K hole experience?
Hi all! I’ve been doing both IV and at home ketamine treatments for chronic pain for ~8 months now. Over the summer, I wasn’t living near my regular clinic and took 400mg troches. These typically felt very mild in comparison to IV. I recently moved back and got my first IV treatment since April, which was 90mg (1.63 mg/kg or 1.95mg/kg/hr). I normally get 80mg but was given more today to apparently account for the effects of at home ketamine treatments. I also got 1mg of Versed which is typical for me.
I had an alarming and frankly terrifying experience that was very unlike what normally happens. I usually get these very bright, colorful, and pleasant hallucinations/physical sensations but this time everything was dark and black. I had trouble breathing the whole time and felt like I was constantly gasping for air. I also felt as if my identity got completely ripped away from me. I didn’t know where I was, what was real, and I couldn’t access my memories or think of the people in my life as real people. I was just enveloped in complete darkness, getting sensations like my body was being contorted and compressed in all sorts of weird, uncomfortable positions. It felt like that was my entire lived reality and it would go on forever like that; there was no memory or perception of my life before or after. I was also freezing cold and had an intense sense of complete confusion the whole time. Overall, it felt like I was in this hellish limbo and I genuinely thought I was going to die for a bit.
I ended up pressing the emergency help button somehow and my nurse stopped the ketamine 7 min early. I wasn’t really able to speak and don’t have much memory of this. They ended up giving me some extra Versed and that was that.
Has this happened to anyone else? I know my dose increased but not by that much and my experiences normally aren’t anything like that. It was terrifying and scary and I can’t get it out of my mind.