The Ketamine Chronicles

 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...

Well yesterday was an unexpected test of my “remission”.  One I did not plan on and was a bit of a bumpy ride.  I started my morning trying to set up this weight loss program I am trying to get on with my dr.  It has been a lot of screwing around and useless appointments which just result in more copays and more waiting so when I was trying to deal with this a mere hour and a half before my treatment it was hard. It also resulted in me being late leaving for the clinic which stressed me out a bit. I arrive to a pretty quiet waiting room and sign in.  There is another woman there with a man.  She was apparently on her first visit and I assume from the cost it was NOT for Spravato but IV Ketamine or intramuscular injection.  I got called back and got my favorite chair right by the bathroom.  There are a total of probably 10 chairs plus a private room which I have never been in.  The chairs are all sort of in private cubicles with the top areas ope...

 Here I am exactly 3 weeks since my last session on the even of session #31.  I was both thrilled after session 30 and worried about the next 3 weeks.  The last time I went 3 weeks between treatments I totally fell apart and all small gains that I had previously disappeared.  In addition it took months to get back to that place I was before going so long between treatments.  This is not how I wanted to live and I knew was not sustainable.  In addition, session #30 was the most profound experience in treatment for me to date so to risk those enormous gains was a major concern to me.  But it had to happen.  The reality of this treatment is that getting to a clinic where you can have the treatment and be monitored is difficult because you need a driver.  It is a huge sacrifice of time.  When I started Spravato it was not intended to be forever.  There was a very real hope for remission.  But the journey to that seemed long and d...