I’m dictating this shit because my fingers are still too uncoordinated to type it out properly—some residual motor control bullshit from the ordeal. But I need to get this story out now; it’s been brewing for three days, and it’s one hell of a strange confluence of events. Right now, I’m up in Mukdahan province in northeastern Thailand. I got here about a week ago, and this is April, so it’s smack in the middle of the Songkran festival—basically the Thai New Year, where they’re partying like it’s 2567 or whatever the fuck their calendar says. The festivities rage for weeks: nonstop parties, water fights, everyone going wild. I jumped right in, being the profound whiskey drinker that I am. Stopped working on anything, barely ate—just bites here and there—didn’t sleep much, and on top of it all, this is one of the hottest months on record. Sweltering heat in the house I’m constructing, no AC installed yet, just fans blasting at high speed. So yeah, we’re stacking up factors here like a goddamn house of cards.

Around the fourth or fifth day, it was morning. I’d just eaten a little fish—not much. I’d had some the night before, wrapped it up, and finished the rest in the morning. About two hours later, I had a bout of diarrhea, but not your run-of-the-mill shit. This was uncontrollable—I couldn’t even make it to the toilet, had to clean up my own mess. Thought, “Wow, how the fuck did that go bad just overnight? Maybe the heat.” That sent me down my first path of misdiagnosis. After that, everything emptied out, but a few hours later, I was still hitting the toilet every 15 or 30 minutes, pissing out yellow liquid. Weird as hell, plus the urge to urinate constantly. Around noon, I asked my girlfriend—her name’s Far—to run to the pharmacy, explain the issue, and grab something. She comes back with these pills; I look ’em up, and it’s basically Imodium, same as in the States. They work. Each pill is 2 mg; standard first dose is 2 mg, but she handed me two, so I popped 4 mg. I’m a big guy—what could go wrong?

Not even an hour later, severe cramping hits, with buzzing and tingling all over my body. It bounces around: one arm, then the other, even my back and head. Dizziness, the works. I check the dosage and wonder if a double dose of OTC shit could do this. It intensifies, especially in my forearms and hands—sometimes one at a time, sometimes both—and from my knees to my ankles and feet. Intense as fuck, like paralyzing spasms that subside in seconds or minutes, but when they’re on, it’s unbelievably bad. After three or four hours into this mid-afternoon nightmare, I’m like, “Okay, fuck this, let’s go to the hospital.” They’ve got a local one in this small town; it services a wider area, looks clean and professional inside—staff seem on point.

Far calls her cousin, a big-rig truck driver, to haul me over; another guy comes too, because during these cramps, I can’t even walk. They get me there quick. I hand the registration guy my passport—I’m in a wheelchair by now. As part of check-in, they take blood pressure with one of those auto-cuff machines on my left arm. As it pumps up, my left wrist goes nuts: my thumb involuntarily curls under my fingers, and my wrist bends over so extremely I thought the bones would snap. Crazy painful, and I’m yelling, “Hey, look at this shit—it hurts!” They stop it, seem to instantly diagnose, and wheel me in. They check the right arm—same excruciating bullshit. Can’t stop it, even pulling with my other hand.

The doc’s a young Thai guy, speaks decent English. He asks what I’ve been up to; I spill the story. He says they’re testing my electrolytes. I’m shocked—thought it was bad fish and pills, but they’re on a different track. Thirty minutes later, he comes back: “We have to admit you tonight, or you could die. Your electrolytes aren’t just low—they’re dangerously, very very low.” Weird, since I take potassium and magnesium pills daily. Far’s on board; she’ll bring my stuff. They put me in the ICU ward with heart monitors, chest sensors, oxygen checks—the works. First, they make me swallow 2-3 ounces of this green fluid: the most awful-tasting, throat-burning shit I’ve ever had. The nurse assigned to me speaks pretty good English—better than most—and he’s on a 24-hour shift, which comes in handy, as I’ll explain.

I’m hooked to IV bags pumping fluids, taking more of that awful electrolyte goo, getting shots, all while it’s an open ward screened for bugs. Lights on most of the night, people talking, new arrivals—constant nurse attention. They wake me every few hours for more green goo and blood tests. Needless to say, zero sleep. Next morning, they test again: still dangerously low, mostly potassium and magnesium. Another doc says it’s not just low—it’s extreme danger territory. I’d told them about barely eating, heavy drinking, heat, sleep deprivation. But I feel better—no more spasms—and I gotta check out. My visa’s already five days overdue; tomorrow’s the weekend, so overstay status would suck in Thailand. I’ve got someone to drive me to immigration. Doc says okay, but come back for another night of fluids. I agree.

We head to immigration—turns out they’ve moved it, pain in the ass to find. It’s run by police, not proper immigration officers. Far handles the 90-day report bullshit for my retirement visa, but they make us jump through hoops: drive back home (30-45 minutes), get her dad to sign off on me staying there, bring it back. Gone four hours total. Back at the hospital, strapped in for another night. This one’s different: new people in the open ward, all chatting—partly Thai, partly English. Sounded like a group from a bus accident or something. Voices close or far, mixing languages. I figure that’s why they assigned the English-speaking nurse; staff has enough English to manage.

Next morning, levels are up a bit. I tell ’em I gotta get the fuck out—can’t handle another sleepless night on top of the prior days’ deprivation. They process me out by noon. Back home, workers are laying brick for the wall around this half-acre. Then shit gets weird: I start hearing them talk—half Thai, half English. Some with Far’s accent, others like they’ve had pro training. Even the music they’re playing: Thai rhythms and tones, but English lyrics sung with Thai accents. Kids around too—daughters of the workers—switching mid-sentence from Thai to English phrases and back. I mention it to Fah: “You don’t hear that? You just talked to him in English.” She says, “No, it’s Thai.” I’m like, what the fuck?

Symptoms linger; I eat a light dinner, crash early with the fan on. But urinary and stool control is fucked—extreme urgency to pee every 15-30 minutes all night. Approaching 60 hours with almost no sleep. I’d get up, smoke, try again. Around 3 a.m., I start getting longer stretches: an hour to an hour and a half each, sleeping till 9 a.m. Wake up, and boom—all the Thais are speaking Thai again. Ha! I research it via Grok, without leading questions: describe symptoms, and it nails it every time. The blood pressure cuff spasms? Classic severe electrolyte depletion. Add sleep deprivation? Auditory hallucinations kick in hard—low electrolytes alone can cause ’em, but with no sleep, it’s amplified.

Motor control’s still a bit compromised, but no more paralyzing cramps or spasms. Zero booze for over three days now, taking the meds, eating, downing bananas and coconut water. Progressing slowly. I’m moving out here permanently in five weeks—good spot to recuperate. Docs say it takes days to fully resolve once nutrition’s back on track. Still got bladder urgency and all that shit I’d never heard of before: extreme electrolyte depletion mixed with sleep deprivation, heavy drinking, and record heat. Total mindfuck. I’ll post updates. Oh, and even in the hospital, Far kept the work going—I’ll embed a quick 1.5-minute video below showing the bricklaying progress. More if anything comes up.

…It turns out that after the previous dictation, I do have something to add, and it centers around the auditory hallucinations. I suppose I’m like at least a lot of people who tend to chalk it up to something like, “Oh, they’re just crazy nuts. It’s all in their head. They’re seeing things, they’re hearing things—it’s not real.” And I want to tell you that it blew my mind how convincing it is as an accurate representation of reality. People say, “Oh, it’s just voices in their head.” No, it’s not. It is the weirdest, most convincing thing I’ve ever experienced in that regard. I thought everybody else was nuts, you know? It was unbelievable how in-context it was. I mean, even though the stuff people were talking about—in English—it was plausible stuff, and not weird at all, not seemingly weird. It was just seeming like an experience I was having, but nobody else was having that experience.

So now I understand totally how serious and severe these things are, and that they’re totally real—seemingly real. Or else, can we say maybe reality isn’t as authentic as we think when we’re “normal?” I don’t think that one can adequately describe auditory hallucinations, or I suppose even visual hallucinations, which I only had a little bit of. That is, for a while, it seemed like the guys building the wall—my brick wall—had built it with a pass-throughs so they could pass through to the other side, but they could not. But it seemed real to me, looking at it through some trees in the yard. But I could tell that that was it. I suppose also when I started getting the sense that I was hallucinating was when the children were involved, and even though the music box they were using to play music was involved and all of that.

So I will regard this a lot differently from now on, and with a lot more respect. And it’s not just somebody taking some psychedelic drugs—yeah, I don’t know how those are. I don’t intend to try to compare the experience. I don’t intend to have any experience like this again. So that’s it for that part.

Oh, one other thing: I was talking to my brother this morning, and he asked me, “How can you, Richard Nikoley, who was doing all this stuff all this time, you know, in the health sphere, fuck this up so bad?” And I said, “Well, you know, I know I’m pretty good at a lot of things, including downing lots of whiskey without much effect or stumbling around drunk and stuff like that. But this time, I got thrown everything you can throw at me—all the different things all added up together. And nope, I’m not Superman or God; I’m just normal, just with some abilities, I guess.”