My experience of receiving IV ketamine for depression this time around is now almost completely lost in the recesses of my brain. I do remember having an odd, somewhat uncomfortable feeling early on that I recognized from one of my recent ketamine infusions. My best description of this feeling is that my thoughts were physically too large for my head and too fast to really grasp. But what was most interesting about this infusion was what happened afterward.

First of all, I was so incredibly disoriented that when I thought that my mom was driving in the wrong direction, I asked, “Wait. Where are we going?”

“…Home…?” She replied. It then dawned on me that we were leaving my appointment rather than being on our way there. I was so impaired that I didn’t even remember going to the appointment at all.

The second very strange thing that happened post-infusion was that I began having brief, uncontrollable muscle spasms combined with sudden knee buckling that affected my entire body. I was wobbling along, trying not to fall in the parking garage, when it hit me. My arm shot out in front of me, flinging the apple juice I was holding onto the floor, and the rest of me doubled over for a second. It felt sort of like when you fall asleep sitting up and then violently jerk awake. Except, I was walking. For the rest of the afternoon/evening, this happened in varying degrees at least once per hour. At least, that’s my estimate. Then again, maybe we shouldn’t trust the person who couldn’t even remember going to a ketamine infusion.

The muscle spasms are mysterious but may have been due to the magnesium we’ve been adding, which helps some people see better results from ketamine. We plan to skip it next time, as it hasn’t made a dramatic difference for me, mood-wise. While magnesium may not be important for my depression, something was very different about this experience. The infusion itself seemed the same, but the bizarre visual, proprioceptive, and even auditory components extended far past the time when they usually disappear for me. I can only attribute this to the other measures we take in the effort to slow down my metabolism of ketamine, plus the somewhat recent increase in dose, but to be honest, I don’t know why this one was different.

Generally, by the time I’m capable of putting my shoes on to leave the clinic, things look pretty much normal. This time – not so much. Once home, I noticed that a piece of crumpled paper appeared to have cobwebs on it with tiny insects crawling around inside it. At first, I was completely fooled. Fascinated, unsettled, and fooled. I peered at it from a close-but-safe distance, trying to get my eyes to focus on its movement. I tried alternately holding my breath and blowing on it to see if the gentle movement was actually caused by my own proximity; I tried holding my hand above it to feel for a draft, and I tried touching it with another piece of paper. But, no matter what I did, the cobwebs continued to wave slowly back and forth at their own pace, and the small bugs never explored past the cobwebs. My little tests helped me realize that it wasn’t real, but I was so interested in it that I continued to stare.

Eventually, I dragged my eyes away from the paper to look behind me, and when I turned back, the bugs and cobwebs were gone. After the rather large amount of time I spent engrossed in a crumpled piece of brown paper, I suddenly understood via first-person experience why ketamine’s effects make for a useful clinical model of psychosis. The entire event was bizarre and deeply unsettling in a way I can’t quite describe.

My eyesight was frustratingly blurry, to the point that things actually looked clearer without my glasses. I’m not sure exactly how the physics of that works, but wearing my glasses seemed to make it much more difficult to focus my eyes than it was without them. Attempting to lock my gaze on something flat and relatively close to me, like texts on my phone, made the object recede and push forward into subtle 3-dimensionality on repeat.

Perhaps the most persistent phenomenon of this post-ketamine experience was the sound of voices next to me. I’ve been re-watching a show I like lately, and at some point in the afternoon, I realized that I had been “listening in” on the dialogue of several fictional characters off to my right for at least an hour — not sure about that timeline, though. Their voices sounded exactly like the actors’ voices; so much so that I felt I could identify the person speaking at any given time. There seemed to be a choppy plot- not one familiar to me from the actual show. My brain must have created a whole new plot, but I couldn’t tell you what it was. I again reminded myself that I was just not quite past the effects of ketamine, and that it would pass. It wasn’t that I ever thought those fictional people were actually next to me; the voices just wouldn’t stop. It was like listening to a podcast that I couldn’t turn off. I kept trying to distract myself with something else, but I would eventually drift away from it, back to the voices. Then, after what felt like a few minutes, I’d remember that it’s generally not good to be hearing voices and would try to distract myself again. I was moderately creeped out, but mostly exasperated by the fact that I couldn’t reliably corral my thoughts back to reality.

All of this – the experience of seeing and hearing things so long after an infusion is distinctly new to me. There have been times when I thought I heard things post-infusion, but I’m never quite positive that those sounds weren’t real, and they always happened much closer to the infusion. It seems possible that I might have just been thinking about that show and gotten pulled into an imaginary scene, which doesn’t necessarily count as hearing things. But the cobwebs – which I also saw once during an infusion when I left my eyes open for too long – definitely appeared to be taking up space in the real world, and long after I’m usually good to go.

Today, I feel much more like myself, although I’m strangely exhausted despite doing basically nothing all day yesterday. My vision is still a tad blurry, which I think might have been the scopolamine patch I was wearing, which can dilate your pupils. I’m going to make a checklist before the next time of things that I need to do when I come home from a ketamine infusion. It’s difficult to keep things straight when you can’t remember whether you even made it to the infusion in the first place! I’m going to take this weird continuation of my ketamine infusion experience to mean that it might be more effective against my depression this time. Or, maybe it’s a really bad sign and nobody else ever experiences this. When I find out, I’ll let you know.

If you liked this post, consider starting at the beginning of the Ketamine Chronicles, or visit the archives to find month-by-month posts.