story + images / Gina Tron
I like to say that I am kinda like Jesus, seeing how I was kinda resurrected from death one glorious Easter. It was April 15th, 2001 and I was attending college in Montreal. At the time I had made it a hobby to consume drugs in abandoned churches. It was kind of the in-thing to do at the time.
There was something different about the Easter party from the beginning. This rave, unlike the others, was not in a church. It was in an old hotel. The name of the party was Eggs, as the flyer proudly advertised. It also advertised that there would be a pool at a party. I was excited about the water element.
I was accustomed to taking ecstasy, and my favorite pills were the ones with a Pikachu stamp. Yellow, orange and blue Pikachus would pokemon their way into damaging my brain on the regular. At Eggs, though, I ate a brown Pikachu.
Brown…. Brown…. I remembered hearing some rumor about brown being bad once. Or maybe it was a song. I vocalized my concern.
“Oh no. That is just in reference to acid. You don’t take brown acid.”
This color made me feel better than I ever had in my entire life. I said fuck off the dance floor and hello to laying lifelessly on the floor. The ultimate euphoria consumed me and I forgot about consuming water. I was always, before this, cautious to a fault about H20.
“Why drink water when I can jump in it??”
I jumped into the hotel pool with all my clothes on. I immediately regretted my urge to do so. I know how to swim but that skill escaped me at the time. Also the water was ice cold. I frantically doggy paddled to the nearest ladder. I struggled in doing so. As soon as I got out of the water my sense of euphoria shifted into an overwhelming feeling of dread. I was now in a dystopia, a horrible hell. I was surrounded by druggies dancing under a ceiling decorated with dangling plastic Easter eggs.
I started feeling very cold and went into the bathroom to use the hand dryer to warm off. Looking into the mirror, I noticed that my left pupil was larger than the right one. I figured this was indicative of some sort of literal split in my brain and began panicking accordingly.
By the time I got to the hospital the fluorescent lights were burning my eyes so much that I couldn’t keep them open.
My roommate, who accompanied me to the ER, later told me I was babbling about video games. Which was interesting as it was what I talked about the last I was at a hospital. When I was 8 I had meningitis. Before getting sick I was obsessed with obtaining a Nintendo. Through being sick I got an NES. I finagled it out of my parents due to the pity I received after getting a needle put into my spine.
The Montreal nurses were predictably speaking French to me and I didn’t understand what they were trying to communicate to me. They gave me an EKG, and in order to do so had to take my top off. I didn’t want my roommate, who was in the room for some reason, to see my exposed chest. Though the will to live outweighed the embarrassment.
They stuck a needle in my vein and I was out cold. I awoke 15 hours later in ICU. Well, that’s not true. I woke up twice, briefly, before that. Once when I seemingly peed the hospital bed. I vaguely remember the nurse having dealing with that. A second time when I looked up at the clock to see that it was 2pm. I knew my boyfriend at the time would be calling my dorm phone. I had told him a week prior that I would try to lay off the drugs. It’s funny to think that just a year prior, I hadn’t even been able to successfully inhale marijuana. Oh how behavior can accelerate ever so quickly. When I woke up the third time, I opened my eyes to see my friend Baron sitting quietly next to my bed reading a book. At first I thought the nurses injected sedatives into my vein. I soon learned all they stuck in my was an intravenous to get me hydrated.
