I sat back and observed the bettering flowing into me. Following in the legacy of Teigen and Styles et al., I took a selfie. I had gotten an IV drip before — but in the fluorescence of a hospital room, not dangling on a tufted chaise longue with $12 Erewhon mangos on offer and oontz-oontz-oontz beats crooning from the ceiling. The incongruity of my surroundings was so odd, like snow in July or a chair revealing itself to be a cartoon character.

Then, back home, I felt neither worse nor better. The promised “really, really good” never arrived. I tasted Flintstones. Or maybe I was only convincing myself I tasted Flintstones. Where were the spurts of energy or eurekas? Surely, the $3 billion global IV drip market isn’t built on pure fantasy; surely people around the world aren’t doing corporate IV drip parties and open-air IV drip movie nights and at-home IV spas just for some great game of pretend? I asked Peter Lurie, a physician and co-author of a study on IV hydration spas, to assess the efficacy of my Remedy Drip. It seems “likely to relieve vitamin deficiencies, but little else,” he said, calling it “a witch’s brew with about the same likelihood of success as, well, a witch’s brew.” (“That’s certainly not the guest experience we seek to provide,” a Remedy Place representative told me, adding that the drip is formulated with “proprietary, higher doses” of vitamins.)

A week later, I looked back at my selfie from the black-curtained room. Perhaps it was the mood lighting, but I was startled to see I looked wan — tired around the eyes and irritable and a little sad. The tube poking out of my arm and linking to the vitamin bag looked like a phone charger or an umbilical cord: There I was, receiving vital care, invaluable help. So maybe I am in fact better now than I was, I thought, looking at that picture.

Or maybe it was a trick of the mind. If you go out and pay for a treatment that has been long associated with some level of sickness, perhaps you later feel regardless of the treatment’s actual effects that you must’ve been sick. And then the more time passes, the more that memory quakes and muddies and reshuffles the order of events, so the past is always trickling down into you in a kind of mixed-up sludge.

I wanted to go back and do another IV drip to suss out the true timeline of events — which comes first, self-awareness or self-delusion? — but then I remembered that the $350 didn’t even include the service tip, and that when I asked for water, it arrived in a plump glass bottle and cost an extra $8.