TERRIFYING EXPERIENCE, NOT A JOKE!!
I tried place because they are sponsors of the NHL, I'm a big hockey fan. I'm going to keep this review/warning short because I could go on for a very long time about a the following incident.
I went to Tim Hortons and purchased a medium coffee, and had one of the worst incidents of my life. About a half an hour later my heart suddenly began pounding fast, really fast. I was rushed to the hospital and was taken right in to the back.
After getting triaged they found my resting pulse was 155 to 162 it was terrifying!! They gave me 2 mg of Ativan IV which is a powerful benzodiazepine tranquilizer especially when given intravenously, it did absolutely nothing to bring my pulse down, in other words it wasn't anxiety.
What the Ativan did was make me accept my fate that I may not make it out of the hospital alive or that my life would severely change and I would no longer be going to the gym etc. because of a heart attack that inevitably would've happened from it being that fast to long
They then gave me IV Lopressor which is a beta blocker used for several things including bringing a fast heart rate (tachycardia) down. They also gave me a pill of it to take which would last longer than the IV. My pulse came right down though I was terrified, and rightfully so, that it would spike back up. It was traumatic in the very literal sense of the word. I'm sure you can imagine.
I didn't have anything to eat other than a blueberry muffin that day, it was the morning. I drink pretty strong coffee almost daily (Starbucks etc.). Before I even told them what I had they asked if I ingested some sort of a "cardio stimulant" legal or illegal... I told them about the coffee. Because this had NEVER happened to me before in 40 years of living it was painfully obvious that there was something up with that coffee. Overly fortified with caffeine in one way or another was a strong hypothesis. I will never go there again and I tell everyone about this experience of the topic comes up.
Here is another VERY IMPORTANT DETAIL. I was speaking to an employee of mine (we'll call "JC") and in conversation he mentioned that he once had to call an ambulance because he felt very ill. JC's blood pressure was dangerously high, he was dizzy and his heart rate was very fast.
When I told him that I had a similar experience after drinking TIM HORTONS COFFEE his eyes widened. He told me that that is what he drank as well about an hour before. It was not from the same location or very close in time, though not that far apart either. It was about a 4-6 mounts after my ordeal, we figured it out to see if it might have been the same batch; it was the same company and that's bad enough.
My recommendation is to steer far clear of this place. If you had a similar experience please let me know, I'm very interested for several reasons so please do PM me.
Disclaimer: The coffee I drank at Tim Hortons was never tested, I can't possibly imagine anything else that would've caused this reaction and neither can the medical professionals who did many tests on me. Other than the strong Tim Hortons coffee that I had an hour before I had no outside substances in my system. I have a pretty high tolerance to caffeine and drink coffee daily. This is my, as well as somebody else's, personal experience regarding a 1 hour or less period of time after drinking the same product. read more