At the early morning airport.
It’s surprising how many people take the first #2 bus in the morning, which sets off at 5:03.
I will see some of you quite soon.
Butterflies and Wheels
Gnu atheism, women's rights, internationalism, universalism, and gossip
You’re going to beat me! I arrive around noon tomorrow.
Xanax, Ophelia. It’s the only way. It makes travel anxiety go away and plane flights disappear in a soft, wispy sleep.
Weather reports look good. We were praying really hard ;-).
Oh look its welcome to Ottawa snow gently falling out of the sky….
Flurries! They’re only flurries I tell you!!!!
(Yes, the thought of a major blizzard or ice storm disrupting air travel — and it doesn’t necessarily have to be here — has been giving me nightmares. It *has* happened this early in the season, some years.)
Good grief — NO. Not Xanax or any other benzodiazepine for travel.
Have you not heard of anterograde amnesia?
Here’s how it works. You get on the plane, and take a benzo. Get a great sleep on the plane. Get up, have a wonderful day where ever it is that you’ve traveled to. Nice, normal, fun productive day. Go to bed that night.
And wake up with precisely zero memory of the previous days’ events. Forever and ever. A lost day. Could have been the best day of your life — or the worst — or anything in between. Doesn’t matter. You’ll NEVER recover those memories.
This is a known side effect of ALL benzodiazepines. Halcion, Xanax, Valium, Prosom — all of them. And all the generic equivalents as well.
Hells bells, they give you midazolam during surgery precisely because it erases your memory of the surgical process.
Avoid these products like the proverbial plague.
Jesus Christ Kevin, calm down. You’re making wild and inaccurate generalizations about benzos. The amnesic effect depends on drug, dose, and other factors. Forgetting everything that happened on a plane trip is NOT a common side effect of a low dose of Xanax or Valium, or Klonopin.
Do you understand that people are commonly prescribed these for months at a time to deal with anxiety disorders? Do you understand that they don’t forget everything that happened the day before every day they wake up? How is it that I manage to take a small Xanax when I fly and yet wake up and remember where I am and how I got to the airport.
It sounds to me like you’ve had a bad reaction to benzos. OK. But that doesn’t generalize to ordinary use. What you said is just plain factually wrong.
And why do you think, Kevin, that you get to tell me “how it works,” as if I have no earthly idea how benzos work despite having taken them on occasion for 20 years, and consistently for travel for a decade? Do you think everyone but Kevin can’t figure out what they experienced?
Loudoun County Supervisor Calls Atheists “Terrorists” http://is.gd/i6ld9O
Thought you’d get a kick outta this one, once the Xanax wears of 🙂
I’m in Toronto!
I got my secret wish and was able to see when we crossed Lake Michigan. It was socked-in clouds almost the whole way but it thinned out just enough as we flew over the Illinois shore then the lake then the Michigan shore. [happy window geek sigh]
Also saw a bit of Lake Huron.
PZ, I knew I would. Seattle is that much farther away, so I have to travel the day before.
Just because YOU haven’t experienced that particular adverse effect, does not mean that it is not a real adverse effect.
All benzodiazepines, including Xanax.
I have personal knowledge working directly with the original manufacturer of Xanax (Upjohn – yes, I go back that far with these drugs). That’s how I get to tell you “how it works.”
Avoid these drugs. Especially for travel. Especially to get sleep on an airplane during travel.
Halcion is the worst offender (another Upjohn-created drug), but all benzodiazepines have this adverse effect. All of them. Xanax is basically Halcion with a long half-life.
Join the reality-based community when it comes to drug safety.
Thanks.
Kevin: different people have different reactions to drugs. Very, very different sometimes. Yes, I’ve met people who can’t take benzos because they cause memory problems (and other cognitive side effects), but I’ve also met people who have been taking them for many years with few or no side effects. And then there’s my brother, who became so jittery they practically had to hold him down when he was given a drug of this type before surgery… Saying “Avoid these drugs” as if everyone had the same problems/side effects is just silly. And not reality-based.
I took Kevin’s statement to mean that one should not take a benzo casually, probably borrowed from someone else with a prescription. Because people do. If you already have a script, you probably already know how it affect you.
Why would he assume the situation as I’ve outlined it? Because anyone with a Xanax script would not need to have the “take a Xanax” advice given to them. They would take them when they needed or wanted them.
Of course, something I don’t know, and I don’t know if Kevin knows or not, but Josh may know, is whether Ophelia takes Xanax. But this is not mentioned anywhere.
I don’t.