73-year-old Mieke van Vugt from Boxtel unsuspectingly ate a chocolate after cleaning her daughter’s B&B. But soon Mieke felt unwell. That chocolate turned out not to be as innocent as it looked.
Mieke has been helping clean her daughter Katja’s B&B in Liempde for years. She also did that last week, not knowing what adventure awaited her that day. She opened the refrigerator because guests often leave all kinds of junk there. “I saw two chocolates lying around and thought people had forgotten them. So they were nice for us, I thought.”
Mother and daughter took a break, drank a cup of coffee and both took one of the chocolates they found. “I thought my mother had brought them from home,” says Katja. Shortly afterwards the ladies continued with the chores. But after an hour, Mieke felt increasingly worse. “I became completely weak and my legs collapsed. I felt awful and I said to Katja: ‘I’m not well, I’m not well.'” After some hesitation, they decided to call the doctor and they could go there immediately.
“I shouldn’t close my eyes because then it’s over”
Mieke, who is still a psychiatric nurse, is lying on a bed in the consulting room and all kinds of things are running through her head. “I thought: I’m going to die, I can’t make it through this. I certainly shouldn’t close my eyes, because then it will be over. I only saw my sister, who has already died.” Panic also struck Katja, who also had a chocolate. “It was really reinforced in a way that I don’t know in myself.”
The doctor first thinks of hyperventilation, but Mieke does not believe that. “That never bothered me.” Then she has a moment of clarity and thinks about the chocolates. “Would there be anything to that?” she wonders as she calls her daughter, who had been sent out of the consultation room because of her panic. When Katja is inside, she opens her B&B’s app and there is an answer: “Dear Katja, we had a great stay. We forgot two chocolates in the refrigerator. Be careful with this, it contains cannabis,” the guests write in a message.
Then the puzzle pieces fall together and there is relief. “We were just in the middle of a really hard trip. When we got home, we had several laughs. We just kept laughing. We had a made a video and posted it on social media. There were so many reactions to that,” says Katja at the kitchen table of the B&B, where there is also laughter. “We immediately got fries with mayonnaise and frikandels. “Fatty food turns out to be good,” says Mieke.
Mother and daughter are happy that it ended well and together they see the humor in it. “I’m 73 years old and then I end up on a trip. I’ve experienced it! But absolutely never and never again.” Mieke blames the guests. “I think it is irresponsible of the people who sat here and left this behind. That is the first thing you should think of when you leave. Imagine if there were children here,” she says as she takes a bite of a chocolate she bought herself. “I trust him.”