Thoughts on ketamine therapy
Ketamine therapy was very interesting for me. It helped me with some things, didn’t help with others.
Rambles that are fluffy, by fluffy
Ketamine therapy was very interesting for me. It helped me with some things, didn’t help with others.
On the plus side, my focus is way higher, and my anxiety is the lowest it’s been in a decade.
On the minus side, my chronic pain still sucks a lot, and this is still making it very hard for me to do my job.
It’s still been a huge net benefit for me though. And supposedly it takes a little while for ketamine treatments to have an effect on chronic pain. I’ll get there eventually.
Maybe I should have been checking my blood pressure more frequently. I didn’t check it at all yesterday like I should have and just assumed it was fine, because I just woke up at 4:40 AM feeling a bit off and on a hunch I checked my blood pressure… which is now 169/86.
Wellp, so much for my last chance at being medicated.
So I’ve been on Vyvanse for many days now. Four total, one last Friday and three this week.
So far it isn’t really helping me, but it also isn’t hurting me. This is also just like the lowest possible dose for trial purposes, though.
It makes me feel awake and a bit alert. I also feel like I’m a bit more prone to irritation and feeling stressed, but that might just be other situational things happening right now. It hasn’t really helped with focus at all.
My heart rate and blood pressure are slightly higher than usual but not alramingly so.
I think it’ll be worth trying the next dosage up at some point. I have a followup with my doctor next week to discuss that. It’s promising.
Today I drove for the first time while on it and boy howdy did that feel weird. I’ll probably want to go without it during my trip in a few weeks.
We’ll see how I feel this weekend.
Today was my first day trialing Vyvanse, just a single 10mg dose in the morning. I took it at around 9 AM, and felt it kick in at around 10. It gave me a slight headache, and a slight vague spacy feeling, with maybe a bit of… something that I’m having trouble describing. Almost like my spine was being squeezed from the inside? I don’t know.
My blood pressure and heart rate did rise up a little, but not to concerning levels; my rest pulse is usually 50-60 and my BP is usually 120/80, and on Vyvanse it peaked at around 75 and 135/85, respectively. Nothing terribly concerning, and not so much that I could feel it myself.
I don’t feel like I’m specifically more focused than usual, although my headspace is at least a bit less cluttered. And I’m definitely more alert than usual. It’s not quite how I felt on the two good days of Adderall, but it’s also not like, say, Concerta or Strattera which had me feeling frustrated and, well, colicky, for lack of a better term.1
Anyway. It was good to try this experiment on a day right before a weekend, since that means it won’t mess up the rest of my week if something went wrong, and also this was on a day I wasn’t expecting to be very productive anyway, what with the everything. I’ll be skipping it over the weekend but now I’m feeling a lot more optimistic about resuming it on Monday.
Just a followup, I ended up staying awake for over 25 hours, finally fell asleep for a bit today at 10, woke up again at 11, and mostly I’m feeling like I have a gigantic hangover.
Apparently armodafinil’s mechanism of action is identical to cocaine’s, so it actually IS stimulant-based and not just “a wakefulness agent” and I wish i’d known that before embarking on this. I don’t know why my research failed me this badly this time. Probably me being desperate for something that works.
I’m definitely not interested in continuing with armodafinil, in any case. Advice for dealing with this massive pounding headache would be appreciated.
i feel like crap and i;m wide awake and i want to sleep but i can;t sleep
i;ve been having electric pains through my nerves all night and i feel like i drank three pots of coffee and i am not sleepy at all but i am very very tired
on the plus side i’m having no apnea symptoms tonight but that’s because i’m not getting into a state of relaxation which allows it to occur in the first place
why is my body so awful at processing medications
Just to keep track of stuff here for onlookers
Time | Systolic | Diastolic | HR | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|
9:11 | 120 | 76 | 59 | Just took dose |
9:13 | 119 | 78 | 59 | Validation check |
10:01 | 136 | 90 | 52 | Felt it starting to kick in |
10:02 | 132 | 86 | 51 | |
10:20 | 130 | 93 | 52 | Feeling a bit bad |
10:38 | 142 | 99 | 55 | Feeling quite bad |
10:46 | 147 | 102 | 54 | hi |
10:50 | 136 | 67 | 64 | the ratio |
10:59 | 140 | 100 | 54 | am i going to die? |
11:17 | 148 | 87 | 50 | yeah probably |
11:21 | 151 | 91 | 54 | if i hit 160 I’m going to the hospital |
11:30 | 156 | 95 | 55 | really shouldn’t have taken this on an empty stomach, huh |
11:38 | 158 | 96 | 55 | but hey at least I’m very much awake |
11:56 | 171 | 109 | 61 | 911 is being called right now |
12:15 | 170 | 87 | 68 | EMTs don’t seem to be very worried |
12:17 | 152 | 89 | 60 | Called doctor, seems the EMTs were right |
12:20 | 156 | 96 | 65 | |
12:26 | 144 | 86 | 60 | Out of the woods? I’m feeling better but just shaken |
12:57 | 142 | 89 | 57 | Still feeling really shaky but at least I’m pretty sure I’m not gonna die today |
14:36 | 145 | 94 | 56 | feeling like garbage but I also still haven’t eaten which might have something to do with it |
16:56 | 147 | 91 | 62 | still feeling shitty but at least I’m stable, hopefullY I sleep really good tonight |
18:56 | 139 | 86 | 62 | |
23:46 | 137 | 01 | 59 | bedtime |
A few weeks ago I learned about armodafinil as an alternate non-stimulant ADHD treatment; this seemed pretty compelling to me because stimulant-based meds have always been troublesome for me for various reasons.
Unfortunately, it’s only off-label for ADHD; fortunately it’s on-label for a bunch of other conditions I have, and the theory of it working for ADHD is that it treats underlying sleep conditions that make ADHD worse, rather than treating the ADHD itself.
Last night I came across a pop-science video about the link between ADHD and sleep disruptions, and it raised an interesting point: many of the ADHD symptoms are also symptoms of sleep deprivation, and the sleep disruption aspects of ADHD might actually be the underlying cause of many of them.
I’ve always had great difficulty with sleep, with trouble falling asleep at night but then being incredibly fatigued during the day. And I can’t help but wonder how many of my other issues are just plain due to crappy sleep. Maybe my chronic pain isn’t because of an underlying neurological cause, but is because I’m not properly sleeping and healing at night?
I’ve had three sleep studies at this point. The first in-home study vaguely diagnosed me with obstructive apnea, and is why I got a CPAP machine. The CPAP machine didn’t help at all, so a second study to rule out narcolepsy happened. Then the third one verified that CPAP doesn’t actually make a difference for me.
Anyway, one of the things mentioned in the video is that there’s been some success with treating some forms of childhood ADHD with time-release melatonin. So starting tonight I’m going to try taking time-release melatonin and see if that helps me any.