The Ketamine Chronicles

This session occurred on July 22, 2024.  My session started off with cats.  I don’t own a cat or think about them so this was odd.  But I went with it.  Cats everywhere.  All different kinds of cats.  Then there was this one cat that felt like the president to me.  She was standing at a podium (I know cats don’t stand up on their back legs but this was my trip.  I don’t make it up, it just comes.) She felt powerful and although she wasn’t talking in words she seemed to be in charge and taking no shit.  Then there was this cute little puppy dog that seemed to be her VP. Imagine me describing this to Jym after my session.  I always tell him what I experienced because you often lose a lot of it as time passes and I am usually not in any condition to write it down in that moment.   So then as I was watching the cat president my focus zoomed in and her face was covered in tiny blocks of the “wisdom” (the Aztec looking symbols I often...

 #38.  I have not had treatment in over a month due to work commitments both on my part and Jym’s and the holiday (when the clinic is closed). I have had an extremely difficult last 2 months being away from home with work and some added work stresses and I was probably not in a place to physically test my mental fortitude in my already fragile remission but here we are.  Although I felt the slipping early on, I hoped it was possibly due to my nervousness about the whole month with no treatment thing combined with a very stressful work situation and that I would level out emotionally but the last 2 weeks in particular have been a struggle and one that was far deeper than I imagined.  To add to my constant battle to keep my head above water, one of the PGA TOUR players at the tournament I was doing, took his own life.  (the last entry) It was a sobering reminder of how quickly and easily one can slip into the darkness.  I have to be constantly vigilant....

This was my Facebook post: The suicide this weekend of PGA TOUR Pro Grayson Murray has been weighing on my mind. It is a perfect example of the overwhelming power of depression.  You can be talented, gifted, successful and loved but that broken place deep inside your brain tells you that you are not.  It whispers to you in the stillness and it shouts to you over the noise of life. It shadows everything around you in a haze of darkness, blocking out the sunlight of reality.  I am someone who has been on both sides of suicide.  I have suffered its loss in those I have loved as well as been the one lost myself.  Battling depression and SI from a young age I know the constant struggle it is to keep your head above water.  No one wins this battle.  There is no cure, only short-lived periods of remission and that is only for the lucky ones capable of navigating not only uncertain treatments but the financial burden of those hit-or-miss remedies. But, for m...

 I don’t know what’s wrong with me.  I am more than 2 weeks into my month (may) with no Spravato.  I knew this was coming and was just how it had to be due to work commitments on both my part and Jym’s and the holiday (the clinic is closed).  So I am trying hard to get thru til June 3 (session #38).  I really feel like although Spravato is healing me and not just drugging me, my stupid brain just can’t stop chewing itself up in the spaces in between.  I am hoping right now is just me having anxiety about how I am going to do without it for a month.  I mean the reality is that November and December will both be months that I will likely not have treatment or very sparsely at best so I knew this “trial” run was necessary and was hoping I would do better than I am now.  I had a rough few work weeks mentally with some issues that were going on and it really wore me down and so it was bad timing for sure to be without the meds now.  But it is wh...

My last session was really good.  It was very enlightening. I remember a dome above me.  It was a thin dome high up in the sky.  I could see a spot of it degrading like it was being eaten away as if by acid.  But then I noticed that the hole was trying to heal itself.  It kept attempting to close and solidify the dome again but whatever was eating it away kept at it and the hole would reopen.  Its edges ragged like it was alive.  As the hole got larger I got sucked into it.  Not like a black hole but just like an alien abduction.  LOL.  Gentler.  Kinder.  Just like a lifting.  It was calm and peaceful and on the other side, the universe.  I was floating gently thru the blackness of space with tiny lighted stars all around me. I felt weightless.  Released.  This session also had an elephant in it.  Sometimes I remember odd bits and pieces and try to note anything that seemed powerful in some way to me....

 The administrator of Spravato group I am on on Facebook asked if I could write a success story to post on the page for prospective Spravato patients and people who are struggling in their journey to give them hope.  Since I joined the group it has been my goal to be a positive influence on people and share the experience with people in the same boat as me so this was a perfect thing for me to do.  This is what I wrote… I am a 52-year-old woman who has struggled with treatment resistant depression and suicidal ideation since I was a teenager.  As an adult I found myself trapped in a cycle of daily pharmaceuticals always requiring higher doses, additional pills all with their own side effects. At my worst I was juggling 8 different meds for depression and anxiety, none of them working and all of them barely keeping my head above water.  It was, in the attempted addition of a 9 th drug, that I told my psychiatrist I needed to find a better way.  He refused...