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The feeling of surrealism was stronger now, and breathing in through the nose and out of my mouth also helped staying focused. I've asked for wet towels around my wrist and neck, which brought me much closer to reality.

I was very scared in that initial moment and everything that happened later, for the same reason, or curtesy of, my panic attack.

I kept trying to explain what happened, I probably repeated myself 3-4 times. The doctors and assistants always listened well and sometimes noted things down. For some time I believed that I could speak Dutch because I thought I understood the assistants.

I would have waves of clearness or waves of further fear and further loss of control. I felt it coming from my upper stomach, but the assistants helped me to calm down.

When I suggested the idea of “it would be embarrassing if I had the placebo, because then my mind just made this up”, the assistants reassured me that whether caused by the placebo or by the real medicine, what I'm experiencing is real.

I also said that I found my own voice weird or annoying and felt like I was talking in a weird way. I also thought everything sounded “weird”.

My initial experience with this happening was feeling overstimulated, hyperfixated, that I could both forget or oversee a person talking directly to me, and sometimes the quiet chatter from the room next door was the loudest thing I've heard.

When I've been given my lunch (13:10), I had trouble eating it. I would either forget that it was there, or after finishing to make a bread, it felt like hours had passed. My feeling of time was gone.

When starting to eat a slice of bread, I would believe that hours had passed, but when looking back at my bread, I saw the bread was still there and I barely ate any of it. I would sometimes look at the bread, having forgotten what I've done or why I am doing this. The motoric task of putting a topping like butter on my bread was very hard.

Every feeling or emotion I had, I felt much stronger. When an assistant was noting something down at the front of the bed, I could feel it shiver from my legs to my hands, despite in a normal environment, the slight disturbance of a pen writing something wouldn't feel like the bed was shaking. Additionally, my fear was increased tenfold, the pain I felt from the sting to measure my blood sugar felt a lot worse, and when I laughed, I wouldn't stop for minutes on end.

As I had mentioned at sometime during eating lunch that I “feel like a hamster”, the assistants joked that they'll now have to write that as one of the side effects of the medicine, and when I laughed about that joke I couldn't stop. The feeling was mich increased. The feeling of being a hamster came from the idea that my eating must be looking silly, because when I observed myself I saw that I didn't have the motor skills to easily and swiftly make a bread. I found it funny, sitting there eating a piece of bread like a hamster. I imagined myself being that, or thought people must perceive me this way.

I never had any hallucinations or visual things happening outside of my mind. When I closed my eyes the effects would become stronger and I would see whatever my mind came up with. With my eyes opened I would sometimes be sent back to some idea / memory causing my concentration or line of thought to be broken, and me stumbling over words or having to stop talking altogether.

At many given moments I felt like I could escape this if I very much tried and did everything I could to fight it and stay focused. When standing up right, moving, etc. I would initially often feel like it was gone for a moment, only for it to return later or overwhelm me once more.

To be continued