First dose of Ketamine

For about 15 years I've been dealing with some sort of depression. Not bad for the first 7 or 8 years. It's gotten worse since then. It started getting worse this past summer. My dad passed away, but that didn't affect me all that much. There was a little sadness from the loss at first and then it went into taking care of my mom until it faded away. Still, that lingering depression was there. I contacted my old therapist to begin sessions again. There was a pre-test to measure my current level of depression. I scored in the major to severe category and that worried me. I saw the therapist for a while, until my insurance stopped paying. I weighed continuing but never went back.

Over the holidays I was messaging back and forth to a friend about it. She suggested I continue to seek help. That was the plan. Around that time I saw a program about Ketamine use and effects. The show wound up telling and demonstrating that this was given to patients with treatment resistant depression with great success. I read up on as much as I could about Ketamine. Sure enough, in almost all cases it cured depression. There was still a certain percentage who don't respond to Ketamine. My depressed self figured I would fall into that percentage. What did I know.

I searched online for availability of Ketamine or how to get a psychiatrist to prescribe it. It was very difficult to find anything that specific at first. Then I find there are clinics, like pain clinics and new age medicine clinics, who administer Ketamine. It looked at first like I would have to travel out of town to get the treatment until I found a place right here in my own town who does it. Several blocks from my house at that. I signed up and paid and away I went.  Here's a description of my first of six treatments. My apologies if it's a little disjointed. I wrote this on two different computers. 

100mg of Ketamine to start with, given intravenously. The onset of the drug is slow. Things start to get smaller and distorted. At the start, noises around me were loud. Eventually, once I was fully “under” things got quiet. The only thing in my head was me asking questions of myself. Not a good thing to do. The doctor said if the medicine starts to feel like a bad trip, think of how the drug is helping me. Anything I'm going through is part of it. You have to think of it healing.

The thing to do is not fight it and try to fall asleep. It was hard to do when the IV was going at full flow and there was too much medicine all at once. The nurse cut back the flow but there were just too many things going on in my head to come back down. She cut the flow to give me a rest and a much needed trip to the bathroom.

Back from the bathroom and under again with a moderate flow of medicine put me just right. There was still something bothering me that was causing me to have a bad experience. I lasted through the bad part until the bag ran dry. I could feel the room getting back to normal. Things which were distorted were aligning once again.

It's really strange how I felt. During the treatment I didn't really feel anything out of the ordinary, other than distorted reality. I wasn't really thinking of anything, other than things around me, voices in the room, numbness, etc.. The doctor said there may be sadness from something in my past letting go during my treatment. That didn't happen during the treatment, but it did happen later. During the treatment my mind was blank, just processing immediate needs.

When everything was over, I thought, when does the good happen and the bad go away? Then I realized I couldn't think of anything bad. That didn't really have an effect on me until later. My biggest deal was getting my body back in order so I could go home. Get the breathing under control, clear vision, balancing when I stood up, etc. As we got up to leave it occured to me that I couldn't think of what the old me was like. The feeling was like I was split into two wholes and I didn't know what the other guy, the "old Kev", was up to. I kept thinking I'd look over into the doctor's office where I had my consultation and I'd see me sitting there. I was convinced I was a separate, different person.

That's when the sadness set in. No matter how hard I tried to think of the old me, I couldn't conjure a picture of me at all. I knew there were some things which were bad in my life, but now they didn't seem important. I started crying when I got to the car. It wasn't any event or whatever making me feel sad. It was just a detachment loss I was feeling for the guy I left in the office. It was like I had a twin who I knew everything about except what he was thinking. Like letting go of a friend who just became too toxic in your life. You really enjoyed their company for a while but you had to let them go for your own health. Two days later and I can't think of anything that got me down before.

I knew one thing which set off a perpetual sadness in me. An ex who would infuriate me to think of before. Thoughts of her would make me feel bad about myself. And, I'm telling myself these things because they're not memories I feel anything about anymore. Now, the thought of her is just a blank memory of someone I knew. There was something bad about it that just got erased.

Another thing I remembered was an event which, I think, caused me some PTSD. I wasn't able to pinpoint it before. It's all making sense now. That was a very traumatic event. The guy who went through it with me has since died. His ex-wife has moved on. There's nothing about that event to remind me anymore, but it still haunts me. I'm thinking it will take a couple of more treatments to eliminate that. It's a faded memory since the first treatment, but it's still there as something very strong.

This event must have been more traumatic than I imagined before. Now that my mind is clearing out the mess, I can see some things in my life that showed that occassion was when the switch got flipped. I see some writings stopped at about that point in 2009. Also, my photography stopped, my music buying stopped, my DVD collection kind of ends in 2009, my work on my car stopped too. I always thought that the surgeries I went through in 2008 were the starting point of my downhill slide, but now I see this event with my friend was it. At least it's out there and I can deal with it on its own now.