What It Was Like

The Ketamine infusion left me tired, cold, and nauseous, with a metallic taste in my mouth. Hell, for me, would be an endless repetition of Ketamine. In fact, I think I would altogether lose my mind after several hours, which has surely been the fate of thousands of lab animals. Even after a mere two hours, the doctor himself wheeled me to the car so Peggy could drive me home.

The nurse who started my IV said, "You might feel like you're floating around the ceiling." It was a gross understatement, because every time I thought the drug had peaked, it laid further waste to my sense that I existed. I became like a compressed ball, a black hole of nothingness, yet I recognized the place Ketamine took me as though I had been there before. I looked in vain for something solid on which to anchor my identity but the more the Ketamine took hold, the harder this became. The room lights had been turned low, but I was seated, as I requested, away from the others in a corner near the door under a softly shining pole lamp. I had brought four books because I had no idea if I would be able to read or would be reduced to looking at photos. Of the four, one was the spiritual memoir of an agnostic, another discussed the spiritual life of dogs, and the final two were oversized books of cat photos. I settled on the cat books, reveling in the beauty of my favorite breed, the ancient and sensuously beautiful Turkish Angora, but when I switched from book to book, the one I was putting away seemed to float downwards while the one I was retrieving floated upwards, my hands following rather than moving. 

Time, space, and even existence came to be mere intellectual concepts, and I had no idea if the music and the whisperings I was hearing came from within or without. When I could no longer focus on cat photos, I tried sitting with my eyes closed, but the blackness pullulated like maggots on a carcass, so I returned to my books. Many things cause me to feel alienated from my species, none moreso than that it allowed the flat-faced deformities called Persians to so displace the ethereally beautiful Angora that the Angora barely escaped extinction. I smiled when I reflected that I have come to adore cats with the same intensity that I once adored women, and that it was the cat photos that were making the Ketamine bearable.

A bed (patients could choose whether to sit in a recliner or lie in a bed) separated me from the other five patients and I could only see the upper bodies of the two nurses, Linda and Vanessa. I would look at them, let what seemed like several minutes pass, and then look again, but they would be in the same place and in the same posture, leaving me to feel frozen in time. I sat opposite a sink, and the cabinet's drawer handles turned into melancholy faces. The nurses, the doctor, and the other patients moved in and out of the room in slow motion like shadowy, surrealist performance artists for whom movement was its own end. Reality became an Ingmar Bergman movie. I had been warned that the drug would make me diurese (which I assume is why the other patients kept leaving the room) so I stopped all liquids three hours prior to the infusion. I was glad for this because I could have neither said that I needed to go or have gotten to the bathroom unaided.

I would occasionally move an arm or leg because it seemed like the right thing to do, but I felt no connection with the seemingly distant flesh that was mysteriously obeying my commands. I kept going back to the same two Angora photos, and despite being enthralled by the textual description, I had trouble remembering the preceding sentence. I imagined that I was leaving visible fingerprints everywhere I touched a page, and this led me to fantasize that I was creating the book out of nothingness. I remembered that Ketamine causes brain damage, and I knew this was true because I was watching my mind disintegrate. If a bear had entered the room, I honestly don't know if I would have been able to flee. I was in awe of the fact that I had once walked, talked, and done the many things that normal people do, and I seriously wondered if I would ever do them again. 

Every time I thought I had reached a peak of disintegration, the Ketamine took me even higher. Like a stealthy shadow, Peggy entered the room, and I saw her with new eyes, a part of my high, a part of my movie, a knowing participant in the existential joke. She looked drawn and worried because her husband was wasted, and Peggy hates being around wasted people, and because, while I was receiving the Ketamine, she had taken Ollie to the vet for the same problem he had two months ago. Now as then, the vet didn't know what is causing the hair loss, but he charged another $175 to guess. He proposed a treatment that Peggy declined because it was toxic, and because she didn't trust him to know what he was talking about. He finally gave Ollie the same two shots that had temporarily helped before.

I think I might have succeeded in whispering a short sentence to Peggy, and I'm sure I nodded my head, but she soon drifted away, phantom-like, to sit in the car with Ollie. She returned when the treatment was nearly over, and this time I giggled and made gestures with my free hand, but I mostly tried to avoid disturbing my fellow patients. It worried me that I was among strangers and expected to maintain a decorum that had become impossible for me. Fortunately, when the Ketamine was withdrawn, I regained the ability to at least speak--however stupidly--and I was even able to stand, although I was too weak and dizzy to remain standing. 

But did it help? My pain level had been higher than usual lately, but it had dropped appreciably before the Ketamine, partly because I was done with the yardwork that had aggravated it, and partly because I was psyched to have a new direction for treatment. Doctors ask their patients to score their pain level on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the worst imaginable. I hate this because every number is a lie, but doctors demand it, so I gave mine a three going in and a one coming out. I think the anti-gravity recliner might have helped more than the Ketamine. My lowered pain score led the doctor to ask if I would like to come back in two weeks for a higher dose, and I said yes in order to keep my options open. Today, my pain level is higher than it was yesterday prior to the Ketamine, but what of Ketamine's promise of providing quick relief from depression? I don't know. Perhaps, I'm better, but I'm still so shaken by the Ketamine trip that I really can't tell.

Once home from two hours of constant Ketamine, I wanted to settle my mind by watching something happy, so I settled on a documentary about Roger Ebert. I knew he would die at some point in the film, but I assumed it would come at the end, so I was horrified when the film opened with him sitting in a hospital bed with his mouth hanging open and his bandaged neck visible through his mouth. I unsuccessfully tried to deny the reality of what I was seeing, but soon realized that his tongue and lower mouth had been removed, and that his chin contained no bone, which was why it was hanging open like a flap. I remembered Peggy's father's preacher's wife who so trusted in Christ's promise of healing that she refused to see a doctor for oral cancer, only going when it was too late to save her nose or her face from the roof of her mouth down. I don't know how any of us survive decades on this nightmarish planet, and Ketamine seemed like a new hell in a parallel universe.

I persevered with the documentary just as I had persevered with the Ketamine, stubbornness combined with my fear of looking afraid having, for good or ill, gotten me through a great many things. When I got into bed last night, Ollie ran, not walked, to join me. Every night he does this, and every night, he continues the ritual by rubbing his scent upon my book and bedside table. Then he stands upon my thighs and gazes into my eyes lovingly while kneading my abdomen. As our statue of Bastet looks down in divine approbation, I kiss Ollie tenderly, and tell him he's my handsome man. Last night, I asked him if he's worth all the money we spend on him, and he answered by slowly blinking both eyes in tenderness and trust. 

He's now on the chair beside me, taking his late-morning nap, and I am rapturous in the knowledge that it's money that enables me to provide him with what I lack, by which I mean a belief that the universe is safe and that our life together will go on forever.

Going down the K-hole

I slept no more than five hours last night, partly because I rarely sleep well anyway and partly because I was nervous about having cataract surgery today (I'm posting this two days after I started writing it, so the surgery is over), but mostly because I'm euphoric over the prospect of receiving my first Ketamine infusion next week. The pain that I've lived with for years has various causes and afflicts me in various parts of my body, but the worst of it consists of soft tissue back pain that started when I broke my back in 2016. J___, my pain specialist, has done everything he knows to do, but nothing has worked, and I've often thought about seeing a pain specialist named L___ who gives Lidocaine infusions, something that J___ isn't set up to do. I didn't because I had little confidence that Lidocaine would work, but mostly because I feared losing my monthly oxycodone allowance. When I heard that L___ is offering Ketamine infusions, I ran not walked to make an appointment. I saw him yesterday, and he agreed to start me on Ketamine next week. The treatment will take two hours, and will have to be repeated every month or so. I figure that even if it doesn't relieve the pain, it will surely diminish the severe depression, and anything that helps with the one helps with the other.

Ketamine is sold illegally as Special K. The common term for the high is falling into the K-Hole, but it's also called, and I kid you not, God. It got these names because it takes users out of their bodies (some people even forget that they have a body) and causes hallucinations. Because such things can lead to panic, L___ adds a benzodiazepine (a family of downers that includes Valium and Ativan) to the IV. He said that, even with the downer, those who enjoy Ketamine most benefit most, and that some of them drop from a chronic pain level of seven all the way down to zero. 

I anticipate a lovely trip, but Peggy doesn't see it that way. Peggy says there's something wrong with people who enjoy drug trips. Peggy says I shouldn't even talk about such things, even with her, and this inspired me to chant, "I'm going to get wasted in the doctor's office; I'm going to get wasted in the doctor's office!" Peggy then complimented me on my emotional maturity, and I complimented her on hers. Ours was a veritable love-fest of respect and affection.

I reminded Peggy of what L___ said about Ketamine's efficacy being enhanced by enjoyment, but she wasn't swayed. L___ said I'll need her to drive me home. L___ said that she can be at my side during the infusion as long as she's supportive, but I worry that such support as she is able to offer will ring false, and that I'll be too vulnerable to shrug it off. 

Many years ago when I took every hallucinogenic that I could find, I discovered that if I took them on a sunny day amid beautiful surroundings, and was either alone or with a trusted friend, I would have a good trip; but if I took them at night, at a party, among people I didn't know or trust, and in an unfamiliar place from which I couldn't easily escape, the result was so frightening that I couldn't move or speak. When people noticed my distress, they would stop talking and stare at me, causing me to feel like an insect upon which the sun was being directed by a a magnifying glass. An infusion lab means strangers, strangeness, clinical sterility, and the expectation of decorum, but L___ suggested that I bring peaceful music (I anticipate Bach or Vivaldi), and I anticipate sitting with my eyes closed.

But why did I take drugs that cause hallucinations and dissociation in the first place? Three reasons: curiosity; a desire to test my psychological strength; and the hope of seeing God. I failed the mental toughness test, and God never came, but the visual manifestation of creatures more frightening than a Bosch painting did, but only when my surroundings were wrong. When my surroundings were right, the universe became physically beautiful and morally benevolent. On the night that I went on my worst trip, I eventually founding myself alone in a completely darkened room, where I spent the next several hours enthralled by an ethereally beautiful kaleidoscope of light, safety, and color. When dawn came, I watched water oaks do a joy dance across the Louisiana Delta. On another occasion, my mind created the wildest and most beautiful electric guitar music I had ever heard, and the music lifted me into the air while I sat in a chair. These unreal experiences rank among the most joyful, memorable, and enriching experiences I've ever known.

Next week, I take a drug that will hopefully cause my spirit to soar, both in the short-term and the long-term. "Some people walk into the clinic with a pain level of seven, and walk out with a zero," L___ said, and I am happy to think that it might be so.

But what qualifies as abuse?

I'm to see yet another pain specialist next week. On the forms he sent was the question, "Have you ever been physically or emotionally abused?" I said no, but a few days later, the following poured from me, and I wondered if I shouldn't have responded differently. I know that the answer comes down to what qualifies as abuse, but after dredging up the following memories, I certainly felt abused. But abused by whom, and if my boyhood was so abusive, how is is that so many who grew up as I did would disagree?

I grew up in an ultra-fundamentalist denomination called the Church of Christ, which holds that the Bible is the dictated Word of God, and is therefore completely clear, consistent, and perfect in every scientific, historical, and theological aspect. Because the Church of Christ recognizes no authority beyond the individual congregation, beliefs and practices vary slightly. At the liberal end, women are allowed to make announcements, teach Sunday school, and ask questions during Bible study. At the conservative end, they aren't allowed to speak at all except to the people near them, yet in both liberal and conservative churches, young boys can speak freely in any role assigned to them. Again at the liberal end, communion wine is served in tiny glasses that are passed around in stackable trays. At the conservative end, communion wine is served in one large glass, the reason being that Jesus spoke in the singular when he said, "Take this cup in memory of me."

The Church of Christ has weekly communion; practices baptism by immersion; and prohibits the use of musical instruments inside the church, even for weddings. It claims to be God's one true church and to have been in continual existence since the time of Christ--it explains the lack of evidence for this by saying that Catholic persecution drove it underground until the 1830s. The church teaches that anyone, anywhere who sincerely seeks God will be led to the Church of Christ, and that anyone who has reached "the age of accountability" (around age twelve) without belonging to the Church of Christ is in willful disobedience to God and is therefore condemned to eternal torment in a "lake of fire." To illustrate the extreme literalism of the Church of Christ, I heard preachers debate whether someone who died in a car wreck on his way to be baptized would go to heaven or hell. The Church of Christ regards religious holidays as "pagan" and politics as "worldly." Because it regards other churches as ruled by Satan, ecumenicalism is unthinkable. I, personally, never knew the Church of Christ to do any good for anyone beyond buying poor families a turkey at Thanksgiving, its entire emphasis being on personal salvation.

Members of the Church of Christ call their preachers Brother (Reverend being considered Satanic and Father even worse), and they call one another Brother ___ and Sister ____. Because Church of Christ members expect every sermon to include talk of hell and an invitation to be saved, my earliest memory of God revolves around being so afraid of him that I hid under the bed when I got home from church. Heavy rains scared me because I worried that they were the start of another worldwide flood, and thunder frightened me because I heard in it the voice of an angry God. Yet most of my early memories of church are good memories, perhaps because I was a desperately lonely child who lived in the country and had no playmates, and the people at church were friendly. 

I was six when I started celebrating "the Lord's Supper" privately with grape juice and saltines (the Church of Christ uses wine and Matzo crackers), and seven when I attended a Catholic wedding, and wished that my bare-walled Church of Christ could be so lavishly decorated. By the time I was eleven, my family had moved into town, and I improvised a backyard pulpit, decorated it with wisteria, and began preaching to the neighborhood kids. When I was twelve, Jehovah Witnesses came to my house, and I began knocking on doors alongside them, saying what I had been told to say and handing out Awakes and Watchtowers. Jehovah's Witnesses were new to our town, and because their services were held in the living room of a small house, I believed that they were like the early church. When my mother told our preacher about my JW involvement, he said that I had to choose one way or the other, so I stayed with the Church of Christ.

I didn't remember my grandfather or great grandfather, but I was told that they had been well respected Church of Christ preachers, and when I reached my teens, I began to accompany Brothers Miller and Stewart on out of state revivals. I took my religion more seriously than did my parents or my sister, which proved to be a good thing when I later left the church and they, at least, didn't shun me. I attended church three times a week, preached short sermons, led singing, offered public prayers, and presided over the communion table, yet from age eleven, I fell victim to a long and desperate struggle to maintain my faith. This struggle left me miserable beyond words because I was convinced (from having heard it continually) that a life without God is one of sadness and desperation. 

What occasioned my first doubt was the Bible itself, specifically a passage in the Old Testament that Brother Miller, read in Bible study one morning. In that passage, God ordered the Jews to invade a city and kill every man, woman, child, and animal, except for the young virgins, which they were allowed to "keep for yourselves." I asked Brother Miller how a just and merciful God could command such a cruel act, and he said that the answers to some questions will only be given in heaven because if God answered them now, faith would be replaced by knowledge, and no one could be saved. Until that day, I had thought that preachers knew everything, and didn't know how I could go on worshiping a god who claimed to be good while commanding his followers to do evil. I was surprised that I was the only person in class who seemed bothered by the reading, but I soon found that I was the only person who seemed bothered by much of anything that was said in church, the Church of Christ belief being that the Bible was true, and questions were of Satan.

After that incident in Bible study, I started paying increasingly close attention both to the Bible and to what my church was telling me about God, and so it was that my doubts increased. I concluded from this that there must be something wrong with me that had caused God to deny me the "gift of faith," and that other people had access to some secret knowledge that I lacked. I continued to cling to my religion, but I could only experience joy to the extent that I was able to find distraction from my questions. I started asking God for faith, and when none came, I berated him for breaking his promise to give faith to those who asked. Hundreds of times, I would pray for guidance, open my King James Bible at random, and point to a verse with my eyes closed in the hope of receiving a message from God, but none came, and when my finger fell on a blank space, a genealogy, a genocide, or some Old Testament ceremonial law, I became furious at God for mocking me. 

I was struck by the irony of having almost no belief in God, yet being obsessed by fear of him. Today, when I hear the continual outpouring of anger, petulance, bullying, narcissism, childishness, and mean-spirited vindictiveness, that comes from my president, I'm reminded of my boyhood image of the Biblical God, only without the white robes and long beard. Of course, the Church of Christ also talked about the gentle Jesus, yet Jesus, like his father, was often insulting, threatening, condescending, hypocritical, and contradictory, plus the context in which Christ was mentioned in church was usually in regard to "his atoning blood," and him being a "ransom for our sins," images that took me right back to the image of an angry God who requires innocent blood to be shed before he can do what he expects us to do freely, that is to forgive.

When I was thirteen, I was running my paper route on my bike when I told God that, since he had ignored my every prayer for faith and because his own son's last words had been an accusation of abandonment, he could hardly expect me to believe in him. As soon I said this, I became terrified that I had committed the unpardonable sin. While I still found church rewarding, I was often consumed by a fear of everlasting hell when I was alone. When I finally concluded that I had to either talk to someone or lose my mind, I went to a preacher's house in search of assurance of God's forgiveness, but when I got there, I couldn't bring myself to tell him why I had come, so we chatted awhile and I left. While still in high school, I tried to help myself by taking a course in psychology at the local college, and we visited the Mandeville, Louisiana, mental asylum as a part of that course. I wondered if I could find peace at Mandeville with the help of wise psychiatrists, but I didn't know what to do to be committed. I thought that maybe setting the woods on fire was the answer, but I worried that I would instead end up in juvenile prison.

By the time I reached my upper teens, I had the thought that maybe my fear and loathing of God wasn't caused by him but by the teachings of my church, and that I either needed to liberalize the church or find a different one. I began writing liberalizing articles for the church newsletter, but none was published, and I began to imagine that the people at church were treating me differently. I then started visiting other churches. Because my options were limited by living in a rural area, I sometimes drove sixty miles north to Jackson (I lived in Mississippi). I stopped counting denominations when I reached fifty, accumulating churches in the same way that other people accumulate states or nations. My search also inspired me to read a set of books on comparative religion, and I took courses in Bible and theology at the local Independent Methodist college, which was only slightly more liberal than the Church of Christ. Early in the process of church shopping, I visited the Episcopal Church, and felt that, at age nineteen, I had finally found my home, so although I visited other denominations, I did so for the joy of it rather than because I had any thought that I might want to become a Pentecostal, a Christian Scientist, etc.

I later joined two other denominations (more about that later), yet the Episcopal Church continued to be the only church I ever loved, although I love it largely because it doesn't even qualify as a church by the standards with which I was raised. I say this for reasons already mentioned, but also because it avoids tackling the Bible directly, but instead cherry-picks passages for its Book of Common Prayer, the result being that most Episcopalians are Biblically illiterate. Yet it is for such reasons that I love the Episcopal Church. I love it so much that I sometimes cry (something I never did in the Church of Christ) while singing a hymn or taking mass, but my tears don't come from any love of a divine being, but from the sweetness, grandeur, and antiquity of the service; from the physical beauty of the sanctuary; and from the shared intimacy with other people. To me, these things and more constitute God, although I avoid the word because I can't to this day separate God from Satan, the one being depicted as hardly less evil than the other in the Bible, and the meaning of God in my life being characterized for far too long by an increasingly desperate and despairing attempt to worship and seek solace from an abusive deity.

More later...