Five weeks ago, a friend and I drank a Syrian Rue/Mimosa Hostilis Ayahuasca preparation (3g/12g each), and I ended up panicking through the bulk of it over fears of heart attack, coupled with less-than-pleasant imagery. Two days later, I attempted to quit smoking cigarettes because I had begun to experience sharp, quick chest pains from time to time. I relapsed and made a few more quit attempts before staying quit for one week (the past seven days), but the chest pain has yet to abate.
Cannabis and caffeinated beverages both contribute to the panic episodes associated with the chest pains, and nicotine products to a lesser extent. The pains are recurring but unpredictable, akin to having the inside of your heart tissue quickly prodded with a straight razor or a sewing needle. I have tried to set up a doctor's appointment regarding the pain, as it makes normal day-to-day functioning difficult, and I am not sure whether it's stress-induced or a possibly life-threatening condition. Prior to my Aya experience, I never had chest pains or other psychosomatic symptoms, and never had panic attacks induced by cannabis, nicotine, or caffeine. I don't know how long these pains will persist for, and I've quit all of the above substances to reduce my heart complication risk.
I will try to visit a doctor as soon as I can, though due to my financial situation (broke and jobless) and lack of health coverage (used to have Medicaid, but my ex-GF "accidentally" cancelled it), I cannot afford an emergency room visit or any extensive health care. Any advice for this weary, beleaguered traveler?
UPDATE (from latest post):
Cannabis and caffeinated beverages both contribute to the panic episodes associated with the chest pains, and nicotine products to a lesser extent. The pains are recurring but unpredictable, akin to having the inside of your heart tissue quickly prodded with a straight razor or a sewing needle. I have tried to set up a doctor's appointment regarding the pain, as it makes normal day-to-day functioning difficult, and I am not sure whether it's stress-induced or a possibly life-threatening condition. Prior to my Aya experience, I never had chest pains or other psychosomatic symptoms, and never had panic attacks induced by cannabis, nicotine, or caffeine. I don't know how long these pains will persist for, and I've quit all of the above substances to reduce my heart complication risk.
I will try to visit a doctor as soon as I can, though due to my financial situation (broke and jobless) and lack of health coverage (used to have Medicaid, but my ex-GF "accidentally" cancelled it), I cannot afford an emergency room visit or any extensive health care. Any advice for this weary, beleaguered traveler?
UPDATE (from latest post):
As of the 22nd of December, 2013, I still occasionally experience chest pains - they abated for a few months, as I successfully readjusted to cannabis use. Roughly a month ago, however, after an addiction-like craving for it after abstaining for two days, the next use led to a resurgence of the old panic attacks, and with them, the post-Ayahuasca chest pains, which have returned in increasing severity over the past week. In addition to this, I am also combating random, "clogging" pains in random parts of my body and an extreme discomfort in my lower ribcage, as if it were digging into my sides. As I intend to be capable of passing a drug test, I ceased cannabis use six days ago, and it may have something to do with the recent resurgence, though it does not seem to be improving with time as it had previously. Since the pains previously abated, I never went to see a doctor (though I did make a 911 call after a particularly disturbing bout of pains - the paramedics assured me that my vitals were optimal, with elevated oxygen levels as a result of increased stress), though I feel I may have to soon. I am no longer a cigarette addict, and I believe I have broken an unusual psychological attachment to cannabis in the past few days. Nevertheless, the fact that these pains have returned in force and frequency has caused a massive resurgence in panic attacks and sleepless nights.
A similar experience, in terms of general lack of improvement:
Ayahuasca - Erowid Exp - 'Unique Psychic Difficulties 14 Months After'
In addition, I also have strange, one-sided (usually left) headaches along with the "clogging" pains described earlier. I have also had HPPD in the form of a blue and red static overlay ever since the experience. A final note - the overall message that the trip conveyed was that while I understood a special unity between myself and the Universe as a whole, the Universe didn't seem too eager to reciprocate - that the Universe hated that I was a part of it, and desperately wanted be to know how much it wanted me out of it. The mantra "I AM THE UNIVERSE" bellowed many times through my head, and said Universe seemed more and more displeased with each mental utterance, furiously driving the point that I was not a welcome element, along with the various nightmarish visions that assaulted me between the three peaceful peaks of my experience. I fear that I may never recover from that fateful afternoon, that the effects of it will drag me to an extremely early grave, and that the Universe will finally be satisfied, having rid itself of my consciousness for all time, and that my death will be one fraught with fear and nightmares, that even passing on will in no way be the peaceful transition the human body developed to endure, but a final, hellish descent into a ultimately unending terror that I will never be able to escape, an eternal perpetuation of a nightmare from which I cannot wake, simply because I felt compelled to engage a unique Catch-22 in my life: that if I had listened to the advice of my more experienced friends, I would've always wondered what wondrous experience I had neglected at the behest of those who advised against it, or to live with the suffering I now endure at the cost of indulging my curiosity as to the true nature of my existence and to explore the reaches of my mind that I could not see any other way. Had I not taken it, I would've never known, but since I had, I wished I never imbibed what amounts to the Universe in a shot glass.
I can no longer pursue the many paths of mental expansion so easily explored by my friends, because I leaped from a few tall hills to the distant edges of the very Universe, in a manner of speaking, and both said friends and I have concluded that any further trips would only evoke the horrors that I subjected myself to with Ayahuasca, and exacerbate my current psychological and physical maladies. As a young man just a few weeks short of 21 years of age, I have fallen from the fittest and healthiest state I have ever known, to a decrepit sufferer in the shell of what appears to be a healthy young person, and for this reason, no one in the "real world" truly believes that anything is wrong with me at all, which may well be the case, but I am unable to avoid the persistent discomforts and pains that I never thought would beset me so early in life. I may look back on this period and find that some logical, possibly external cause propagated these symptoms, and that my psychological tendencies made it easy to allocate them to a mental disorder of some kind, but I have yet to find it (pleurisy, tapeworms/parasites, circulating blockages, and other conditions have been considered as possible causes, though no medical professional has yet to detect any of them).
In sort, because of my foolish, unprepared launch into the reaches of deepest mental space, I have become grounded to reality by my fear of losing control of it, my many alarming physical symptoms, and a terror of walking the paths I used to so desperately yearn for, that I must close myself to potential enlightenment because I may find something so unspeakably mind-breaking and nightmarish that I may lose my ability to function as a member of society and, at the most basic of levels, as a human being, or even as a living thing at all. My desire to explore places no other person will ever see is crushed by the fear of losing what little connection to real life I have left - that I am even attached to reality at ALL after that experience is nothing short of my best fortune, and that any new experience will cut that tie and propel me into a complete realization of the terrors I had beheld from Ayahuasca. I do not want to die, and I do not want to live in a state where I wish I did, and I'm deathly afraid that one of these outcomes is imminent and inevitable, in the short scale of time that is the next few years or so. I fear that a doctor may yet be unable to treat my condition, and that I may be cursed with it until it kills me. I think that the anxious outlook and unfittingly competitive spirit I carried into the trip is what did me in: I recall feeling all of my emotions - happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and all of the in-betweens - at their absolute maximum, the most intense emotions I had ever felt, in their purest form...and fear quickly and easily overpowered all of them, twice between the three "self-harmonious" peaks, lasting far longer than any of them. I could feel myself calling to the ex-girlfriend who had abandoned me a little over a year ago, and all I could do was wish that she was there to tell me that everything would be alright, to save me from what seemed like a harrowing spiral into a hellish death-trip, which surprised be because I thought I had finally gotten over her and how she had hurt me, only for the tea to tear my petty facade and expose my true feelings in a paranoid, fear-fueled fervor of tossing, turning, sweating, and crying. As much as I told myself that the experience would eventually pass, as it did for everyone else who had taken it before me, I couldn't be more wrong, as the effects it had on me have clung to me every day since, leaving me a panicky, nervous wreck, terrified of my own mortality to the point of thinking it imminent.
That final note really kind of...went on longer than I hoped it would, but it's a more open, thorough elaboration of the experiences I had felt during the trip and since then. I should mention that I am not a religious person - I feel that when you go in the ground, you go for good, and that's the end of it, but I don't want my last sights and feelings to be of nightmares and terrors, which I am sure will arise if I die any time soon. For a few, short moments during my panic attacks, I question whether or not what I believe (or rather, don't believe) is appropriate, especially if I don't have as much time to come to peace with it as I felt I'd had before drinking the tea, and while it hasn't turned me into a spiritual or religious man, it casts doubts as to whether or not I will feel at peace when I pass on.
A similar experience, in terms of general lack of improvement:
Ayahuasca - Erowid Exp - 'Unique Psychic Difficulties 14 Months After'
In addition, I also have strange, one-sided (usually left) headaches along with the "clogging" pains described earlier. I have also had HPPD in the form of a blue and red static overlay ever since the experience. A final note - the overall message that the trip conveyed was that while I understood a special unity between myself and the Universe as a whole, the Universe didn't seem too eager to reciprocate - that the Universe hated that I was a part of it, and desperately wanted be to know how much it wanted me out of it. The mantra "I AM THE UNIVERSE" bellowed many times through my head, and said Universe seemed more and more displeased with each mental utterance, furiously driving the point that I was not a welcome element, along with the various nightmarish visions that assaulted me between the three peaceful peaks of my experience. I fear that I may never recover from that fateful afternoon, that the effects of it will drag me to an extremely early grave, and that the Universe will finally be satisfied, having rid itself of my consciousness for all time, and that my death will be one fraught with fear and nightmares, that even passing on will in no way be the peaceful transition the human body developed to endure, but a final, hellish descent into a ultimately unending terror that I will never be able to escape, an eternal perpetuation of a nightmare from which I cannot wake, simply because I felt compelled to engage a unique Catch-22 in my life: that if I had listened to the advice of my more experienced friends, I would've always wondered what wondrous experience I had neglected at the behest of those who advised against it, or to live with the suffering I now endure at the cost of indulging my curiosity as to the true nature of my existence and to explore the reaches of my mind that I could not see any other way. Had I not taken it, I would've never known, but since I had, I wished I never imbibed what amounts to the Universe in a shot glass.
I can no longer pursue the many paths of mental expansion so easily explored by my friends, because I leaped from a few tall hills to the distant edges of the very Universe, in a manner of speaking, and both said friends and I have concluded that any further trips would only evoke the horrors that I subjected myself to with Ayahuasca, and exacerbate my current psychological and physical maladies. As a young man just a few weeks short of 21 years of age, I have fallen from the fittest and healthiest state I have ever known, to a decrepit sufferer in the shell of what appears to be a healthy young person, and for this reason, no one in the "real world" truly believes that anything is wrong with me at all, which may well be the case, but I am unable to avoid the persistent discomforts and pains that I never thought would beset me so early in life. I may look back on this period and find that some logical, possibly external cause propagated these symptoms, and that my psychological tendencies made it easy to allocate them to a mental disorder of some kind, but I have yet to find it (pleurisy, tapeworms/parasites, circulating blockages, and other conditions have been considered as possible causes, though no medical professional has yet to detect any of them).
In sort, because of my foolish, unprepared launch into the reaches of deepest mental space, I have become grounded to reality by my fear of losing control of it, my many alarming physical symptoms, and a terror of walking the paths I used to so desperately yearn for, that I must close myself to potential enlightenment because I may find something so unspeakably mind-breaking and nightmarish that I may lose my ability to function as a member of society and, at the most basic of levels, as a human being, or even as a living thing at all. My desire to explore places no other person will ever see is crushed by the fear of losing what little connection to real life I have left - that I am even attached to reality at ALL after that experience is nothing short of my best fortune, and that any new experience will cut that tie and propel me into a complete realization of the terrors I had beheld from Ayahuasca. I do not want to die, and I do not want to live in a state where I wish I did, and I'm deathly afraid that one of these outcomes is imminent and inevitable, in the short scale of time that is the next few years or so. I fear that a doctor may yet be unable to treat my condition, and that I may be cursed with it until it kills me. I think that the anxious outlook and unfittingly competitive spirit I carried into the trip is what did me in: I recall feeling all of my emotions - happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and all of the in-betweens - at their absolute maximum, the most intense emotions I had ever felt, in their purest form...and fear quickly and easily overpowered all of them, twice between the three "self-harmonious" peaks, lasting far longer than any of them. I could feel myself calling to the ex-girlfriend who had abandoned me a little over a year ago, and all I could do was wish that she was there to tell me that everything would be alright, to save me from what seemed like a harrowing spiral into a hellish death-trip, which surprised be because I thought I had finally gotten over her and how she had hurt me, only for the tea to tear my petty facade and expose my true feelings in a paranoid, fear-fueled fervor of tossing, turning, sweating, and crying. As much as I told myself that the experience would eventually pass, as it did for everyone else who had taken it before me, I couldn't be more wrong, as the effects it had on me have clung to me every day since, leaving me a panicky, nervous wreck, terrified of my own mortality to the point of thinking it imminent.
That final note really kind of...went on longer than I hoped it would, but it's a more open, thorough elaboration of the experiences I had felt during the trip and since then. I should mention that I am not a religious person - I feel that when you go in the ground, you go for good, and that's the end of it, but I don't want my last sights and feelings to be of nightmares and terrors, which I am sure will arise if I die any time soon. For a few, short moments during my panic attacks, I question whether or not what I believe (or rather, don't believe) is appropriate, especially if I don't have as much time to come to peace with it as I felt I'd had before drinking the tea, and while it hasn't turned me into a spiritual or religious man, it casts doubts as to whether or not I will feel at peace when I pass on.
