allergies
DPDR
Utter confusion, frequently, about everything
High blood pressure
Low blood pressure
Erythema ab ignis on 1/2 my back from having to keep heat on it all the damn time (look it up: ewwwwww)
Bad anemia
Low potassium
Low vit b12
Hay fever all the time
Bad postnasal drip
Sore throat
Overpowering covid headaches
Lost my regular, less severe daily headaches for 3 years
Loss then distortion of taste and smell
Olfactory hallucinations
Year 3: alternating food intolerances (never had any before)
Seizures
Dx of epilepsy in year 3 from an EEG and symptoms
"Transient Global Amnesia": in year 3: hours, a day, or days where no memories were formed, despite engaging in conversation and activities. No recollection, just a blank
"Visual migraines" or similar wording: blinding light in even dim settings, like staring into stadium floodlights, w some normal peripheral vision at same time
Double vision that persists
Vision declined rapidly, many times, still sucks
Went down a shoe size
Extreme, near daily very painful bloating
GERD
Ulcer
Hiatal hernia
Barrett's Esophagus, presumably from constant puking
Some butt problem I forget the name, dx via colonoscopy
Hair falling out in chunks
Psoriasis (never had before)
Ever-changing rashes, some itchy, some burny, some no sensation
Cuckoo nerve/sensation issues
Heat intolerance
Logarithmically worse sun and cold intolerance
No ability at biothermal regulation: wild pendulum that never stops swinging, swinging away, like Hugh Hefner on crack
Nerves and brain not communicating well, in either direction
Gray hairs multiplying exponentially
Strange and awful new body smell (even when I was clean)
I am not here to give advice, because this fucking thing is so idiosyncratic and variable and capricious. I've read tons and know that some shit has worked miracles for some, left others unchanged, and worsened some things for others. But I am here to say that this last year, things have markedly changed. I did have new symptoms come, like the amnesia and certain types of seizures (seizures previously called seizures sometimes by some specialists, with no suggestions or prescriptions for help, and called not seizures by other specialists including a neuro who looked at a normal CAT scan and watched me convulse the whole time in my whole body during the visit. Don't know what he thought it was, because he didn't say, but he did not find it to be neurological...) BUT many things have improved. During the last year, I have developed rotating food intolerances. My hair fell out. Still getting random rashes in different places. And the amnesia, diagnosed as seizures: now on seizure meds, which seem to work. Amnesia, especially for days, is fucking scary, my dudes, esp when you've already had so much confusion, DPDR, and a sense of losing oneself due to all the abilities lost, including or especially intellectual or basic cognitive abilities. Here is where I am now.
I still have PEM and POTS, but waaaaay less bad. I can do stuff. I've never tried taking a walk yet, and I still need to sleep 14-18 hours a day and one full day a week, but during the rest of the time I can wash a WHOLE SINK of dishes and then load the dishwasher. I can read a fucking book! I do have to reread things frequently, but back in the day I couldn't have managed to follow the complexities of a fucking Teletubbies episode, so I'm happy with that development. I can sit down and make art. I can take photos of it and have started posting stuff I made, or vintage stuff, to sell online. NO WAY could I have done that even 6 months ago. I know which language I am speaking, and how to speak it. Definitely lose words on occasion still, but I am very, very, very much improved from the level of aphasia even a year ago, let alone being a completely incomprehensible idiot as I basically was for 2 years. I had a gallbladdepancreas emergency and got really sick in October, and they pumped me full of 2 or 3 IV antibiotics and sent me home with 2 to finish, as well, and I had a fever for 2 or 3 days toward the end of my hospital stay, and while on the one hand I rightly felt like utter shit because I was so sick and starting to get an infection, toward the end of my stay and after I also felt markedly, significantly, undeniably better, including radical cognitive improvement.
Was it the antibiotics? The fever? Both? My hypothesis (for which I have no scientific basis and have not read about this before with this shit) is that either or both dealt with some viral persistence. I have no reason to believe or not believe that in my case viral persistence was a factor. I just know that suddenly while in Telemetry ward (like ICU in terms of all the gravity and machines and wires and recording of data, just they don't think you're probably going to die right this moment), despite how utter shit I felt, I also felt strangely...good? Like, I had ICU Psychosis in there for sure part of the time, and that sucked to be inside of, and I pooped myself a couple times, which is always a subpar experience, and I was super dehydrated and couldn't manage to walk without assistance, yet somehow in the midst of all that nonsense something also was better.
I came home and was feeling really worn down for a couple weeks. They don't let you sleep in there, because they have to take blood and measure sugar levels and O2 levels so frequently, plus they kept taking me off all food and liquids (except IV) because they kept being getting ready to take out my gallbladder the next day or the day after that. So I hadn't slept much at all and needed to recover just from that. From that time post-hospital I don't remember much.
But now my brain is definitely better. I still have much less PEM than I have in 4 years. POTS is not nearly as severe, though it's still there and still enfeebling at times. Taking a bath still wipes me out, and I have to take a bath instead of a shower because I get hypothermic from showers, so I'm still not the freshest daisy in the field, but I've been using personal wipes and larger bath wipes for 4 years now, so I am accustomed to reduced expectations for personal hygiene.
On a similar note, I do love clothes and dressing up. When I'd go to a doctor, what little dressing up I could manage to do (i.e., something that wasn't the sweats and slippers I lived every day in) was as exciting as just being out of bed/the house. Now, I have sufficient presence of mind to go to the store, or work a few hours in our shop again --- and to dress the fuck up! I bought a bunch of cheap wigs from AliX, etc., when my head had bare patches, but now my hair has been growing back in with dutasteride and minoxidil (both oral), and I can put some shit in it and style it and it's pretty fucking fun to look like Robert Smith in the 80s. Clothing and styling are giving me active pleasure, and that is a new fucking sensation in the last 4 years.
My medications have changed many, many times throughout all this, as has the parade of GPs and specialists and their ideas and recommendations, or lack thereof. I am still on a lot of meds. I still go through periods of high BP and heart rate, and then periods with really low BP. I still fall, but much, much, much less, and I haven't broken any other bones beside my nose a couple years ago from falling into a bathtub. I hardly ever need a walker now, but I'd say I use a cane 50% of the time. I can get my feet and legs up onto a curb and stand up! My balance is still an issue, but far less severe than previously. I am extremely dizzy or have vertigo every day for at least the first 4 hours; sometimes, though, it is still a whole day or more. I still get nausea, maybe 1-2x/week, but I haven't vomited since October. I do have diarrhea most of the time, but I can make it to the bathroom, can hold down liquids to rehydrate, and, hell, if I need to I am now able to walk quickly to get to where I need to get to! (And it might be attributable at this stage to now taking Magnesium, which I'm not going to stop, because I can sleep normally nearly every day [see below]).
I do not feel like I am going to die, which I spent over 3 years feeling like, all goddamn day and night (when I was actually awake). I do not think I feel depressed. I've had 4 years to come to terms with having to live a circumscribed, smaller life. There is just shit I can't do, and most of the time I'm okay with that. I know I'm a different person. I honestly don't think I'm "wiser" or "more mature," just more realistic about the situation and what it means for me. I don't think therapy helped me, other than just having someone to talk to who wouldn't judge, but I'd say it served the same purpose to the same level as this sub, not better, but also not useless. I think they both offered the same thing: being heard, being empathized with, so I can't say bad things about therapy, just that I don't think it has any special kind of hoodoo that other things don't.
The 1000 different psych drugs they gave me fucked my shit up, and I think that is worsened by the fact they kept changing them. I know some antipsychotics were used for off-label experimental LC purposes, but they were antipsychotics, though, and that's major. I had shit doctors at different times (incl. a shit psychiatrist for "med management" who "managed" my meds by giving me ever-increasing amounts and variety of them), and I titrated myself down off those and whatever antidepressant I was on at the moment and stopped seeing that foul woman. I titrated down off many other drugs, too, when I thought they were making more problems than helping, or just not helping at all.
I take magnesium and have not suffered insomnia for most of the last year. I think it is the magnesium, bc chronological correlation, but I have no proof and am just glad I don't spend hours staring at the ceiling in complete exhaustion. That symptom alternated with the hypersomnia, and the insomnia obviously exacerbated not merely the PEM but pretty much everything else. I think for like at least a year and a half my life was strictly alternating regularly between long periods of insomnia and long periods of sleeping all the time, with me bedbound the whole time either way.
I think for me the gradually-increasing number of things I'm able to do really matters psychologically. I think they are slowly building on each other. Like I feel like I can now cognitively and physically handle filling birdfeeders and walking over to hang them up. I hope I can have the mental competence to keep on top of it. I don't know that I can, but I feel like I probably can. That, to me, is a HUGE small thing. It is also a pleasure, to be able to see the birds and see my cats watching the birds. And I think that idea of pleasure itself, and of pleasure building upon pleasure, or small accomplishment building upon small accomplishment, really helps how I look forward in hope - toward a smaller life, sure, but a life still worth living and being present for, a life that now includes pleasures and happinesses, and DOINGS. I got lost for 4 hours in a grocery store once when I was stupid enough to think I should go get some groceries, ffs, and now I can craft cool stuff again and read dystopian Albanian novels and go to a damned grocery store and manage to follow a list - and even freestyle a little bit!
I know my experience proves nothing in any general sense. It proves nothing categorical, absolute, or applicable to all, because this fucking condition is a hellhole of capriciousness and variability. But it does prove that one person, with that person's particular, individualized shitty constellation of symptoms, can improve vastly, in myriad ways, across multiple body systems, including cognitively and emotionally. It proves nothing, but I hope it helps someone hang on, keep hoping, keep resting, and believe that it can get better for them, too. Thank you for reading. Keep going. The world is better because you are in it.

A “tiktok nurse” named Hannah with lots of followers who is an LTC LPN made a video saying the only difference between an LPN and an RN was the letters in the title 💀 I have been an LPN for almost 9 months, and that type of thinking is not really any better than the rns who say lpns aren’t real nurses. Both are wrong.
I actually live in a state with a large scope for lpns, but there are definitely some things I can’t do. Comparing clinical skills between an RN and LPN in, for example, medsurg, you won’t see much difference in my area. Lpns can do IV push, hang blood, etc. however, I’ll never be charge nurse, I don’t know how to do an admission assessment, and I don’t formulate care plans (just modify the existing). I’m sure there are other things I can’t do as well, like titrate drips, that you’d never come across in my work setting anyway. Oh, and teaching.
Yes, lpns are nurses. Yes, lpns have critical thinking skills. Yes, lpns are capable of saving lives. AND, yes, an LPN is different from an RN. The way to go about advocating for the importance and legitimacyy of lpns as nurses is not by minimizing that of other nurses. Just wanted to share my thoughts lol.

The screaming from my basement kept me up at night. The women I had kidnapped and chained down there often wept or yelled until dawn, and I knew things couldn’t continue like this. They were disturbing my sleep, making my life intolerable, and that made me furious to the point where my vision turned white with rage every time they woke me up. I would go beat them any time that happened, but they still kept screaming, and I knew I would have to find a better way to immobilize them.
I had originally bought barbiturates, benzos and fentanyl off the dark web. I also bought medical supplies like plastic tubing as well as machinery to titrate IV drugs. After a few experiments gone wrong where I accidentally overdosed a couple of them and had to administer Narcan, I found I could keep them incapacitated with a very low dose of fentanyl combined with high doses of IV benzodiazepines. But then my dark web connection disappeared, likely busted by the DEA or FBI, and I knew I had to find another way.
I read about legal drugs, and one of them caught my eye. It was a red-and-white mushroom by the name of Amanita muscaria, commonly called “fly agaric”, a mushroom that appeared in pop culture references from the Smurfs to Alice in Wonderland to Super Mario Brothers, but one that almost no one realized was psychoactive and totally legal. It had incapacitating effects, often causing out-of-body experiences and catatonic states.
“This is peeeeerfect,” I said to myself, smiling and feeling elated. I immediately ordered some Siberian fly agaric, and as soon as it came in the next day, I started extracting the active ingredients and diluting them in distilled water for placement in the IV bag.
As I went out to check the mail, I saw a male about my height far away in the forest, running away in a panic from something behind him, something that appeared to drag itself forward at an amazingly fast speed on its arms, yet had no legs. But when I turned to look at it directly, they had disappeared into the thick brush. I had no neighbors, the nearest one being over a mile away in the other direction, so I wondered who would be out here.
I lit a cigarette and stayed on my porch, watching and waiting, but after no more sightings or noises came, I gave up and went back inside.
Whistling to myself, I brought the IV bags down to the basement. The three women I kept there were currently all quiet, likely either asleep or just staring blankly up at the ceiling. They were all naked, chained to the gurneys. I only unchained them when they needed to use the bathroom or eat, but then I would immediately chain them back up again. They were all beautiful with blue eyes and blonde hair parted in the middle, lithe bodies and very light, Irish skin.
I walked down the creaking cellar stairs, moving next to my nearest victim. I didn’t usually bother to learn their names, but this one was a hitchhiker and had told me when I picked her up. She said her name was Ally and that she was a college student. She was beautiful and young. She was sleeping when I started hanging the new IV solution of fly agaric up to the medical pole next to her bed.
As the fluid began to drip through the clear plastic tubing, she woke up. Her deep blue eyes regarded me with hatred for a moment, then she turned away, not saying anything. Her face had a look of hopelessness and despair on it that I had seen dozens of times before. Whenever any of my victims neared the end of their lives, that kind of vacant hopeless stare was all that was left on their faces, sometimes accompanied by tremendous pain and fear, sometimes accompanied by acceptance and peace.
Whistling to myself, I began to walk around the room, checking the other two women for infections, making sure their chains were tight and that they were still alive. I was about to grab the padlock key to unchain them one at a time, letting them use the bathroom and get some food and water quickly so I could keep them alive longer, but then something started to happen from underneath Ally’s bed.
I heard a deep growling sound. Spinning around, I saw Ally’s pupils had expanded to cover her entire iris. Her eyes were staring blankly past me with a thousand-yard stare, and the room seemed to shimmer and glow around her. Underneath her bed, I saw a face with dozens of glowing white eyes staring out at me from the shadows. I backed up slowly, reaching into my pocket for the switchblade I always carried on me. It used its front limbs to crawl out, leaving a trail of reeking blood behind it and filling the room with the smell of iron and rot.
The monstrosity looked like it was rotting from the inside. Its skin fell off in fetid bluish-purple layers, its mouth was full of blackened teeth embedded in sickly brown gums, but its dozens of eyes were what truly caught my attention. They were all blue, just like the eyes of my victims. Some were icy blue, like an Alaskan lake, while others were the deep blue of a tropical ocean. To my horror, I could even recognize some of the eyes and which of my previous victims they had belonged to.
It dragged itself forward at a tremendous speed using its arms, with exposed muscle and bone showing through the worn, decaying layers of maggot-infested skin that covered them. It had no legs, but only bleeding stumps that left two thick trails of blood behind it on the floor. It had no clothes on, but the decay and constant squirming of maggots and insects in its body gave it a unique covering all its own.
“You can flee,” it said to me with dozens of overlapping, harsh voices, “but I know you better than you know yourself. You think you are evil, but the true evil is coming that will tear you to pieces. Run!” The last word was so loud that the entire cellar shook, sending clouds of dirt falling down from the ceiling, and I turned and ran up the stairs. I heard a rapid scuttling, dragging sound as the monster behind me gave chase.
“Ah oh no oh shit oh no,” I said to myself quickly as I ran right through the cellar door, not even stopping. It slammed against the wall, shutting itself again from the impact as I passed by. I ran out into the kitchen and towards the front door, which I always kept locked with two deadbolts as well as a knob that locked. I was serious about my security, but right now it was working against me. My shaking fingers quickly undid the two deadbolts as I heard the monster break through the cellar door.
“Jaaacckk…” it said to me, dragging my name out as it slid on its belly behind me. I had just gotten to the last lock, the turnkey on the doorknob, when I felt it grab my leg. I kicked back as hard as I could, smashing the bottom of my steel-toe boot directly into its face through pure luck, and felt the knob turn suddenly. I flung the door open, but just as I was running through it, I felt myself pulled back by the grasping arms of the eldritch monstrosity behind me. It spun me around to stare into its rotting face. I felt like I could do nothing for a moment but look into those countless eyes. Then, with a superhuman speed beyond my vision, it rapidly bit my right thumb off with its blackened teeth.
For a moment, there was no pain, just shock. I stared down at my spurting hand, the blood soaking into my white shirt, then a fiery burning sensation shot up my arm. Screaming and thrashing, I fell back through the door, kicking with all my might at the thing’s eyes and face. But though I made contact over and over, it just started laughing, a demonic and deep sound that rattled the windows and doors of the house.
Laying flat out on my back on the porch, I began to scoot backwards as fast as I could while it came towards me. Fumbling in my pocket, I found the key for the deadbolt I kept on the basement door, pulled it out, and unthinkingly shoved the piece of metal into the center of its eyes. It made a direct hit into one of them, sending warm vitreous fluid covered with squirming maggots shooting out onto my left hand. The smell was so pungent and the sensation of the insects so horrifying that I started to gag. But it bought me enough time to push myself up and begin sprinting into the woods. I held my mutilated hand with my good one, wrapping the cloth of my shirt around it to try to slow the bleeding. I knew if it kept spurting like it was, I would begin to lose consciousness from the blood loss, then that thing would have me.
The daylight was growing soft and weak as the sun set, but it was enough to see the brushes and brambles as I ran blindly ahead. After a couple minutes, I came into a clearing, where I saw myself standing in the center of the field. I stopped suddenly, looking behind me for the creature, but there was no sign of it. Then I turned back to me and started moving forwards. I saw he only had one shoe on.
“What the fuck is this?” I asked loudly. My doppelganger only smiled at me.
“We’ve made a huge mistake, Jack,” he said.
“Who are you?” I said.
“I’m you, obviously. Look!” He raised his bandaged right hand, the strips of a white shirt wrapped tightly around the dismembered thumb.
“How is this happening?” I felt like I was about to wake up at any moment, as if I were trapped in a nightmare.
“You didn’t do enough research into that drug you gave the young woman,” he said to me. “Not only did you accidentally kidnap and torture a psychic who has supernatural powers, but then you gave her a drug that causes time-loops and out-of-body experiences. Her mind is so powerful that it is disrupting the flow of space and time all around us. You are caught in the same loop now that she is subjected to inside of her nightmare state.” I shook my head.
“That sounds totally impossible,” I said. “There’s no such thing as psychics.”
“Before today,” he said, “we also thought there was no such thing as monsters. Yet didn’t you see the one who bit off our thumb? It had the eyes of every girl we’ve killed. She has recruited their spirits and pieces of their decomposing bodies to reform into a vessel for justice. You’re being hunted, and you don’t have much time. You have to listen to me and stop asking questions.” I nodded at him, and he went on.
“Your only chance now is to run out the clock. That drug, the fly agaric mushroom, only has enough active chemicals in that one bag to keep Ally in a time-loop for twenty or twenty-five hours, depending on how fast the drug begins to wear off when the IV bag is depleted. If you can survive the entire time, you might be able to make it out of this alive. Her powers should start to fade back to normal once the drug has dissipated…” He turned, looking. “Did you hear that?”
I was about to respond, saying that I didn’t hear anything, but then I realized I did hear something. It sounded almost subaudible, like the tremors of an earthquake deep underground just out of the reach of human hearing, but as I listened, it grew louder and the ground started to shake. Thousands of black, decomposing hands began to reach out of the ground, sprouting from the forest clearing like rows and rows of corn stalks, and I screamed in terror.
I was much closer to the forest than my doppelganger, so I began to back away rapidly. Some of the hands grabbed at my jeans and shoes, and I lost one shoe in the process of escaping, but within a few seconds I was back under the cover of the trees. My doppelganger wasn’t so lucky.
He tried fighting, kicking at the nearest hands and pulling a switchblade from his pocket, which he used to begin stabbing and slicing at the dozens of hands that now grabbed his legs, feet and torso. I saw black liquid dripping from the slices he made, but the hands were totally unaffected. They began to return to the earth, dragging him down with them. He shot me one final, terrified glance before he disappeared beneath the ground.
“Found you!” a monstrous gurgling said from behind me. I turned around and saw the monster there, one of its eyes deflated and still dripping, its mouth opened in a grin that stretched across its face like a Glasgow smile, its cheeks ripping open from one corner of its face to the other as its grin kept widening.
“Please, leave me alone!” I said, using my good hand to pull my switchblade out of my pocket. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to. I have no fight with you.” The thing laughed, a deep and disturbing sound that echoed through the rapidly darkening forest.
“You killed me, over and over,” it said, “and now I come to repay the favor. A life for a life, the ancients said, but your debt is overdue. You have only one life to trade, so I’m going to make this fun for us. You can have a sixty-second head start.”
I turned around and sprinted blindly across the forest, until I eventually found an abandoned shack. I took out my phone and tried calling for help. I called 911, but the only voice that came through was the voice of the monster, gurgling and laughing.
The internet worked, so I began to write up my story. I know I can’t survive for twenty hours. I’ve seen myself die already. These things are just toying with me before they finish me off for good.
I just wanted the world to know what happened to me, though. Maybe I do deserve to die, but at least I can give others a warning.
Stay away from the fly agaric mushroom.