Psilocybin Trial Diary - Day five: Second scan and follow-up

Flowers from the Psilodep team

I wake up with a headache – is it a hangover? If it is a hangover then it’s far better than an alcohol hangover. I have a shower, which feels amazing and enlivening, and, after another veggie samosa and apple juice breakfast, make my way to the unit.

Robin comes to meet me in reception and we go to the patient lounge where I answer some questionnaires about the past 24 hours and provide the usual urine sample.

We move on to another ward where I put on scrubs once again and the nurse weighs me (I’ve lost a few pounds apparently). We then head to the scanner and once again I’m slid into place like a pizza going into an oven. Or is it more like being placed in a washing machine? Either way, I have to surrender once again, but this feels very different to the first scan. My levels of anxiety are much lower, my depression is much less heavy and overbearing and I don’t have the urge to escape my whirring, buzzing tube.

When the scan with the piano music begins, I feel myself willing the feelings on that I had when listening to music during my doses – just as I had willed those feelings on last night when trying to sleep. When I simply let go of these urges and demands though, the music takes on a new dimension and every key of the piano rains down on me like a waterfall. Again – expectation results in disappointment, openness and isness results in genuine experiencing.

I fill in a couple more questionnaires on Robin’s laptop and then we go back to the ‘chill out’ dosing room where Mark and James are waiting. I feel a bit disappointed that the room has been returned to a more sterile and less welcoming state with much of the colourful material removed. The people within the room are still warm and welcoming though.

We have a chat about the previous day, the breakthroughs and themes that arose and how I’m feeling about everything now. I mention the knot in my solar plexus and how I realised that that’s where I chased all of my unwanted feelings, thoughts, fears and emotions. I say in fact it could be called a ‘not’ without the ‘k’ as it’s where I keep all of the things I’m not prepared to feel, not allowing myself to experience etc. But in reality all that does is increase the size and weight of the knot, increases my anxiety and actually amplifies all of those negative feelings. They’re then placed under immense, resistant pressure and then explode out of me every now and then in an uncontrolled and damaging way.

I eat lunch in the patient lounge with the two chronic fatigue syndrome study participants I met yesterday afternoon (really nice people) and then go back to the dosing room where Mark asks me a series of questions about how I’ve felt during the past week (after dose one and before dose two).
We chat for a while longer and then I’m set free into the world once again, travelling to Liverpool Street on the tube and then getting the train home from there, all the time with the bottle of flowers poking out of the side pocket of my bag. I hope it brought some happiness to people that saw it, it certainly brought happiness to me.