When I first heard that Colorado had a proposal on the ballot to vote on legalizing the use of magic mushrooms, I thought, “Wow, that seems out there. Is this a thing that a lot of people are clamoring for?”
But I decided to vote in favor of the proposition, and so did the majority of Colorado voters.
Soon after, I started seeing a lot of news articles about psilocybin mushrooms, which piqued my interest.
In college I had tried a few drugs. But I never experimented with LSD or mushrooms. It sounded scary to me. Probably from all the propaganda in the 1970s when we were shown movies in school about people losing their minds and jumping out of windows.
But now, I’m in my early 60s, and I felt like maybe I missed out.
Plus, I’ve been on a spiritual journey since I was 30 years old – with limited results. Perhaps my mind patterns are just too rigid at age 60 to make any major transformations. It got me thinking that mushrooms might be just the thing to loosen the pathways in my brain.
The great book “How to Change Your Mind” by Michael Pollan illustrates (on pages 318 and 319) the neural connections of a typical brain in its default mode versus the neural connections of a brain on psilocybin. There’s a lot more happening in a brain on mushrooms. The mushrooms jolt people out of their patterns and into something far more rich.
I decided I wanted to try mushrooms.
But where to secure some?
Even though it’s legal to take mushrooms in Colorado, as of this writing it’s still not legal to sell or purchase them. And I didn’t know anybody who had mushrooms, anyway.
So, I decided to grow my own.
This was kind of a complicated and lengthy process. There are lots of YouTube videos on how to grow mushrooms, but not a single, really great, comprehensive video that explains everything in a step-by-step fashion. Each video leaves stuff out. So I had to watch a bunch to figure out the process.
Then I had to find a suitable place to grow my mushrooms (my basement bathroom shower); make sure the space was immaculately cleaned (because any trace of bacteria can ruin the grow); order a grow bag and the mushroom spores; inoculate the bag with the spores; and wait a few months for anything to happen.
Finally, the first thrush of mushrooms appeared. And I waited until just the perfect day to harvest them. Then, I had to wait several more days to air-dry these finicky fungi.
I had started this mushroom project in January, and in June I was ready to take my mushrooms.
It was only when I was ready to ingest my mushrooms that I realized there were things to learn about that process, too.
Namely, how many mushrooms should I take?
This was also a question that YouTube wasn’t great about answering.
By this time, my patience was running short. So, I made plans to take my mushrooms on a Saturday, and my husband kindly agreed to stay home with me that day in case anything terrible happened.
At about 9 am on the appointed Saturday, I ate some crackers with peanut butter and then ate a couple of large mushrooms. People had warned that psychedelic mushrooms taste awful, but I didn’t find them too offensive.
I then went to sit on my meditation cushion in front of my altar. My plan was to meditate through my trip.
This was going to be awesome.
Hah!
About 20 minutes into my meditation, I started to feel really woozy. “Ugg, I can’t sit here anymore,” I thought. “I need to go lie down.”
I staggered into the next room and lay down on the couch. Shortly thereafter, my husband came in to see how I was doing.
I said, “It’s a lot.”
He said, “I’m just going to make myself a cup of tea, and then I’ll be back to sit with you.”
The next thing I knew a wave of nausea rolled over me, and I rushed to the bathroom. I was so violently ill. My body had to get those mushrooms – and that peanut butter – out of my stomach as fast as possible. Between bouts of vomiting, I lay on the bathroom floor seeing all kinds of colors and visions. Of course, I was horrified and thought, “Oh my God, I might be going through this for four or five hours!” Simultaneously, I was also laughing because the whole situation was so ridiculous. “I did this to myself!”
By this time, my husband was coming back with his tea, and he passed the open bathroom door and saw me lying on the floor. He’d only been gone for a few minutes.
Eventually, he helped me walk on my wobbly legs back to the couch.
Even though I had expelled the material of the mushrooms from my stomach, the psilocybin had definitely taken effect.
I started to feel very cold. My husband piled a few blankets on me, but the cold was like cancer cold – generated from the inside. It seemed like no amount of blankets in the world would get me warm.
When I shut my eyes I saw a lot of colors and patterns swirling. But when I opened my eyes things in the room looked weird. Our tortoiseshell cat walked into the room and she looked like a wild panther with her fur seeming to stick straight out from her body.
My husband kneeled down next to me to see how I was doing. His face looked contorted, like it was made of jello. I started to laugh hysterically at that and laughed for quite a long time.
After a while, I thought maybe I would feel warmer if I went outside. It was a sunny, beautiful summer day. My husband helped me get outside and settled in a lawn recliner, and he piled blankets on me.
The peak of the experience must have passed by now because I was able to keep my eyes open and enjoy the backyard. My eyesight was stellar. I could see every leaf on the big maple tree in our yard. The grass seemed to flow like swells on the ocean. I noticed I didn’t have a lot of thoughts racing through my mind. I was fairly peaceful.
Did I disrupt my default mode network at all?
Maybe a little.
I’ve always worried too much about our daughter, who at this point had recently graduated from college and was living on her own up in the Colorado mountains.
I noticed while I was sitting in the backyard coming down from my mushroom high, that I was utterly incapable of worrying about her.
After effects
I felt fine the next day. And I was back to my old self on Monday morning when it was time for work.
But I guess my trip wasn’t entirely over.
A couple of weeks later, I attended the big MAPs psychedelic conference, which happened to be in Denver in Summer 2023.
I had taken two days off work to attend the conference and was really looking forward to it. On the opening day, I found a seat in the big theater at the Colorado Convention Center, along with about 12,000 other people.
It was super exciting. MAPs played awesome music. And the room was abuzz as famous people in the psychedelic community came, one by one, onto the stage.
But as I was sitting in my seat I felt an uncomfortable pressure in my chest, which also crept up my neck.
After the main keynotes, I attended a couple of breakout sessions, but the weird pressure didn’t let up. I decided to visit the complimentary medical clinic on-site. The medic there did all the usual things when someone might be having a heart attack. He checked my heart rate and blood pressure, and he hooked up a bunch of electrodes to my chest to do an electrocardiogram.
Everything looked fine. As a side note, I have excellent health, and I had not seen a doctor in about seven years.
But the medic was concerned given my age and my symptoms. He said it would be best if I went to a nearby hospital emergency room just to be sure. He didn’t have the ability to run a particular blood test that could determine if the heart was in distress.
So I reluctantly left the conference and went to the emergency room.
What a cluster.
I had to take a number and wait for several hours – even though I came in complaining of symptoms that might indicate a heart attack.
At one point my name was called. I went to a room where two nurses said they needed to insert an IV port in my arm just in case the doctor needed to start some emergency medication. Even though I had not yet seen a doctor.
When I ultimately saw the doctor, he did all the same things as the medic had done, and also ran the blood test to see if my heart was in distress.
I was perfectly fine.
The IV port was removed from my arm, and I went home.
A couple of months later, I received a final bill of $1,700 for my emergency room experience. (This was after insurance.) Welcome to America.
Why did all this happen?
I don’t know.
But I do feel like the heart attack symptoms had a connection to my mushroom trip and were somehow triggered at the psychedelic conference.
I’ve since learned that a lot of people have physical symptoms during their psilocybin trips. They may feel super cold, like I did. Or they may sweat. Their body may shake. Or they might have increases in heart rate and blood pressure. These things are considered cathartic and part of the process.
In my case, some of these symptoms happened about two weeks later. It’s a mystery.
