The Ketamine Diaries Volume 2

The Ketamine Diaries Volume 2

 A Book of Short Stories

Medical practices have a telephone message designed to re-direct patients in crisis to the appropriate medical facility. It is provided to discourage a prospective patient from scheduling a medical visit that the outpatient office is not equipped to handle. Before speaking to a receptionist, the caller hears some variation of: If you are experiencing a medical emergency, hang up and call 911. The purpose seems clear enough. A physician's office is not an emergency room, and the receptionist is not qualified to explain how to staunch a hemorrhage or send an ambulance. At SereniPath Ketamine and Wellness Clinic, some prospective patients apparently had heard something different. To them the message seemed to say: If you are experiencing a medical emergency, a psychiatric crisis, an existential funk, or anything else that cannot reasonably wait until business hours-call SereniPath immediately.

And they did. Some called because they were actually in crisis and dialed the Ketamine clinic because they had heard a Tic Toc influencer exclaim that ketamine could work miracles. Some called because they believed they were dying from a mysterious cause that no specialist could identify. One patient wanted to know whether ketamine could remove microplastics, heavy metals, ancestral curses, parasites, vaccine remnants, and the emotional consequences of having been insufficiently validated as highly gifted in the third grade. Many arrived with enough emotional baggage to require a concierge baggage service. It was important to distinguish these complaints because some might actually benefit from treatment, while some others might require researching occult literature and adding an addendum to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5-TR).   

This is the background for The Ketamine Diaries, Volume 2. These short stories might seem improbable. I am not a casting director for a comedic play. No one at SereniPath deliberately assembled the odd ball patients. They found us. SereniPath, at times, was less a clinic than a psychiatric unit with open doors. The way a lighthouse is erected as a warning to steer ships away from the shoals, SereniPath Ketamine and Wellness clinic's patients, had they been foundering ships, seemed to be attracted to them. Volume 2 returns to that same territory, where modern ketamine treatment encounters the universal human tendency of making everything more complicated than necessary.

Volume 2 begins where the first Ketamine Diaries left off: with the staff still attempting to practice sound medicine and psychotherapy while human nature continuously revised the standards of practice. The staff members bring their own quirks, blind spots, overconfidence, rescue impulses, boundary confusion, and competing definitions of what constitutes good care. The clinic operates somewhere between professionalism and improvisation.

The staff have become questionably wiser, and considerably better at creatively documenting problems which challenge classification. The policies have multiplied. Whether anybody follows them remains in doubt.