The Poisonous Flowers Incident

Well, something unusual happened after I woke up this morning at 3AM. I shouldn't have been awake, but that's another story.

I got a drink from a bottle of cranberry juice that I had just brought home from work last night. Then I lay back down in bed.

Only a minute later, I suddenly opened my eyes with a feeling of panic and intense discomfort. I felt like I was going to throw up, and I felt very certain that something was wrong. I recognized immediately the 'I have been drugged' sensation.

Over the next few minutes I lay there struggling to relax and figure out what had happened. Had somebody put something in my drink? I was definitely sick somehow and couldn't fall back to sleep. The feeling of drugged discomfort went on and on.

But gradually, the feeling faded over the next hour. Whatever it was, it wasn't very severe.

After a while, I figured out that it was 'Accidental Herbal Medicine.'

My co-worker had given me a bouquet of flowers - they had been on sale for only ten cents each, and she bought two of them just for the heck of it, and handed one to me before leaving. Without thinking anything of it, I stuffed the bouquet of flowers, with its flower stems exposed, inside my grocery bag along with my leftover cranberry juice and some other things. The cut flower stems must have touched against the cranberry juice bottle, close enough to the bottle's opening that it got on my mouth as I drank from it.

I don't know what kinds of flowers are in the bouquet - I'm not very familiar with flower types by sight. But I know that a LOT of different ordinary plants and flowers have very mild medicinal effects. The only medicinal plants that are commonly known to most people are the really strong ones, not the mild ones. The mild ones have become obscured over the years and are only known to people who study herblore.

After realizing this, I felt reassured. This was a typical situation where you have to distinguish between accident versus sabotage. I live a life of constantly anticipating 'sabotage.' If people think I'm paranoid, I always emphasize that accident and sabotage are not mutually exclusive: you can have both accidents AND sabotage in the same world. Sometimes things go wrong by themselves, and other times, people make them go wrong, and both things can really happen. You just don't always know which it is.

The 'poisoned' feeling is gone now and I don't feel any more discomfort. The only problem now is I'm awake in the middle of the night.