Chronically Catherine: Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Ketamine

“Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline.” I laugh at those commercials because I wish the newest neutrals palette from Maybelline was what keeps me going these days of ravaging chronic pain, but it isn’t — it’s ketamine. 

I was introduced to the drug at a desperate time when I was starting my third month of “status migrainosus” — a sustained migraine attack lasting longer than 72 hours with no break. I was in nausea-inducing, light-avoiding, head-crippling pain. 

I’d been hospitalized already at Mayo Clinic Scottsdale looking for relief but to no avail — though it was an extra special stay because I had my first spinal tap (cue cute hair flip). Back home and half-alive, my Mom hauled me to the Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego, and that’s when things began to change. After being admitted again, a nurse said pain management and anesthesiology were en route. Excuse moi? A speciality for pain? Where have they been all my life?

Despite my excitement, I didn’t have high hopes because my pain hadn’t relented to any treatment yet, and migraines have a long history of being misunderstood as “just a headache” when in reality, it’s a neurological disease. Not to mention, as a young woman, some doctors dismissed my pain as anxiety-induced or hormonal like it was the 1800s and hysteria was the only answer for why women had any medical issues or started having opinions. As a result, I’d come to understand myself as someone who’d never be a candidate for true pain relief.

Nevertheless, in walked a team of doctors, led by a 6’4” physician who my mother would describe as “the missing Hemsworth brother”— a Navy SEAL turned pain management specialist who treated literal SEALs.  It was clear by the look on his face he expected to walk in and see one of his fellow brothers, maybe with shrapnel in his back, but instead he saw me — no fucking way a Navy doc treating our nation’s highest trained military operatives was going to take my invisible pain seriously. 

To my surprise, the missing Hemsworth evaluated me with patience, listened to my story, acknowledged my suffering and said he understood the severity of my pain. “I’m going to do everything in my power to give you relief,” he said. “Have you tried ketamine?” I lit up with hope for the first time in months.

While too much is deadly and street ketamine can be fatal as it is often laced with lethal substances like fentanyl, medical-grade prescribed ketamine has been proven to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, phantom limb pain, and it’s even used in low doses on kids in the ER. The controlled dissociative effect is its superpower — or so I thought.

We started the 24/7 IV drip of ketamine, and within an hour I finally got relief, but not without severe side effects. The goal was to tolerate the paranoia and losing touch with reality as long as possible so my brain could bathe in the sweet reset nectar. The IV ketamine was great while it was flowing, but upon discharge and a few days later, all my symptoms came back. I was hospitalized twice more and received 24/7 ketamine again to try and “break” the migraine, but the side effects were too traumatizing to go on. 

Amidst the other trials of treatments, like surgery to burn a nerve in my neck responsible for migraine, an incredibly smart and Maybelline modelesque anesthesiologist and pain management doctor at USC asked if I’d ever tried ketamine lozenges. “Like cough drops?” I said. “Exactly.” She paired them with oxytocin lozenges to provide additional relief and the final result was a miracle. It gave me relief with no side effects and helped get my body back in semi-functional order. 

Halle-fucking-lujah. Yet I remained baffled: Why had my pain relief not been adequately addressed until I’d seen a pain management doctor? 

In a country with an ongoing opioid epidemic and where ketamine isn’t known for pain management, I was scared into believing drugs for pain, aside from Ibuprofen, are dangerous, addictive and should be avoided. But that’s half the picture. Pain relief is also stigmatized, especially for young people like me who are assumed to be resilient, not disabled or immobilized by pain. I thought taking any medication to relieve my pain, especially a controlled substance like ketamine, was naughty. Even worse, I thought accepting pain treatment meant admitting defeat to my diseases.  

It shouldn’t take the SEALs’ doctor, or matter that my pain is invisible, to get relief; what should matter is that demanding relief is not admitting defeat, something to shame or a reason to assume the worst of people, it’s demanding a quality of life. Yes, chronic pain is notoriously difficult to treat, but it isn’t a reason to give up on patients, it’s a reason to innovate, as in the case of my Special-K lozenges. 

Today, I live life with ketamine stocked in my fridge at all times, prescribed and monitored by a pain management doctor. Do I use it regularly? No, sometimes I go a month without touching it. But during bad pain flares, it’s my saving grace. Without it, I would have to be hospitalized by pain flares, which is about once a month. 

It’s so normalized to me now that the first time I went over to my boyfriend’s place I brought a tin of the lozenges to put in his fridge. “Don’t freak out, it’s ketamine.” His eyebrows shot up until I explained all I just relayed to you. You could say that was part of our meet-cute. 

So if you’re listening, Maybelline, hit me up. I think a chronic pain awareness campaign starring me (obviously) would be an incredible brand expanding partnership, tagline: “Maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Ketamine.” 

Catherine Ames is a senior writing about life as a young person coexisting with chronic illness in her column “Chronically Catherine.”