The onomatopoeia of breathing
Apr. 16th, 2020 08:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: drugs, amnesia, maybe medical abuse]
Sometimes I wonder if having several nitrous-oxide-assisted dental fillings as a child ruined me for my culture's more usual recreational psychoactives.
What do you *mean*, I won't be able to reliably tell which of my perceptions are hallucinations and which are real, or which aspects of my current mental functioning are because of the drug and which are innate? What do you *mean*, I'll be expected to expose other people to my likely-embarrassing intoxicated babbling, and be exposed to theirs in turn? What do you *mean*, I don't have the right to stop being high at any time, to demand that the drug leave my system immediately and have it do so?† And what the *fuck* is this fucking "blackout" bullshit?††
---
I mostly couldn't feel my body below the neck except when it was moving, and when I twitched my finger I could feel the moving of the tendons more acutely than usual. Every so often, instead of few-to-no proprioceptive reports I'd get ones that were obviously fake: most commonly a feeling like being on a roller coaster going up the first hill, or my forearm spinning in place in an anatomically impossible way. (I soon learned that I could change the direction of the spin by twitching the appropriate side of my hand downward (right for clockwise, left for counter-clockwise). I also learned that if I paid close attention, I could usually feel the real arm lying there, with the spinning one like an overlay on it.) If I had wanted to keep my mouth closed, it would have been difficult: my jaw was inclined to go slack.
The background music they played had what I later learned to call "flanging". The dentist or his assistant would occasionally speak to me, asking me to open my mouth wider or move my tongue a certain way, and I had no trouble understanding them or doing those things. In the enclosed space of the breathing apparatus I could hear my breath very distinctly, zherrrr taaaang, zherrrr taaaang, like a voice or a choir.
My thoughts didn't verbalise by default like they normally do. I *could* think verbally if I chose to, but it took a small-but-noticeable amount of effort. When I spoke in my head, the voice sounded flat.
A while afterward I was at a historical-reenactment village and saw an ad for then-new medical nitrous. "Perfectly Painless", it said, and I knew that it was wrong. It's not that it was *painless*: I could *feel* the pain of the drilling. But it's like the difference between someone screaming "STOP!!!" in your ear at the top of their lungs, versus someone politely asking you if you would be so kind as to stop doing that if it's not too much trouble. I was *aware* that I was in pain, and it was unpleasant *enough* that all else equal I would have preferred not to feel it, but it was easy to ignore it if I deemed the painful thing to be worth doing.
('All pain should be like this,' I thought, 'or at least most of it. Enough to do the job of making you aware that something is wrong, without overwhelming you. Maybe hot stoves and stuff like that can keep the regular pain: stuff where split-seconds count might need the extra motivation of agony. But there's really no need for that sort of thing in most cases: this would be enough. In a lot of cases this would be *better* at its job, because it leaves you enough brainpower to come up with a plan for how to make the painful thing stop.')
---
I'm not firmly attached to *sobriety*, per se. I'm unwilling to fuck around with black-market drugs, but if medical-grade nitrous were available for white-market recreational use I'd probably take it occasionally: it *is* a fascinating feeling, and there were so many experiments into "how would being on nitrous oxide affect this sensation?" that I never got to run because I couldn't do them from a dentist's chair. But I *am* attached to *lucidity*, to *knowing* precisely how high I am at any given time. And while I'm not opposed to *other* people choosing to lock themselves into altered states for a few hours, I personally value being able to bail.
---
As a child I figured the portrayals of nitrous-oxide intoxication I saw on TV were full of shit, but I later learned that many unfortunate souls *do* have a much more classical-hallucinogen response to nitrous, with the non-lucidity and the babbling and all that. Having read a bunch of anecdotes and looked at the commonalities, I *suspect* the determining factor is autism: my response is the autistic one, while allistics get the standard hallucinogen experience. I wonder if anyone's ever studied this properly.
(I notice that my childhood dentist--who was quite fond of drugging his patients into submission in general††† and especially of nitrous oxide--*did* specialise in neurodivergent children††††, though you weren't expected to present a diagnosis (if your parents thought you would benefit from their expertise, that was all the evidence they needed) and they also did my (neurotypical) little brother's dentistry so that my parents wouldn't have to find another pediatric dentist.)
---
†I never *did* attempt to safeword out of or otherwise circumvent the anesthetic, but it was very comforting to know that I *could*.
††I remember being high about as well as one would remember any interesting experience one had several times around ages 8 - 10. And knowing me (this aspect of my personality has been quite stable throughout my life), if I'd noticed any suspicious gaps or blurriness in the memories when they were fresh, *that* would have stuck with me even harder, and I would not have been *nearly* so amenable the next time they wanted to drug me.
†††Yes, in hindsight I do see him as rather questionable. At the time my main problem with that team was how patronising they were: I have a distinct memory of the assistant--in the process of turning off the apparatus they insisted on calling the "piggy nose"--asking me if I was still feeling "floaty", and thinking sarcastically 'ah, yes, "incorporeality" has seven whole syllables, I couldn't *possibly* know that word'.
They had my mom give me liquid Valium once, the night before an appointment (one of the earlier ones, possibly even the first). Three things stick with me about that one: "thinking 'they make *cold medicine* taste bad so kids won't want to take too much of it, but they didn't make the *restricted mind-altering drug* taste bad?? it's very disturbing how okay this tastes! like, it's not *great*, but it's way better than cold medicine, and that makes no sense!'", "lying in bed wondering why it wasn't doing anything", and "finding out several years later (age 13) that Valium is an amnestic (maybe it *did* do something later on, how would I *know*, here I was thinking I'd merely been asleep), and being fucking pissed at them for giving that to me without informed consent, what the fuck is wrong with them, someone being a child doesn't make slipping her amnestics *okay*".
††††them being them, they were *way* more euphemistic about it than that, to the point that I didn't figure it out until after the fact, but still
Sometimes I wonder if having several nitrous-oxide-assisted dental fillings as a child ruined me for my culture's more usual recreational psychoactives.
What do you *mean*, I won't be able to reliably tell which of my perceptions are hallucinations and which are real, or which aspects of my current mental functioning are because of the drug and which are innate? What do you *mean*, I'll be expected to expose other people to my likely-embarrassing intoxicated babbling, and be exposed to theirs in turn? What do you *mean*, I don't have the right to stop being high at any time, to demand that the drug leave my system immediately and have it do so?† And what the *fuck* is this fucking "blackout" bullshit?††
---
I mostly couldn't feel my body below the neck except when it was moving, and when I twitched my finger I could feel the moving of the tendons more acutely than usual. Every so often, instead of few-to-no proprioceptive reports I'd get ones that were obviously fake: most commonly a feeling like being on a roller coaster going up the first hill, or my forearm spinning in place in an anatomically impossible way. (I soon learned that I could change the direction of the spin by twitching the appropriate side of my hand downward (right for clockwise, left for counter-clockwise). I also learned that if I paid close attention, I could usually feel the real arm lying there, with the spinning one like an overlay on it.) If I had wanted to keep my mouth closed, it would have been difficult: my jaw was inclined to go slack.
The background music they played had what I later learned to call "flanging". The dentist or his assistant would occasionally speak to me, asking me to open my mouth wider or move my tongue a certain way, and I had no trouble understanding them or doing those things. In the enclosed space of the breathing apparatus I could hear my breath very distinctly, zherrrr taaaang, zherrrr taaaang, like a voice or a choir.
My thoughts didn't verbalise by default like they normally do. I *could* think verbally if I chose to, but it took a small-but-noticeable amount of effort. When I spoke in my head, the voice sounded flat.
A while afterward I was at a historical-reenactment village and saw an ad for then-new medical nitrous. "Perfectly Painless", it said, and I knew that it was wrong. It's not that it was *painless*: I could *feel* the pain of the drilling. But it's like the difference between someone screaming "STOP!!!" in your ear at the top of their lungs, versus someone politely asking you if you would be so kind as to stop doing that if it's not too much trouble. I was *aware* that I was in pain, and it was unpleasant *enough* that all else equal I would have preferred not to feel it, but it was easy to ignore it if I deemed the painful thing to be worth doing.
('All pain should be like this,' I thought, 'or at least most of it. Enough to do the job of making you aware that something is wrong, without overwhelming you. Maybe hot stoves and stuff like that can keep the regular pain: stuff where split-seconds count might need the extra motivation of agony. But there's really no need for that sort of thing in most cases: this would be enough. In a lot of cases this would be *better* at its job, because it leaves you enough brainpower to come up with a plan for how to make the painful thing stop.')
---
I'm not firmly attached to *sobriety*, per se. I'm unwilling to fuck around with black-market drugs, but if medical-grade nitrous were available for white-market recreational use I'd probably take it occasionally: it *is* a fascinating feeling, and there were so many experiments into "how would being on nitrous oxide affect this sensation?" that I never got to run because I couldn't do them from a dentist's chair. But I *am* attached to *lucidity*, to *knowing* precisely how high I am at any given time. And while I'm not opposed to *other* people choosing to lock themselves into altered states for a few hours, I personally value being able to bail.
---
As a child I figured the portrayals of nitrous-oxide intoxication I saw on TV were full of shit, but I later learned that many unfortunate souls *do* have a much more classical-hallucinogen response to nitrous, with the non-lucidity and the babbling and all that. Having read a bunch of anecdotes and looked at the commonalities, I *suspect* the determining factor is autism: my response is the autistic one, while allistics get the standard hallucinogen experience. I wonder if anyone's ever studied this properly.
(I notice that my childhood dentist--who was quite fond of drugging his patients into submission in general††† and especially of nitrous oxide--*did* specialise in neurodivergent children††††, though you weren't expected to present a diagnosis (if your parents thought you would benefit from their expertise, that was all the evidence they needed) and they also did my (neurotypical) little brother's dentistry so that my parents wouldn't have to find another pediatric dentist.)
---
†I never *did* attempt to safeword out of or otherwise circumvent the anesthetic, but it was very comforting to know that I *could*.
††I remember being high about as well as one would remember any interesting experience one had several times around ages 8 - 10. And knowing me (this aspect of my personality has been quite stable throughout my life), if I'd noticed any suspicious gaps or blurriness in the memories when they were fresh, *that* would have stuck with me even harder, and I would not have been *nearly* so amenable the next time they wanted to drug me.
†††Yes, in hindsight I do see him as rather questionable. At the time my main problem with that team was how patronising they were: I have a distinct memory of the assistant--in the process of turning off the apparatus they insisted on calling the "piggy nose"--asking me if I was still feeling "floaty", and thinking sarcastically 'ah, yes, "incorporeality" has seven whole syllables, I couldn't *possibly* know that word'.
They had my mom give me liquid Valium once, the night before an appointment (one of the earlier ones, possibly even the first). Three things stick with me about that one: "thinking 'they make *cold medicine* taste bad so kids won't want to take too much of it, but they didn't make the *restricted mind-altering drug* taste bad?? it's very disturbing how okay this tastes! like, it's not *great*, but it's way better than cold medicine, and that makes no sense!'", "lying in bed wondering why it wasn't doing anything", and "finding out several years later (age 13) that Valium is an amnestic (maybe it *did* do something later on, how would I *know*, here I was thinking I'd merely been asleep), and being fucking pissed at them for giving that to me without informed consent, what the fuck is wrong with them, someone being a child doesn't make slipping her amnestics *okay*".
††††them being them, they were *way* more euphemistic about it than that, to the point that I didn't figure it out until after the fact, but still
no subject
Date: 2020-04-19 12:28 pm (UTC)(aaahhh and now I just made the connection between certain very unpleasant knife-related intrusive thoughts and this. That should have been obvious but there you go)
no subject
Date: 2020-04-19 02:48 pm (UTC)I'm glad to have helped you learn more about your brain, although I'm sorry it's such an unpleasant part.
no subject
Date: 2020-04-19 03:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-29 05:14 pm (UTC)God, the way children are treated, especially around consent, is honestly just constantly horrifying. You'd think everyone having been a child once would make most people capable of understanding how ridiculously horrible we treat them in many ways, but I guess not.