ferrie
she/they
- May 19, 2024
- 513
Posting this in recovery bc I figure this is more of the crowd who would be interested, but I've just done my first day of Spravato which is esketamine given as a nasal spray for treatment resistant depression or major depressive disorder with suicidal ideations. It's given in a clinical setting twice a week for the first four weeks, then once a week after. You administer the spray yourself in front of the nurse practitioner. It's once in each nostril from the same device, and for normal appointments this will be done three times 10 minutes apart. For the first appointment they only do two rounds of the spray, but I was only able to do one. They came back with the second one & I wasn't ready, so they waited another 10 minutes to see if I wanted to take the second one at all. I felt super nauseous though & couldn't do it. Apparently nausea & vomiting are pretty common symptoms. It felt way worse than normal nausea though bc the ketamine also made me dissociate pretty heavily. It takes a few minutes after the spray for the side effects to hit you, but once it did I felt completely detached from my body & moving was extremely laborious. Time passed really weirdly for like the first hour after I took it, but I vividly remember staring at my hands & feeling like they weren't mine. I have a lot of health conditions & medications always hit me hard, so take my experience with a grain of salt. I wouldn't want to do it again though. The psychiatrist said most people see that their side effects go away after a few sessions, but I felt disgusting. Idk how to describe it other than it felt like a bad trip. It felt like my brain was in a blender
