painting a story

Hello again.  I am working behind the scenes on the website and slowly it is coming together.  I spent the day organizing data I have to share.  I discovered several journals I kept during the two years leading up to my being told about Ketamine.  It is heartbreaking to read and remember.  It is still so painful.  I am going to share several of my entries because I feel it may document my state of mind before arriving at the doors of Dr. Steven Levine.  I think that when I learned about Ketamine I was in such a bad space and many of you still are.  I know that when I heard about Ketamine I thought it was too good to believe in.  I didn’t have the ability to have faith in anything.  I shrugged at the thought of others being helped.  I watched a couple videos and read the few articles that were available on the internet.  I watched in disbelief.   I was highly suspicious.  Could these people be for real?  It seemed doubtful.  I know now that they spoke with honesty.  I  will write about aspects of Ketamine that you may want to reject.  You may think it is great that it works for me but you are different.  Am I correct?  I know I had these same exact thoughts.  The people that were helped with Ketamine are lucky.  I won’t be that fortunate.   I am sure I have suffered too long to be helped.  I bet those helped didn’t have “my kind of depression”.  I had all the defenses, and mistrust I have grown to feel when approaching new treatments.  As I have stated before and want to impress upon anyone reading now is I was at my end.  No light on inside.  I know from reading my journals that I didn’t have high hopes for Ketamine.  I stayed around and fought for my family.  If there was something that could help, didn’t I owe it to them to try it?  It was not an easy endeavor.  I was profoundly depressed and so angry about it.  I write now and my feelings about the future are positive.  I guess I worry that a depressed individual may blow me off because it seems so far fetched.  I know, I had these thoughts.  My family did so much research and were so hopeful that this treatment would work for me.  I think they had to believe that because they knew I had basically checked out and was just playing the waiting game.  I think I didn’t believe it would help me.  I felt nothing would because the fact is nothing ever did.  I couldn’t get my hopes up like my therapist and husband were.  It is important to me to have you realize how far from the sun I was.  I had been for years.  I know now my depression was always present.  It just manifested itself in a variety of different ways.   I have used many crutches over the years to combat my illness; without success.  I was fighting off depression with running shortly before my most recent break and hospitalizations.  I was training for a marathon, and my body betrayed me.  I ignored it.  I needed to run.  I was being chased by the demon.  I couldn’t seem to run fast enough or long enough.  I would run when I was broken because I knew what was in store for me if Satan out ran me.  The evils of depression go beyond any will power you think should kill it.  I have lost so many, many things and people because I was ashamed of my mental illness and would go into hiding when the symptoms were at their worst.  Many of my observations have been years in the making and others I found with the help of Ketamine.   Depression is an insidious disease.  It will steal everything from you.  It will make life unbearable.  It makes suicide seem rational.  It embeds itself deep within and suffocates you in a world others can’t see.  It painfully kidnaps you and leaves behind only a shell of who you once were.  I was on my last breath.  Ketamine turned out to be my oxygen.  It forced air in, so to speak, and loosened the grip that bastard depression had on me.   I was reviewing my journals and they saddened me.  I have experienced much personal growth since my journey began.   I recognize the girl that wrote the words spread across the pages of my journals, but I am not her.  Thankfully.  I still find myself angry that I didn’t discover Ketamine sooner.  I am trying to accept that I found Ketamine when I did.  I think I will be way ahead of the game when I accept and embrace my diagnoses.  I have spent a great deal of my life denying my illness to others.  I didn’t want to appear weak.  I didn’t want to be labeled and judged.  I still don’t.  I do know that if we don’t start discussing it more freely without the fear of repercussions, more will suffer in silence.  It is a raw subject and just slightly intimate which frightens the general population.  People don’t want to discuss illnesses they can’t see.  I want people to understand the true severity of mental illnesses.  It is just so cruelly debilitating.  We need to realize we have a voice.  We need to be heard.

In closing today, I wanted to comment on how involved my family became in order to pull me from my despair.  My son Matthew was a freshman at Virginia Commonwealth University when Ketamine was first spoken of in our home. Matthew was taking a research class at the time and decided to write his semester paper on Ketamine.  He was then invited to present his finding at the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program’s yearly presentations. It was all so exciting and fascinating.  Matthew’s research paper was accessible online for a year or more, I believe.  I am a very proud mom!  He received an A+ for the class.
His professor was very impressed with Matthew’s topic and enthusiasm. Matthew wrote his paper during the same period of time as my first set of Ketamine infusions.  I returned to Virginia after my first 3 treatments for the weekend, and Matthew interviewed me for his paper.  If anyone is interested I have linked his rough draft of the interview.  Matthew incorporated some of the interview into his research.  He also had to include a poster summarizing his findings for the UROP presentation.

This project was beneficial for the whole family.  We are all doing our part to try and change a flawed medical system.  We know how it changed our lives and we want to shout it off the rooftops in order to bring attention to the drug and its potential life saving abilities.

I will post a couple pictures from VCU’s UROP event below.   I also have high hopes that more people will read this informative paper.  Matthew did an amazing job capturing how Ketamine could be the way out of the darkness.  It definitely lifted me up into the light.

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