Word: sasha
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...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...