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Quake3
Total Carbohydrate




Registered: 08/31/06
Posts: 924
Loc: Relatively New York
Last seen: 12 years, 8 months
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Drug Trip in the E.R.
#7750102 - 12/12/07 04:38 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1693924,00.html?xid=rss-health
"Oh, Mommy, I like this cartoon world!" From the lips of this perfect little 9-year-old Russian boy, these were welcome words. I was doing something so painful to him yet he was quite comfortable — I was happy to be getting my job done. But soul-chilling doubt attacked as soon as I looked up from his broken arm into the young, innocent, and oh-so-stoned face of my patient.
Sasha was not a normal kid. His parents told me he was a genuine child genius. Spoke three languages, did 12th-grade math, played violin and piano — if you read Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game or saw Little Man Tate, you know the type.
Before I gave him the drugs, I explained to Sasha what was going on, why this fracture through the growth plate in his wrist had to be put back in place right away. I told him that the nerve going to his strangely numb fingers was wrapped tightly around a jagged edge of broken bone, that every minute it stayed there increased the likelihood of permanent damage, maybe a palsied hand. His brilliant dark eyes understood immediately. He understood the time pressure, the risks and why I had to treat him right away, in the emergency room. Sasha nodded and said O.K. Then, so did Mom and Dad. I marveled at how these parents deferred to Sasha's judgment. They knew who he was.
The ER doc with me that night was also exceptional, one of the best there is. She knew a lot about "conscious sedation," that is, knocking patients out just enough to do short emergency procedures without pain or writhing — but also without stopping the patient's heart or lungs. (Emergency rooms are not operating rooms; sedation can be risky, and Sasha had a full stomach, another danger.) But Melissa was her usual cheerful, omnicompetent self: "Don't worry, we can fix up that arm right here. We'll just use a touch of atropine, a little Versed for the nightmares and then the best drug there is for this sort of thing — good old Special K."
Special K, or ketamine, is in fact an old drug. Available since the early '60's, it has enjoyed something of a rebirth in the past few years in hospitals, in-patient psych facilities and — illegally, of course — in nightclubs (the sweaty-techno-mosh-pit kinds, not the ones with elegant ladies at small tables). Though it's listed as one, ketamine is not really an anesthetic; it's not even an analgesic. It doesn't actually stop pain. On Special K, you'll still feel pain — you just won't care. Patients I have seen on ketamine become nonchalant about what's going on with their bodies, as if they're not really in there: "Out of body" is how users say they feel on it.
Many patients, like Sasha, seem to be fascinated by the Special K high. This is what mortified me that night when I realized how much he liked what ketamine was doing to his amazing brain. I was afraid that Sasha had tasted a forbidden fruit, peeked into a place he might never forget, one he might long for. Into a 9-year-old mind already struggling with so much adult turmoil, we had loosed a psychedelic snake proffering an alternative and apparently pleasant reality.
What scared me more was that I had never taken a bite of that apple myself. Put another way: I can describe my wife's chocolate cake. On a good day I could probably write 1,000 words about it. And you could read them all. But unless you had a bite (with coffee) you would never know how good it is. You wouldn't know it like I do. I've never been on ketamine, so I know it only as well as a reader would know my wife's cake — secondhand. I wondered how could I warn Sasha about this drug. Without firsthand experience, could I still reason effectively with him about it? I wondered if there was anyone who could, who could say something like "Look here, son, when I was in fourth grade, reading Crime and Punishment and doing analytic geometry, I tried getting high on ketamine and it seemed great, but let me tell you why it really wasn't"? I held Sasha's arm and watched his face as the plaster cast hardened. He was tripping, staring into the mystical middle distance, breathing deep and easy. Was this the face of the next Timothy Leary or Aldous Huxley? Was it my fault?
"Please don't let this mess him up." Formed silently on my lips.
A different set of eyes turned. We waited.
And then it was over. Boy, was I happy to see that first grimace of pain. The plaster was hard, the X-ray was good and the child prodigy was back. He was still a little groggy from the Versed, but there's a world of difference between the sleepy-drunk effects of that drug (it's in the valium family) and the floating, hallucinating, who-am-I? mystical effects of ketamine. As Sasha returned to normal I tested the nerve to his hand. "Do you feel me touching your fingers now?" I asked.
"Yes, but I won't be able to practice in this cast," he answered, and I knew, at least for the moment, that Sasha's big brain had won it's fight with Special K.
And, yes, he was the model patient when he came to the office for follow-up. He claimed (perhaps a tiny bit evasively) that he didn't have nightmares and that he couldn't recall anything weird about the night we fixed his arm. Versed does cause amnesia — sometimes. But I like to think it was something already in there, more mysterious and far more powerful, that brought Sasha's head back to earth.
Dr. Scott Haig is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Orthopedic Surgery at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He has a private practice in the New York City area.
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johnm214



Registered: 05/31/07
Posts: 17,582
Loc: Americas
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Re: Drug Trip in the E.R. [Re: Quake3]
#7750351 - 12/12/07 05:34 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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what the fuck...
yeah, you can tell his brain won the battle with special K cuz he felt pain again? How many CNS-acting drugs take away pain forever, but don't kill you? Oh that's right, none.
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FurrowedBrow
Free yourself from yourself



Registered: 10/26/06
Posts: 2,439
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Re: Drug Trip in the E.R. [Re: Quake3]
#7750423 - 12/12/07 05:51 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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That ended rather abruptly. i want to read more. This is a topic that is really fascinating to me. I'm sure there's a lot more written about this kid and his treatment. It makes me wonder if any of the other psychedelics have been used in emergency settings.
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Mr_DeeMsTer
Mystic


Registered: 01/20/07
Posts: 211
Last seen: 14 years, 2 months
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ketamine was not a fun experience for me...
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toastandjam
Tastes Grate, Lesh Philling




Registered: 05/07/06
Posts: 752
Last seen: 13 years, 2 months
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Re: Drug Trip in the E.R. [Re: Mr_DeeMsTer]
#7750769 - 12/12/07 06:48 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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This story highlights one of the major problems with perceptions of drugs and the place that prohibition has pushed drugs in to and some drugs further in to.
Its either piano and math OR drugs. Its a 'big brain' OR drugs.
The kid's gonna use all sorts of drugs, though maybe not the 'naughty' ones. Most of us here recognize that society is saturated with drugs.
While with some drugs that may certainly be the case, thinking of this experience as having exposed the kid to some terrible, warping 'forbidden fruit' is a touch of irony.
By pushing this prohibition-minded viewpoint, something 'good' OR drugs, you're creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. If you make it such that it must be an "OR" by telling children that drug users are defective, stupid, lazy, whatever-- if someone starts using drugs they're going to have a deeply seated psychological propensity towards those very same traits.
-------------------- Q: We wanted to see if you had the ability to expand your mind and your horizons... and for one brief moment, you did. PICARD: When I realized the paradox... Q: Exactly. For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you'd never considered. That's the exploration that awaits you...not mapping stars and studying nebulae... but charting the unknowable possibilities of existence. To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening. -Dogen Zenji
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Substance D
Smurfed Up



Registered: 11/25/07
Posts: 239
Loc: Inside my Head
Last seen: 15 years, 6 months
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Re: Drug Trip in the E.R. [Re: toastandjam]
#7750967 - 12/12/07 07:28 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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WTF me an my friends called k the devils tool i used to cook yellow lablel k back in the late 90s since then all i seen is blue lablel stuff never been the same .any ways all k ever did was make me stuck on the floor in a dreamland fun with e though!
-------------------- You can turn your back on a person, but, never turn your back on a drug. Especially when it's waving a razor-sharp hunting knife in your eye.
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ZeroBoyWD
Zombie



Registered: 11/21/07
Posts: 460
Last seen: 2 years, 5 months
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Re: Drug Trip in the E.R. [Re: Substance D]
#7751070 - 12/12/07 07:56 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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A buddy of mine last x-mas did K for the first time around a bunch of us. He did not have a fun time. It was him, myself and another buddy sitting at my kitchen table drinking X-Mas (Hot Damn and Coke... Tastes just like christmas I swear) when another pal called us up. When we picked him up he told us he had a few lines of K. So he and my friend did it and after they had both snorted the lines, Mike had told us he had never done it before. I started getting that prickly feeling on the back of my neck cause his girl had just gone to jail. We got back to my house and sat out in the car cause I didn't want to risk my parents see one of them enter a k-hole. I ran inside and grabbed a sixer and when I got back, there was Mike in the front seat nodding in and out, mummbling to himself. I mentioned to the other two to make sure he doesn't do anything crazy, and just then he snapped up grabbed Chase by the shirt and was about to hit him, screaming for where his girlfriend was. We calmed him down and reminded him where his girl was and he nodded back out. Not five minutes later he snapped back and jumped out of the car and started stumble-running down the street. We chased him down and tackled him into the grass and helped him back in the car, took Chase home and we're driving Mike to his house and he kept saying over and over how sorry he was. "Just leave me in the ditch man thats where I belong" We got him home and into his bed before leaving. He's been ashamed about the incident and it doesn't come up much. Anyway, that nurse should know that one pleasant incident does not encomapass every instance of the drug. In fact, I assumed that was common sence
-------------------- I'm done trying to be "right." I want the exchange of ideas to be the currency of my economy. If you have something I can use, great. I'll try it out. If you think my methods are shit, great. Don't use it. We all want yields.
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sleepy
zZzZzZzZz


Registered: 01/17/05
Posts: 3,888
Loc:
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Re: Drug Trip in the E.R. [Re: ZeroBoyWD]
#7751329 - 12/12/07 08:58 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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i tried versed once when i was like 12. i was going in for surgery and hadn't done drugs at all before, they gave it for anxiety? even though i wasn't anxious. i think the fact that i wasn't anxious made for the fun trip.
i remember is feeling this warm feeling in my arm and an extreme euphoria that made me laugh (my mom was smiling too, i guess it was funny, giving little kids drugs)
anyway, i only remember being awake in this state for about a minute, it is an Amnesiac after all.
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nolongerinuse


Registered: 05/14/06
Posts: 947
Last seen: 10 years, 1 month
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Re: Drug Trip in the E.R. [Re: sleepy]
#7751468 - 12/12/07 09:32 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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K= wierd awesome fun time
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rodfarva
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=====-----=-=-=-=-I



Registered: 07/31/07
Posts: 4,982
Last seen: 6 years, 10 months
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k:
i was doesed at a club, potentialy as an attempt on my life i od'ed for the whole weekend and my shit ball friends never took me to the hospital. That might have really helped. I got luckey.
VERSED:
I got dosed with versed without my consent after breaking my leg 7 years ago. I was on demerol and a variety of other things that kept me alive during the blood loss. I dont know what. I woke up in a hospital bed with a tube in my penis and the worst feeling. Like i would rather be dead at that moment. i lost about a week in my head. then i thought maybe it was three months. now sitting here i still cant keep shit strait, and have never felt the same sence getting that fucking drug. Maybe it was the trauma, maybe. I do have a scar from that night the doctors made, and no one can tell me what the fuck it is. (lawyers, other doctors.. ) its all a big fucking jumble. Never let them give you this motherfucker. I think it fucked my head up but im to unsure. I was screaming at my mother and throwing shit around the room they said. never fucking sober would i; never on my own drugs would i. ASsholes.
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Divided_Sky
Ten ThousandThings

Registered: 11/02/03
Posts: 3,171
Loc: The Shining Void
Last seen: 15 years, 7 months
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Re: Drug Trip in the E.R. [Re: rodfarva]
#7753564 - 12/13/07 12:49 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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It sounds like this author is speaking tongue-in-cheak, but I guess he isn't? Does he really think that a mystical experience will ruin a kids life and turn him into a heroin addict? I find it funny that he is trying to prevent the child from growing up to be like *gasp* Aldous Huxley!
-------------------- 1. "After an hour I wasn't feeling anything so I decided to take another..." 2. "We were feeling pretty good so we decided to smoke a few bowls..." 3. "I had to be real quiet because my parents were asleep upstairs..."
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johnm214



Registered: 05/31/07
Posts: 17,582
Loc: Americas
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Re: Drug Trip in the E.R. [Re: Divided_Sky]
#7753661 - 12/13/07 01:10 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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If you knew any of the premed kids at my school, you'd understand instantly.
They tend to have the practical, real-life experience of a lab rat. About as fun too.
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andrewss
precariously aggrandized


Registered: 08/17/07
Posts: 8,725
Loc: ohio
Last seen: 1 month, 13 days
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Re: Drug Trip in the E.R. [Re: johnm214]
#7757090 - 12/14/07 01:15 AM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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Who ever wrote that is perhaps overreacting.... damn
-------------------- Jesus loves you.
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Seuss
Error: divide byzero



Registered: 04/27/01
Posts: 23,480
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Re: Drug Trip in the E.R. [Re: Divided_Sky]
#7757284 - 12/14/07 05:25 AM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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> It sounds like this author is speaking tongue-in-cheak, but I guess he isn't?
I don't know, but I have seen two bones set in the ER with children. In both cases they gave Ketamine to the kids first. In both cases the kids were completely k-holed. They may drool a bit, but the lights were not on, so to speak. There was no "Mommy, I like this cartoon world" or any other such nonsense. The bones were set, the casts applied, and the doctors long gone before the kids came out of the k-hole. Maybe things have changed in the last twenty years, but I doubt it. The original story sounds like a load of moralistic BS to me... 'and I knew, at least for the moment, that Sasha's big brain had won it's fight with Special K'
-------------------- Just another spore in the wind.
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ZeroBoyWD
Zombie



Registered: 11/21/07
Posts: 460
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Re: Drug Trip in the E.R. [Re: Seuss]
#7757782 - 12/14/07 10:28 AM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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IT WAS INDEED A DRAMATIC BATTLE! Perhaps even.... THE MOST EPIC BATTLE BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN! The pure innocence of a child........................... AGAINST THE INCREDIBLE ODDS OF THE DEVILS KETAMINE!
-------------------- I'm done trying to be "right." I want the exchange of ideas to be the currency of my economy. If you have something I can use, great. I'll try it out. If you think my methods are shit, great. Don't use it. We all want yields.
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ExplosiveMango
HallucinogenusDigitallus


Registered: 07/12/05
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Re: Drug Trip in the E.R. [Re: ZeroBoyWD]
#7762194 - 12/15/07 03:29 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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What a good Christian... wondering if the devil's drug would lead that child into evil the way he did...
(ps: people who believe they know god's will are sick and should be treated with drugs like LSD and ketamine)
-------------------- Know your self. Know your substance. Know your source. The most distorted perspective possible is the perspective that yours is not distorted.
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ZeroBoyWD
Zombie



Registered: 11/21/07
Posts: 460
Last seen: 2 years, 5 months
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Quote:
ExplosiveMango said: What a good Christian... wondering if the devil's drug would lead that child into evil the way he did...
(ps: people who believe they know god's will are sick and should be treated with drugs like LSD and ketamine)
I know God's will.... Can I get some L? Seriouslly though, the people who think God has a plan for us all, I can't help but laugh in their face. God has a plan for dumpster babies? Crack babies? How bout those lucky stillborns? Oh yeah thats God's will. God gave us free will so it wouldn't have to impose its will upon us. And ultimatly, it doesnt care one way or the other. Kill yourself, kill someone else, it doesn't make a difference to the man who lives in the clouds.
-------------------- I'm done trying to be "right." I want the exchange of ideas to be the currency of my economy. If you have something I can use, great. I'll try it out. If you think my methods are shit, great. Don't use it. We all want yields.
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fapjack
Title



Registered: 07/26/07
Posts: 16,574
Loc: Central New Jersey
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Re: Drug Trip in the E.R. [Re: Quake3]
#7762729 - 12/15/07 06:01 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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This guy is a tool. Making shit up about his son, also since when does K turn everything into a cartoon world? I've done K many times, I never got this wonderful world, I just sit down and can't move for an hour. What an asshat turning his poor sons tragedy into a story.
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johnm214



Registered: 05/31/07
Posts: 17,582
Loc: Americas
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Re: Drug Trip in the E.R. [Re: Seuss]
#7762856 - 12/15/07 06:40 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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Quote:
Seuss said: > It sounds like this author is speaking tongue-in-cheak, but I guess he isn't?
I don't know, but I have seen two bones set in the ER with children. In both cases they gave Ketamine to the kids first.
Ketamine is getting more common for all sorts of sedation. Apparently it doesn't have the same tendancy to cause respiratory problems as other drugs
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ZeroBoyWD
Zombie



Registered: 11/21/07
Posts: 460
Last seen: 2 years, 5 months
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Re: Drug Trip in the E.R. [Re: fapjack]
#7762882 - 12/15/07 06:47 PM (16 years, 1 month ago) |
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Quote:
fapjack said: This guy is a tool. Making shit up about his son, also since when does K turn everything into a cartoon world? I've done K many times, I never got this wonderful world, I just sit down and can't move for an hour. What an asshat turning his poor sons tragedy into a story.
It was actually the nurse on duty but I agree its the exploitation of a childs pain in an attempt to cause more rabble rousing against drugs. The first time will get you hooked nonsence. Its not the first time.... Its the 30 subsequent times that get you hooked. You know come to think of it, I've never gotten a cartoon world from ANY of the drugs I've done... Should I be pissed at my dealer cause it sounds like I'm missing out on something cool.
-------------------- I'm done trying to be "right." I want the exchange of ideas to be the currency of my economy. If you have something I can use, great. I'll try it out. If you think my methods are shit, great. Don't use it. We all want yields.
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