I’m Back

Fingers Crossed…

from my sketchbook this morning

I feel so much better. It’s been 72 hours since I took that dose of ketamine, and I can tell already that I’ve achieved a degree of emotional detachment from the heaviness of things. I can still think about it and read about it, but I don’t feel so weighted down. I’m also functioning much, much better. It was easy to figure out what I needed to do today, and do it without blankly staring at the wall or losing track.

I know people don’t understand depression if they’ve never experienced it in way that’s debilitating. This is not a mood. Sure, it can include some mood changes like sadness, hopelessness, or other bad feelings, but it is an actual dysfunction of the brain. It’s like someone disconnected the wires up there. I never got to the intense mood changes this time, I jumped in and stopped it before it could get worse. Back in the days before I understood the chemical nature of depression, I would let it go and hope it would pass. It didn’t, and it just got worse until I was circling the drain so fast I was headed for the sewer.

Better living through chemistry, for sure. I am going to keep the second appointment in early March, to “keep the evil spirits away”- just to give my brain an extra boost of rewiring that it needed. Nausea be damned. I always think about my oncology patients when I feel queasy about being queasy, if they can put up with it for months on end during chemo, I can certainly do an afternoon of it. I’m going to get a scopolamine patch for this next session, hopefully that will help.

Some of my drawings and notes immediately post-ketamine

I usually paint in watercolor after a session, but this time I felt like drawing because the images I saw were pretty simple, I didn’t bring the colors into my drawings, but olive green, peach, and lavender were the main colors. The black Pom-pom cat toy I described in the video in my last post what the most vivid image memory I have.

Yesterday’s farmers market went well. No huge sales, but they added up to make it worthwhile. One woman bought two more of my little purple flower paintings after she bought one a few weeks ago. She said it looked lonely there by itself, now she has a set of three.

These little 6 x 6s were a hit.

Today I’m getting caught up on my books, emailing lists, and wrapping up from the market. Once it warms up out in the garage this week I need to pull all my market supplies out, clean everything, and wash the tablecloths I used all winter. I call that “de-mallification”. The smell of the mall clings to everything.

Tomorrow I’ll be hiking with my friend Kim on some trails west of town, I’m looking forward to that. It’s super cold outside this morning, I’m waiting for the sun to warm things up so I can go out and walk and catch up on some podcasts, I’m a couple of weeks behind!

I have no idea how I’ll feel going forward but this is already a huge improvement. Thanks for reading, I wanted to give an update.

I’ll be back with more soon, I feel a burst of creativity coming on.