Ketanest (esketamine) 50mg intramuscular injection – Trip report
Basic information about myself:
Age: 22
Weight: 81kg
My trip with ketamine yesterday was as spontaneous as it could be. I just decided that I’m bored and I brought up my last ampoule of pharma-grade mind juice - Ketanest (esketamine). 25mg/ml in a 2ml ampoule, so 50mg in total. Welp, there it goes, the last boy.
I took standard precautions for injecting substances into myself. Grabbed a fresh, sterile syringe and aspiration needle to pull out the mind juice out of the glass ampoule container, a sterile injection needle (23G x 1’, blue color), and some alcohol swabs. Disinfected the ampoule, broke off the head, aspirated the insides, switched the needles. Voila, there it is, prepared to send you off into the depths of your mind.
I turned off the computers, dimmed the LED light strips, laid down into my bed, in my mind revised how an intramuscular injection should be given, and I went with it. I chose to inject it into the m. vastus lateralis, in the lateral middle of my thigh, as I wasn’t comfortable with injecting into the deltoid muscle on my shoulder. I estimated the position of the injection, disinfected it with the alcohol swab. Grabbed the muscle so I lifted it off my muscle, and pushed the needle inside (remember, the angle should always be 90° for intramuscular injections, always grab it so, that you have it gripped at the barrel between your thumb and index and middle finger for extra firm grip). It stung a bit at first, but it wasn’t so damn uncomfortable despite the quantity of the solution (2ml).
When I pulled out the needle, it continued to sting for a bit, but it wasn’t too distracting, as it soon dissipated. I soon felt a sensation that felt like if something was spilled on my thigh under the site where I was injecting, but when I looked it wasn’t, nothing was spilled or was coming out from the injection site.
I injected at 22:35, so that will be the T+00:00. I started to feel the tingling throughout my body at around T+00:03. I decided it was time to let it go and stop resisting, as the feeling was getting too intense. I turned off the sounds on my phone, covered myself with a blanket and laid my hands besides my body, with pillows supporting my upper body, so I was in a semi-sitting position on the bed. I closed my eyes. Here’s where the really good stuff sets in.
I must state, that I felt like that play-doh plasteline the whole trip. My mind was completely cut off from my body. At first, it felt like somebody was pushing a big pipe under my bedsheets, as if it would like to lift me onto my right side. Then, it rolled me onto the left side like an ocean wave so powerful it flushed me into the abyss of open space. My body was melting and turning into dust at the same time, mixing with the matter that flushed me away from reality. There I was, tripping harder than I ever was. I thought it wasn’t so hard, but boy, oh boy I was wrong, ohhh boyyy. The visuals were unrepeatable, despite the fact I had my eyes closed. It felt like I was floating in deep space, with stars around me, the planets as separate globes spinning and travelling besides me, who was travelling throughout the space as a blob of well-heated play-doh plasteline. And then suddenly, all the surroundings snapped and closed as a book.
I thought my body was ripped apart, disintegrated and reassembled on a vast red planet of desert and sandstorms. It genuinely looked like the common conception of Mars. I was floating piece by piece throughout the planet, when suddenly everything became shifting like when you mix the Rubik’s cube. I found myself again the vast nothingness of deep space, inhabited only by countless stars, shining in the distance. Faintly I could hear my heart beating (I can often hear my heartbeat because of the hypertension), so I was reassured I wasn’t dead, because I thought that I forgot breathing, so hard was the feeling). Good, life status checked, now back to the travel.
I was reassembled again piece by piece in a mist of foggy colors of the rainbow, when suddenly it started to feel like I was turned upside down, head-first and plunged into the water. Where did that water come from, I mean, I’m in deep space? Nevermind, the hearing was the same as when you’re diving underwater, with small bubble sounds coming from every side you can imagine. Suddenly, I started to segment into four cubes, but wait, where was the fourth cube? Oh shit, it was coming towards me like a freight train at full speed when it hit me: I found myself again in the vast black nothingness of space. I was spinning like a multicolored fidget spinner attached onto a power drill, which landed onto a ledge of a large precipice on Mars. The winds were absolutely packed with stars, like they were so intense they could be blown off by the winds. Suddenly, a tornado formed in the distance, scaring me so I panicked a bit, but I reassured myself that everything is okay and quickly calmed down. The tornado took shape of a hurricane eye, like the one you see from satellite pictures, just that it was vertically placed onto the surface of the planet I was on, and the middle wasn’t blue or white, but pitch black. Shit, it was a black hole, that’s why it was sucking all the stars and all matter inside it. I gave in, released the resistance and became a needle-shaped bullet, speeding into the abyss of the blackness that was sucking inside itself everything it came in its way. I found myself wandering throughout the white space that I didn’t have any memory of. Suddenly, I was in an all white space with lots of people around me, similar to the New York streets in the downtown on a busy day. I walked through the space, ignoring all the people, when I suddenly realized, that I know all these people. They were my relatives who passed away, some even before I was born, but their faces were life-like, they looked like they were really in front of me. I couldn’t comprehend how the hell this was possible, but then I realized, that I memorized their pictures I was shown pretty well, and I have a quite good imagination to imagine how their faces looked like. My grandpa, who died before I was even born, my other grandpa and grandma who I’ve visited but are already dead and my great-grandparents from my dads and moms side, they were all there, and it was almost cathartic to “meet” them in such way. Suddenly, I was lifted in the air and crushed by a cube that fell down from the sky as the space disintegrated into cubes, and I was again in the pitch black environment. My right leg got pulled and stretched into the space, again like the heated play-doh plasteline and I was stretched into infinity, until I was clumped into a ball, which was rolling through the suddenly appeared red-colored desert of an unknown planet, beneath me was the soft sand, which twirled in the wind which I didn’t feel, and above me were countless stars, which were stretched like I was a few moments ago.
I was speeding into infinity when I regained feeling of my body, which contours I hardly visualised. I tried to move my arms, barely succeded to swallow the saliva that accumulated in my mouth. My legs were completely cut off from my nervous system, moving them was impossible, so I haven’t even attempted to do that. The visualization of my body disappeared again in a wave of imaginary water that was rolling to the left, and blackness appeared once again. I was lifted like the soul would leave my body, I was flying, my whole body I was looking at from above was tingling, but I couldn’t see below my waist, like I was existing just to my waist, like my legs weren’t existing at all. Soon also that vision disappeared and the whole picture just slammed in my face, reducing me to nothing. It seemed like I wasn’t existing anymore, it felt like I died right there and then. I again cheched for the sound of my heartbeat, as I again genuinely thought I had stopped breathing. It was there, so I let it go and was engulfed in a sky full of stars which slowly arranged into a circle and started spinning around me. They disintegrated me into tiny particles, which were carried away by the winds I couldn’t feel. Those particles of me formed new stars in the blackness that was all around me. Suddenly, I was getting slight sensations from my body, but then the feeling of falling back into the waves of water that engulfed my imaginary body, swung and threw it around the unrecognizable environment, which could be either deep space or a deep ocean. I was one with the indistinguishable water or vacuum, when I splashed onto a soft, warm surface. There was nothing, it was pitch black, with ocassional stars and twinkles in the space I was in.
After a period of time which felt like an hour, I slowly opened my eyes. My teeth were tingling, they were feeling stiff, like when you get that tingling feeling when you hit your arm on the nerve in the elbow. I clenched my teeth, it felt so good. My joints all over the body were stiff, rigid and felt like I haven’t moved them for a week. I was in the same pose, semi-sitting on my bed, covered with my blanket as when the trip started. I thought the trip lasted for several hours, but it lasted just under an hour, it was T+00:56 when I looked on my phone. It was mind-boggling when I realized that I was tripping for just under an hour, when I thought it had been a period of several hours. I decided it was time to go to sleep, but turning around into the fetal position was a struggle, so I remained in the same position, turned my head onto the left side, and my body succumbed to the wave coming from my right side, that took me on the last ride throughout the mix of the vast nothingness of space and the unknown depths of the sea, and then slowly bringing me back to reality, materializing into a normal human form of semi-anesthetized pile of flesh after T+01:10. I struggled to sit up and re-trace through what the actuall hell I’ve been to in the past hour, still feeling the slight tingliness throughout my body and what felt like micro-electrical jerks of my muscles that tried to contact my brain. I sat like that for a few minutes, recapping the experience on the verge of crying, which was the result of the rush of happiness from realizing, how beautiful, amazing, fascinating and weird the human mind can be when the moment and the substance is right.
I finally rolled to the side, curled into the fetal position, hugged a pillow and fell asleep with tears of joy in my eyes, tingling in my body, feeling happy and content.
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This trip taught me to appreciate the human mind and not to underestimate it under any circumstances. Who knows what powers the mind has to offer. Maybe my trip represents what afterlife looks like when we die and our body shuts down, leaving only the persons’ mind untouched? If we look at the mechanism of action by which ketamine works, it basically cuts the connection to the sensations of the body. Leaving the mind on its own, allowing it to roam free through the vast possibilities it offers. It could do such magnificent things at every time we would like to, but all the sensations from the reality caught by our bodies are just a disturbance, an interference that inhibits the minds’ ability to create such beautiful scapes and feelings in any environment you can think of. The mind is truly incredible and remarkable when it is allowed to roam free, to create whatever it wants without the interference of the outer world it lives in. It isn’t said just for fun, that there’s such silence in the room when ketamine is given for anesthesia that you could hear a sewing needle drop on the floor.
Peace and out.