When I embarked on my ketamine training in a slightly worn, yet naturally magnificent cult-like setting in the Colorado foothills, I had no idea I had breast cancer. The health of my breasts was the farthest thing from my mind – the conscious part, that is. My goal was to learn as much as I could from the leaders in psychedelic medicine, using a well-established, legal and life-saving drug that I was already so comfortable with using in the emergency room setting.
I chose this training (or maybe it chose me) because I got to learn the theory and science from the best, and experience the medicine myself in a safe, controlled environment with physicians and therapists that were masters in this field. They weren’t the typical pop-up ketamine clinic docs, just looking to turn an easy buck from the latest medical fad. They were psychiatric researchers and clinicians dedicated to making this world a better place mentally, recognizing the limitations of pharmaceuticals and the traditional mental health paradigm of our culture. This was my Ketamine experience….
When Lady Gaga appeared as a guide in my altered ketamine state, I was simply amused and euphoric but certainly not surprised. We had now been together for over a decade. She was more than a pop icon to me. Her lyrics and the combination of her empowered persona and her raw vulnerabilities had brought me through some of my life’s lowest epochs: death, divorce, physical and psychological trauma. But my world was just about perfect when she arrived. Soon-to-be-engaged to the man I loved, with a beautiful life in Hawaii, doing exactly what I treasured was a charmed life indeed. Maybe I should have realized that there was more to her visit in my “K-hole” (the out-of-body experience one can have in ketamine treatment) than pure entertainment.
Yet, since time was completely distorted, I reveled for who knows how long in my own private psychedelic concert full of leather, studs, and theatrics. When Gaga pulled off her shirt and flashed her tits, I must admit, I was a bit embarrassed. Chiding her in whispers, I explained the inappropriateness of nudity at a medical training – even if it was in psychedelics – just as one of my instructors walked by us with only one large, sagging pink swirled breast hanging from the center of her chest. There was no time to contemplate the scenes as the medicine continued the show and Lady Gaga kept repeating “love yourself,” but paused short of imparting some other knowledge that I knew was needed but left behind.
She took me underground, not to a sex club as I initially interpreted, but below the surface of the earth. It was elemental and dark, with glowing red embers, reminiscent of my island’s origin. Feeling drops of dirt being flung on top of me, I realized I was being buried alive yet did not feel fear, but only laughter at this absurd paranoia I carry in my “real” life – one which causes me so much claustrophobia that I have jumped out of MRI machines because I felt as if I was being entombed.
Mother Monster didn’t say goodbye but once more repeated “love yourself” as she vanished, not completing her lesson. I screamed back “yeah, you taught me that already… so what else?” But she had already been replaced with wisps of white.
Someone else now appeared to me. Even though I could not see her face, I knew her presence in an instant. The love that filled my core could not be contained and I began to weep with tears of joy at being with the manifestation of one of my most beloved and now dead patients. The last time I had physically seen her, she was angelic, dressed all in flowing white cotton and surrounded by white orchids which filled every possible space of her small apartment. It was on her death day – the one she had been able to choose as she was dying from terminal breast cancer.
“Lie down,” she instructed surrounded by countless felt but unseen souls.
“You have been working so hard,” I heard telepathically.
“Let us take care of you now. Let us treat you like a Queen.”
It was them. My dead friends and patients on the other side. I was surrounded by a limitless number of spirits, full of gratitude and love and what felt like concern. When a patient is in the dying stages, I have always held the firm belief that they deserve to be treated like royalty and do my best to maintain that space around them, sometimes to my own detriment. I did not feel worthy to be treated like a Queen, unless…I was dying!
She laughed at my thoughts, while reassuring me that they were only there to perform microsurgery meant to recharge my depletion from too much work and not enough play. I was humbled and mesmerized by the large, metallic beetle-like claws that were their surgical instruments, coming at me from all angles. Rays of beaming light started to shoot from my hands and my feet – light so bright that my distorted mind could not contain it and the picture, like a movie, once again changed.
There were so many scenes, several I’ll never remember, much that made no sense, others seemed ridiculous. But the themes of forgiving myself and others, along with joy, play, laughter and, above all else, love whirled around me. And then Gaga reappeared. Before I could express my elation at her return, she pointed past me, this time as she sang in screams, “Love yourself like you love the world.”
Then, looking out, off in the vast distance of the Universe to which she signalled, I watched the Earth implode.
Although the shock and loss were immeasurable, it was pure love that overtook my essence, not fear of destruction.
And then I woke up, took off my headphones and my darkening eyeshades.
Stretching slowly, I opened my eyes to find my guide peacefully smiling back at me. Coming back into the room filled with a vast array of medical providers – all students at this training like me, eager to learn from the experts and experience the potential ketamine had in the field of mental health. I knew in my core this tool was going to be powerful for my patients as well: those that were dying or grappling with serious illness and all the physical and mental madness that goes along with having your life threatened by disease.
Unfortunately, I would soon become part of that crowd: one of those patients that typically needed my help. Only a week after completing this initiation into the miraculous world of what ketamine really had to offer humanity besides its traditional role, I was diagnosed with breast cancer by my sister, a radiologist.
Looking back at my ketamine experience, there was so much for me to process. There seemed a foreshadowing of sorts. And there is no way my rational mind can explain the imagery and the messages that came through. Did my physical body already know I had breast cancer and my conscious mind just wasn’t privy yet? Was my subconscious preparing me for the journey it knew was soon ahead? Or was it all one big coincidence of nonsensical imagery the ketamine created in my brain?
The answers really didn’t matter to me, because I witnessed an enormous shift in myself that I attribute to the ketamine, my body’s innate wisdom, the power of a supportive group and Lady Gaga, of course. The following week, when I underwent my annual MRI and mammogram, I didn’t jump out. There was no hyperventilation or feelings of being buried alive. My heart didn’t even race, which has never been the case in the last 10 years of this screening torture. In fact, as soon as the headphones were placed over my ears, my mind created its own music and I felt like I was back in the K-hole, relaxed to the point of almost falling asleep.
When the results returned abnormal, requiring more imaging and biopsies this time, I found myself staring at the gorgeous eyebrows of the doctor sticking needles in both my breasts. I felt so much gratitude that she had chosen to go to medical school and become one of the best breast experts in town, who just happened to be working on this very day, at this very moment, taking care of me.
When the results returned, showing that I did, in fact have cancer? Well, that’s when I lost my shit, for a moment.
It’s now been a year since my diagnosis, and I am gratefully in remission. Although the surgeries were certainly difficult to recover from physically, it was the mental anguish that lasted the longest and was trickier to navigate. But I created a team of sorts, a various tool bag of modalities and supportive humans to pull from to help support my mental health. And although the physical effects of the ketamine wore off long ago, I so often visited, and still do, the feeling of those journeys – and the love for myself that ketamine, cancer, and my own inner healer were able to show me.
