| | |  Health & Beauty | August 2008 
Ketamine Coma Helps Chronic Pain Sufferer Feel Better
 Shawn Jeffords - Sun Media
go to original
| | For more information on RSD, go to www.rsdcanada.org or www.rsdfoundation.org | | |
Strapped to a bed in a Mexican hospital room, Heather Kennedy-Redmond had to battle shadows emerging from dark corners of her mind.
Tubes pierced her body to feed and help her breathe, while beeping monitors registered her vital signs.
Having exhausted traditional medicine, the 26-year-old Mooretown, Ont., woman had travelled to Mexico for experimental treatment of chronic pain.
Kennedy-Redmond has a little-known condition called reflex sympathetic dystrophy, or RSD.
The controversial treatment she underwent involved inducing a coma by flooding her body for five days with ketamine, a powerful human and veterinary anesthetic known to street users as Special K.
For the next seven days, vivid hallucinations threatened to consume her. But now, a year later, the pain Kennedy-Redmond endured has eased.
Parents Linda and Paul Kennedy and husband Ken Redmond hovered over her for the entire week, hoping she would emerge from the coma changed.
Looking back, Kennedy- Redmond remembers a simple gesture in that hospital room in Monterey as being a revelation.
"I remember holding my Dad's hand and it didn't hurt," she said.
After seven years of finding few answers and even fewer viable treatment options in Canada, a radical long shot seemed better than nothing.
"We're very ordinary people. We're not the kind of people to go through with coma treatments," said Linda Kennedy.
But the constant pain was just too much for Kennedy-Redmond.
"For my parents, the ketamine coma was not something they wanted to do," she said. "For me it was like, 'It can't get here fast enough. Let me do it now.'"
The pain of RSD first appeared following a routine injection in July 2000. She'd just had her tonsils removed and the inter-muscular shot in her right leg hurt for days.
The pain spread and grew more intense in the ensuing weeks. And prescribed anti-inflammatory medication did nothing to ease the burning, stabbing, electric-shock pain, she said.
"We went to so many doctors. They were telling me I was crazy and that it was all in my head."
The changes were devastating for a woman who filled her free time playing sports and preparing for 10-kilometre runs.
"Within two years it had spread across my body, from my scalp to my toes."
In desperation, the Kennedys turned to the Internet, searching for anything that matched the symptoms.
In 2003, they found a doctor in Vero Beach, Fla., who treated patients with chronic pain and booked an appointment.
But with the diagnosis came the shocking news: RSD has no cure.
"We just kept saying, there's always hope," said Linda Kennedy. "You never know what's around the corner."
Her daughter began travelling to Hamilton, Ont., every three weeks for nerve blocks and epidurals, adding those 30 needles to a daily regimen of 17 pills.
"They would take the edge off. It would get worse and then I'd go back and have it done again."
The treatments were not sustainable and threatened to do irreparable harm to Kennedy- Redmond's body. Worse yet, the pain kept increasing.
Eventually the Kennedys' research led to ketamine.
They read about how a single, low-dose treatment was showing promise, while another more radical "ketamine coma" had left some patients in German trials pain-free.
The U. S. Food and Drug Administration hasn't approved the treatment, but a doctor in Mexico had secured the drug protocols from German physicians.
"My parents didn't tell me about it," Kennedy-Redmond said. "They were good about it because they didn't want me to get my hopes up and be excited and then be shot down."
Paul and Linda Kennedy talked to patients who had undergone the treatment and doctors who administered it. But the wait list for a low-dose treatment contained about 250 names and the first opening was a decade away.
"Seeing someone you love in such pain and feeling helpless, it's heart-wrenching," Linda Kennedy said. "It sounds crazy what's been done here, but we knew there were no other options."
Family, friends, co-workers and complete strangers rallied to raise $20,000 toward the $50,000 treatment cost.
"It still amazes me," Heather said. "There are just so many people to thank. How do you do that?"
They flew to Mexico last March and Heather emerged from hospital feeling weak but different.
A year later, she estimates she's 60 per cent better, and improving daily. Though she'll never be cured, she expects to be symptom-free soon.
Kennedy-Redmond said ketamine comas are not for everyone. While the results show promise, some patients have emerged with no benefit.
More pressing is the need to properly diagnose RSD. All too often, hopelessness and pain causes RSD patients to commit suicide, she said.
"That's why it's important to get the word out, so that people know that it's something that is real and can be dealt with."
For more information on RSD, go to www.rsdcanada.org or www.rsdfoundation.org |
|
| |
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us