First Experience with Ketamine

My first healing experience with ketamine was many years ago, on the dance-floor of a night club in New York City. 

At the time, I was miserable at my job. The person I was working for was a complete nightmare to work with every day. I remember going home after the first day I worked with this person, my roommate met me at the door and asked me how my first day was, and I just broke down in tears. 

For the next few weeks, I was miserable. Every morning, I woke up dreading the coming day and having to deal with this person. It would be one thing if I just had to go to work and do my job. But my boss insisted that I go above and beyond my normal duties. Every day, I was responsible for feeding this person, who was probably the most finicky person I've ever met. I was asked to feng shui this person's office, paying special attention to the "relationship" corner because this person was single and looking for a relationship. This person's neurotic impulses became my problems to deal with, and I was forced to walk on eggshells every day. One time, on a Sunday, I was asked to come in to the office and turn on the computers for this person, because, after weeks of doing it themself, they could not remember where the power switch was. As time went on, I became more and more depressed and anxious, and going in to work made me feel physically ill.

Then, one weekend, my roommate suggested we just cut loose and go out to the opening of a new club. I agreed that I needed to just let go and have a good time, and before long, we were dancing and enjoying the music. Ketamine, aka Special-K, was a popular party drug at the time, and someone we met there had a bullet of Special-K. It wasn't long before I was high as a kite.

Ketamine, which was mostly used as an animal tranquilizer, is a dissociative drug. If you take too much of it, you can end up in a K-hole, which was described to me as a condition where your body is no longer accepting instructions from your brain, so your body continues to dance while your mind goes elsewhere.

I must have slipped into a K-hole that night because in my mind, I left the dance floor and was transported to another place in outer space. I remember meeting my horrible boss there and being free to let out all of my frustration and anger at this person. On the dance floor, my body was dancing robotically, while in my mind, I was light-years away screaming at my boss.

The ketamine wore off, and I returned to my body.

That Monday morning, I woke up and the first thing I noticed was that my usual nausea at the thought of facing my boss was gone. I went to the office and was surprised to find  that I was able to cope with my boss's personal demands without it bothering me or seeming like a big deal. Those neurotic requests that had so tormented me, were now amusing idiosyncrasies, and what before seemed like life-threatening challenges, now seemed benign. My boss was no longer a tyrant, but someone that I felt compassion for. I was able to stand up for myself. And my boss and I began to be friends. We would even laugh when I would point out to my boss how unreasonable their demands were.

My boss hadn't changed, but I had. I credited that "trip" on ketamine with fixing my relationship with my boss. I was not surprised, thirty years later, to find out that ketamine was being discovered as an almost miracle treatment for depression. And I was anxious to try it therapeutically.