Right now, I am going to recount one of the hardest experiences I’ve ever had to go through. Sometime during the summer of 2013, I did a drug called K2, a synthetic version of Marijuana.
This led me to have a panic attack. I believe I had an aural seizure, and I experienced some of my life’s worst tachycardia.
I was only 13 and turned 14 about a month later. I was dating a man named Justin Miller, who was 18 at the time. I lied to him about my age for a while, but I eventually told him the truth.
However, he wasn’t phased by my real age. He stayed dating me anyway. Justin bought the K2 from a pipe shop in Longview called Glass Dragon. He always referred to it as a legal weed.
I never even heard the term K2 until after this night. My only immature and naive thought was, “it’s just weed, but legal.” That’s about all of the thought I put into it.
The night we did it, the worst night of my life, is all a blur to me, honestly. I remember we had edibles previously to smoking it. We watched Family Guy just before deciding to go downstairs onto the bottom floor into my parent’s garage.
Justin packed the K2 into the hollowed-out E-cig that he had. He smoked and then handed it to me. I remember taking a few hits and not feeling anything, so I took a few more.
From the time it took me to walk about 5 feet to the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror, I was already feeling the effects of smoking it. It felt like I had lost my memory.
At first, it was like I was watching everything happening around me from a shaky camera video. It felt like my eyes were taking pictures. Everything felt like a dream. Then it got really bad.
I crawled up the stairs, and by the time I made it to the top, my limbs were numb to the point that it felt like burning. It felt like I was endlessly moving and falling or like melting into sand…over and over again.
It was a loop. All of my physical sensations were stuck in a loop, it seemed like. No matter what I did or what position I moved into, the burning numbness would not stop.
My heart was pounding through my chest, and so fast. At this point, what I saw was the worst part of it all, I think. My vision was literally like a kaleidoscope that was spinning rapidly.
I saw an outline in the corner of my eyes of bright lights and colors, but it kept spinning and getting dark. It actually felt like inside a strobe light. It was a horrible sight to see.
What I heard was just echoing. Every single sound was amplified, and it echoed. My boyfriend was yelling at me. He kept telling me that I was going to die, and he would go to jail.
I don’t know how I remember his words whenever at the time, it felt like I couldn’t remember anything at all. All of these physical sensations were happening at the same time.
Everything correlated with each other. All of the horrible things I felt, saw, and heard were happening simultaneously. I forgot that I existed. It felt like reality was passing through my mind and leaving.
I had no perception of reality. I’m pretty sure I was dead. After what felt like 20 minutes of trying to regain my normal consciousness, I passed out. I woke up a few times, hoping it would be gone.
I’m pretty sure I was seizing. It felt like hours asleep, but according to my boyfriend, it was anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes. Every time I woke up, my vision was just spinning and flashing.
Eventually, I passed out and woke back up in my bed 3 hours later. I woke up, and I felt fine. I didn’t realize how traumatic what I had just gone through was.
My boyfriend saw that I was fine, and he convinced me to try it again the next day, but to not smoke as much and told me that I would be fine. I had nearly the same experience, except I was actually expecting it at that time, so it didn’t hit me as hard and scare me as bad, but it was still scary.
I never went to the hospital or told anyone in fear of my boyfriend going to jail for obvious reasons. Time passed; months later, I never felt normal again.
I had random, short-lived panic attacks and thought I was reliving the K2 trip. My boyfriend and I eventually broke up. In December of the same year, I smoked normal weed.
I really didn’t expect anything to happen. By then, I had learned the difference between real weed and K2. Unfortunately, I smoked way too much. I had the exact same experiences as I did with the K2.
I didn’t have a boyfriend to worry about going to jail, so I called my mom, and she took me to the hospital. I was given sedation and was treating. I can’t really remember a diagnosis or anything like that.
Life has truly never been the same for me. My childhood was robbed of its emotions. I have been dealing with these feelings of dissociation since I was 13 years old. Nothing feels real anymore.
Every once in a while, I relive the memory lapses of forgetting about reality. The colors of my life are muted, neutral. My senses are really dull, not as sharp as they were before the experience.
It’s a feeling of a false reality. I lost all creativity. I feel like I can’t even read without being distracted by the false reality of my mind. I relive the experience all over again in my dreams every once in a while.
It ends up turning into sleep paralysis. I wake up most nights in a panic because of this. I didn’t start having sleep paralysis until a few years back. Every night going to sleep is terrifying because I’m scared of getting stuck in the experience in my dreams.
I’m completely petrified of getting put under to have surgery because I’m afraid I’ll get stuck in those feelings. I’m so terrified of death now because I’m afraid i’ll be stuck like that forever.
K2 Really ruined my life. I can’t do anything without fear of going through the trauma again. I don’t even feel real. It’s been over 7 years since my experiences with K2, and I still do not feel the same as I did before I smoked it.
It is so hard to have a will to live whenever I don’t even feel real. I don’t feel like I am a part of this world. I feel like there is no purpose to me being here, but I am too terrified of death to kill myself.
My therapists have told me that there are literally no known cures and that they have never heard anything like this before. I’ve talked to multiple counselors about it. I just want my life to go back to normal from this stupid K2 stuff.