a little piece i've done for the potion tutorial/challenge on deviantart! i ended up really enjoying the process, and will likely try a creating a few more similar pieces. maybe it's time for a kitty alchemy lab 😄
Pupils and vision: Side effects of Cat Potion in the Witcher
Hi! I’m your friendly neighbourhood nurse and today I was thinking about ‘ways you can fuck Geralt up with his potions in fiction!’ So I’m making a series of posts. If you want to know about a specific thing, drop me an ask so I can order my thoughts.
So we all know and love witcher potions. They’re cool as hell. They make Geralt’s eyes go black and his skin all black veins and he looks freaky as fuck. But honestly, guys, we don’t lean into what they’re like for Geralt enough and I’d like to give a few insights based on real-world medical shit.
Today we’re gonna focus on Cat. When Geralt takes at least some of his potions, his eyes go black, and the books are very clear that his dark night vision potion does this. His pupils are dilating super fully (I’ll talk about his sclera at some other time because I gotta handwave some stuff for that and talk about some wild shit) and the pupil is leaving only the thinnest rim of iris there. What is this like for him?
We’re looking at a whole bunch of irritation and maybe some hallucinations for fun!
Well, first we have to talk about belladonna, one of the plants that could really work to make this happen.
If you’ve ever had your eyes dilated at the eye doctor, you know that everything gets painfully bright and it’s hard to focus your eyeballs because of it. Things are kind of hazy and unreal if there’s too much light and your eyes sting a lot. We use an actual real life plant to do this: Belladonna. The drops you’re given for dilating eyes are called atropine (that’s one of the active ingredients in belladonna) and we use them for other things as well because atropine does some other stuff that’s pretty fucking awesome. (I’ll probably do a whole post on the myriad uses of atropine sometime soon. Because fuck yeah atropine.)
Belladonna is also called banewort and apparently both are used in translations of the Witcher stories. Regis apparently makes booze infused with belladonna, while according to the wiki, the book version of Cat actually uses banewort! In the story “The Witcher” in the US edition of the Last Wish collection, banewort, monkshood, and eyebright are the main components of a potion that does what Cat does in the video games (I have no idea if the potion is named Cat in the books or not). This makes sense. Belladonna (banewort) opens up the pupil to let more light in. Monkshood is dangerous as hell so we don’t use it in medicine at least where I’m from but it is purported to improve circulation and decrease pain. In eyedrop form, homeopaths market it as a way to improve eye inflammation and pain but PLEASE don’t do this. This Tumblr is anti-homeopathy due to evidence, but that’s its own rant. Eyebright is used in folk medicine (I can’t find evidence of an active ingredient or any sign that this is actually true so I am gonna assume even witchers are prone to the placebo effect) to alleviate eye fatigue.
Sapkowski clearly put some thought into this, so I’m going to focus on the book evidence I’ve found for the contents of Cat since the varying versions found in the games make only limited sense to me with the exception of the fact that ergot (which contains alkaloids similar to atropine) kind of works like belladonna and is an ingredient used to make the ingredients for making Cat in games 1 and 2. But we’re focussing on the three plants from the books since I’m sure you don’t want to read fifty pages.
This combination of plants means that the ‘too much light’ effect isn’t the only thing Geralt’s going to feel on Cat. I’m honestly kiiiind of surprised that Cat isn’t an eyedrop. Based on the ingredients there’s not much reason to take it orally, and it would be a way more efficient use of resources to use it directly on the eyball but hey. Why the fuck not make it cooler (and harder on Geralt’s body) by having him swallow it for systemic effects? Aren’t we here for some whump? Let’s talk about Geralt’s body.
When atropine touches your oral mucosa (the wet skin inside your mouth) it absorbs incredibly quickly and dries out all your spit. We use atropine drops under the tongue of patients who can’t handle having spit in their mouths because they’ll choke or inhale their oral secretions. (Ergot, incidentally, often causes dry mouth.) So Geralt, on Cat, has an epically dry mouth. Like put him in front of a dust cloud and he can’t even make enough spit to clear the dust from his mouth. Once absorbed systemically, it’s also going to speed up his heart a bit, unless his mutations prevent that somehow or unless we consider our friend monkshood (we’ll get there in a second).
His body may also lose its ability to sweat, which has the great side effect of making him less stinky after a big fight (if you’re not into the real gross sex) but uh, also, sweating is how we thermoregulate. Let’s hope Geralt’s mutations give him the ability to be just fine at a wider range of temperatures or that our buddy monkshood can counteract this. He’s pale as hell so he might also go really red because his body will push blood to the surface of his skin to try and cool it off.
You know how I said that Geralt’s pretty dry? That goes for all holes, friends, not just his pores! Let’s hope Geralt didn’t have much to eat or drink before taking Cat. Atropine can make it hard or impossible to pee or poop. This means his bladder might get distended and I suggest that we not stick anything in his butthole unless that’s your kink. Because unless he went to take care of business right before he took Cat, oopsies. What’s in there isn’t coming out to make room for things to go in.
Of course, we need to talk about our friend monkshood, aka aconite. One of its most toxic effects is that it paralyses the respiratory centre and the cardiac muscle. In other words, Geralt’s breathing may slow and the atropine and the aconite are going to battle for whether his heart beats real fast or slows down. This sounds to me like a recipe for some cardiac arrhythmias that might make him a little lightheaded especially when you consider that you can kill a whole-ass human adult with 2g (0.07 oz) of fresh monkshood. Even if Geralt has some resistances to toxins, this plant is REAL FUCKING TOXIC. Remember how atropine makes you stop sweating and get hot? Well. Aconite likes to do the opposite. It likes to make you sweat a lot. So we might get a whole mess of ‘sweating/not sweating’ in flashes while the nervous system tries to process these two competing things.
Vomiting is a real big thing with aconite and nausea/vomiting are real big symptoms of constipation (see: atropine). So I’m guessing Geralt doesn’t get hungry and may actually get nauseated enough to throw up from this combo. Sure, he might not do it during battle when he’s got adrenaline fucking things up even more, but coming down off this trip isn’t going to be a good time.
Aconite might correct the urinary retention, but since we don’t use it in modern medicine very much (if at all), I don’t have enough info to figure out if it was used as a diuretic in traditional medicines because of its effect on the kidney or its effect on the bladder so I’m still leaning on the atropine for this one and thinking Geralt can’t pee very well.
Then we move on to our friend eyebright. No active ingredients to do much as far as I can see from reading a couple papers, but there are reports of toxicity causing nausea, vomiting, and constipation. It might cause trouble breathing and, just because we all love a Geralt who’s screaming that he can’t sleep while Jaskier tells him to take a nap, there are reports of it causing insomnia! So it’s real fun for our insomniac witcher.
Shall we move on to the mental effects? Cool! Eyebright, aconite, and atropine can all cause confusion. Let’s hope he’s REAL good at dosing himself and that he doesn’t have to think about anything heavy and complex. Both aconite and atropine can cause agitation.
Atropine is good at causing visual hallucinations, especially when the eyes are closed, as well as sleep disturbances. So Geralt tries to take a nap after this fight and he trips balls. It can also cause auditory hallucinations, though I can’t find a lot of indications of what form that takes. It’s more likely, based on my experience with people experiencing medication-induced auditory hallucinations, to be tones and other sounds of that nature rather than speech sounds.
Aconite is interesting from a hallucination perspective because the most widely reported aconite-related hallucination I can find is a tactile hallucination of being covered in hair or fur. Interesting, hm?
So yeah, if you want to fuck Geralt up, just give him Cat. I’m sure he’ll be fine.
