Fear and Loathing in my Frankenstein Uterus

My uterus has the ability to cramp with alarming strength. Like, it is Frankenstein and I am a much larger little girl he(it) squeezes to death.

I take medicine for that so I can get through my work days and fun days with minimal down time. Lately though, I've needed more drugs than usual. My doctor decided to give me a new medicine to try - something stronger and unfortunately, something that would knock my sh*t out.

I'll try anything, and I figure that once I know how I respond to medicine, I just work around the instantaneous sleep side effect. That's terrific...unless the medicine is making me see and hear things that cause me to run around the room .... AS IF I AM ON FIRE.

Mr. Zoom was sleeping soundly at 2 am when I came charging into the room, snapped on the light and shook him awake. "heeeeelp meeee. I'm having an attack." He shook the sleep off and tried so hard to calm me down. "HEEEEELP MEEEEE THE MEDICINE IS MIXING!!!" "CALL 911! I need crackers!!"


Now, what he DIDN'T know was that I was freaking out because I was seeing and hearing things that weren't really what they seemed. All he knew is that I was flipping out, randomly eating Ritz crackers and begging him to call 911. In my head, if I ate crackers I could get the medicine to stop "attacking" my senses - soaking it up I suppose.

This hallucination thing happened to me once before when I was in my 20s and I had some Nyquil to help me sleep during a bad flu. I woke up to purple spiders, dinosaurs and other random stuff. And all of it was purple for some reason. I haven't had Nyquil since.

This most recent event started out just like any other middle of the night wake up and have to pee experience. The problem though? When I pulled a new tampon out of the cupboard and saw the wrapper, the texture in the wrapper attacked my head. You read that right. The teeny little dimples in the plastic around the tampon suddenly grew huge - I'd guess about 20x their original size, and appeared to float up around my head. The texture literally undulated as it kept growing and seemed to be drawn to my head like a bird from the coffee shop protecting it's nest!

ALTHOUGH, the yellow swirls that are the decor on the plastic - and the ones that you'd think would be the trigger - stayed right where they were supposed to be. Sober examination of the box a day later revealed this text: Discreet purse resistant [their bold, not mine] wrapper with easy-to-open tabs. I think if Tampax interviewed Mr. Zoom, there'd be a whole new paragraph on the box.

To make the situation worse, I also had a line to a song running in my head. We've all had that, and generally no big deal. Only, it wasn't my voice or even the singer's voice saying/singing the line. And I couldn't get it to shut off no matter what I did - and for some reason the fact that I couldn't identify the "voice" was upsetting me. Ok wait, it wasn't running in my head while I was being attacked by my tampon wrapper...but the minutes (felt like hours) before that event it was.

And this is the weirder part. I'll try and explain it... the line of the song running in my head was from "Bleed it Out" by Linkin Park. Truly appropriate, yes. BUT, I only knew the second half of the line until just now when I googled it to get the first part:

"I bleed it out, digging deeper just to throw it away."

THIS IS WHAT I HEARD: "La la la la la la ...just to throw it away." over and over and over and over again. I know we had heard the song on the morning radio show we listen to on our ride to work Friday morning. I did NOT know it would half stick in my consciousness and come out later as a sanity repellent.

Mr. Zoom did everything he could to keep me from calling 911. He is supposed to do this. I don't know for sure, but I think at one point we had somewhat of a stand off where he stood between me and the bedroom phone - trying to get me to calm down before I made a call I was going to regret. I think I might have had crackers in one hand while making a few attempts at the telephone. It had to have been like fighting off a giant toddler holding soggy finger foods.

Horribly embarrassing. Although in the days that followed, I've been able to laugh at it. I realize, again, how lucky I am to have Mr. Zoom. I don't know of many people who would allow themselves to be jolted awake at 2am by unreasonable - ney - lunatic behavior - and through everything thrown at them, hold on to both their wits and their spouse without one single condescending, judgmental or patronizing word. All without a 911 dispatcher on their side.