Video Transcript of Ketamine Testimonial from Jim:
I first came to Ballen Medical [and the Colorado Recovery Infusion Center] back in September which would be 10 months ago. So I had been on medication, for anxiety for almost 30 years. The last Doc I had been seeing just kept dosing me up and up and up and up and things weren’t happening, it wasn’t good. I just couldn’t take any more pills, it was time for me to try something else. I was as low as low can be.
I was recommended to Dr. Ballen and she sort of took me through this whole process of determining what meds that I was on and the state that I was in. Which was pretty low and she recommended ketamine so as opposed to just a medication that’s masking the effect of something that’s causing you to be calm or whatever and then once it wears off it’s gone.
Ketamine actually is helping create new neural pathways to change behaviors or to change how you feel or to change what your brain thinks or how it works. I really trusted Dr. Ballen after meeting with her a few times. She seemed like she had a great understanding of what was going on with me which wasn’t good.
Dr. Ballen scheduled me for ketamine treatments, they come in threes. The first one is, you know a little unusual because you’ve never really experienced that sort of place. I had never really experienced that place. I mean you just have headphones on, it’s silent, but you know your brain is sort of, you know, it’s like you’re dreaming while you’re awake right or dreaming while you’re half-awake. I went out I was tired. A few days later, I came back in I had my next treatment, a few days later I came back in and I had my next treatment. And, like most things you don’t recognize what’s going on inside yourself, you don’t recognize… you don’t recognize behaviors like I didn’t recognize the patterns and behaviors that I had before. They were just negative but things started to seem more positive. I wasn’t you know, thinking about well heck, I’m not going to be here so it doesn’t make any difference.
A week or so after my last treatment, it was like daylight, that I hadn’t seen for a long time and I didn’t have to wait six to eight weeks to find out whether it was going to happen or not. I think one thing that’s changed quite a bit is my openness to counseling and therapy. I‘m not just as negative as I was. My mind isn’t just as made up all the time about how negative things are, how negative I am what this is never going to happen again that’s never going to happen again. I mean I’m not running out there, I’m not a person, that’s you know like on the tv commercials but I’m open to things that I hadn’t been before. I’m accepting myself for where I am like I had not been before, so I don’t know whether it created a new acceptance neural pathway.