Chasing Fear with 62 Romeo and Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy

Written by Special Guest Author: D.D. Finder

Fear was my first true memory. 

When my little brain first switched on, there was no joy or happiness, only the fear of being left alone, coupled with the terror for the hand that responded to my cries. It would slap my legs or pinch my arms if I was too loud, often screaming back at my face. God forbid when I acted up. Fear waited at the bottom of a dark basement, where I was locked away until my mother deemed the psychological punishment sufficient enough for a child.

Fear choked my breath decades later, descending into a sea of red and blue emergency lights, wishing for my helicopter to land quickly on a closed-down interstate. My flight crew and I were the ones who 911 called when they needed help. Looking down on a scene of nightmares from high above in my flight nurse’s seat, my hands trembled from the adrenaline and the simple fact that I was scared shitless of what I was about to insert myself into. 

It took nine years to qualify for that seat, from prereqs to nursing school to the grind of working six years in a level one trauma center, five in the ICU caring for the sickest patients in New Mexico, twelve and a half hours at a time. 

Nine years later, fear still followed me through the stages of my developing career, creating a juggernaut of anxiety. Several times every shift, the thought “What is going to kill your patient in the next five minutes?” was asked. Multiply this mantra by a decade, and anxiety becomes a behemoth of a beast, trampling into my personal life and mauling any remaining innocence and good humor. 

Then insomnia hit. 

For fourteen years, I relied on Ambien to sleep before my shifts. I had three separate doctors prescribed it, and none questioned the long-term impact, but in fairness, I was the one pushing for it. I called them my “nuggets of gold,”- the only way to wedge the walls of anxiety apart for a few hours of rest. But even with this temporary escape, what waited for me at work took its toll.

The final straw was the punitive administration I worked for. They cared more about the company’s reputation than for those wearing the flight uniform. If you messed up -and in this profession, you will- they would say, ‘You should have known,’ then put you in their crosshairs. Mandatory overtime, flipping back and forth between a day and night schedule in the same week -on top of insomnia-, while cautiously working within an unjust culture, felt like I was going to slip eventually. 

So I left. 

The week my two-year contract was up, I neatly folded my Nomex flight suites and placed them in an administrator’s office before ripping off my nametags. I decided to return to what I knew best: critical care medicine. I found a day position in an ICU, no longer subjected to both days and nights shifts in the same week, but rather working a nice set schedule. 

Score for me. 

Slight problem though: the new job was during the delta wave of COVID in 2020. 

Burnout came quickly. I thought I would be resilient working back in a familiar environment and on a day schedule, but after fifteen years of critical care and emergency medicine, I lasted only six additional months. Like many ICUs at the time, we were severely understaffed, and the patients kept coming. Three prone patients on ventilators per one ICU nurse was, and still is, extremely dangerous. 

I made a horrible medication error that could have killed my patient if they weren’t already on a ventilator. My head pounded from wearing N95 masks for twelve hours. I was physically and mentally exhausted, yet I still could not sleep.  

I changed jobs again, hoping a position in an Interventional Radiology department would provide a place to decompress. But there were on-call shifts. I still had to respond to emergencies in the middle of the night- albeit not on a closed-down interstate- but now to an IR suite for a stroked-out patient whose million brain cells died each minute we did not retrieve their clot. 

My home life was suffering. Who I thought I was, I was not. I was no longer a flight nurse. No longer an ICU nurse. I wanted to be ‘somebody useful.’ I wanted to fight back with what fear poisoned me with, a deep sense of worthlessness. Now, my answers were gone. Over a third of my life, earmarked for a calling, was missing. 

I didn’t want to hang out with family and friends. I was irritated all the time. My wife had to witness my outbursts over the dumbest things. I saw where this was going, and none of it would end well. I wasn’t suicidal…but I didn’t know how I could keep surviving. 

And what was left of me after fourteen years of an unrelenting drive to be somebody useful? More anxiety, more fear, and a strong voice in my head telling me horribly fucked up things.  

I needed help. 

However, for a healthcare provider who had worked in highly demanding environments that called for absolute control, relinquishing that control and becoming the patient did not sit right. My personal quagmire was how low my self-esteem was, yet my ego wouldn’t let me ask for help. I knew what to do, or so I thought, but in reality, I was waiting for a wish to be granted. 

I stopped taking Ambien. Five months later, I could not sleep more than three hours a night…if I was lucky. I thought I needed more time in my new job to distance myself from my stressful past. I was wrong. 

The sleepless nights piled on without my nuggets of gold. I was scared shitless I would make a horrible error like the one in the ICU. The thought added more anxiety and accelerated an equation not in my favor. More anxiety meant more insomnia. 

A good night’s rest before work was maybe three hours of sleep, but often, it was just one. My job as an Interventional Radiology Nurse was to find that happy medium of consciously sedating people who trusted I was on my best game. The challenge was not to push them over an edge. It takes experience, knowledge, and sometimes intuition to do so gracefully and safely. Thankfully, I was good enough at my job and lucky when I was so exhausted and close to my own edge.

There wasn’t a rock bottom moment, but the once occasional thought of how I was going to survive steamrolled through my head every day. I could no longer avoid this feeling.  

How was I going to survive? 

I wasn’t. There was no surviving this. 

Out of all the places, Instagram presented a path of healing. I came across a medically retired Navy Seal, Rob Sweetman, Founder of 62 Romeo, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping first responders and military find their best sleep, and took his course. For two months, Rob and his team taught me how to breathe, meditate, and have invaluable sleep hygiene, from turning off the bright LED lights in my kitchen that block the natural release of melatonin to cutting way back on my caffeine intake. 

             Rob introduced technology to better my sleep environment. I invested in a BedJet to sleep in a cooler environment, a Hatch device to wake up to natural light as opposed to a blaring alarm starting my day off on a sympathetic response, a black-out film on my bedroom’s window, and a Muse device to improve my ability to mediate before bedtime. I tried to get outside at least thirty minutes a day, better yet if I was barefoot on the grass.    

In two months, my sleep turned around. From one hour of sleep, I now slept over five hours a night. I was no longer hopeless. For the first time in years, I could see through the fog I lived in. 

But I wasn’t done. 

There were still intrusive thoughts, I hated myself even more, and my outbursts at home were frequent. My confidence was low. I wasn’t the best person I could be. My wife deserved better, and so did I. 

62 Romeo gave me a solid foundation, but I had to keep building on what I learned. A Pubmed study describing how an increase in brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) positively affects sleep, popped up on one of my deep-dive researches. The study mentioned Ketamine increases this valuable brain protein, which is often low in individuals with chronic sleep deprivation. 

Curious about its potential, I made an appointment at Balance Mental Wellness Ketamine Clinic in Denver. Nurse Practitioner Haley was open to my idea of using Ketamine to boost BDNF and improve my sleep. But as we talked, she quickly uncovered a hidden treasure of mental health conditions I was trying to keep at bay. Pathological OCD tendencies. Horrible work experiences with PTSD symptoms A bottled-up traumatic childhood. And, of course, insomnia. 

She mentioned that perhaps, through Ketamine, my sleep would improve by increasing BDNF, but more importantly, the other stuff would be addressed. For the second time in a year, I made my health a major priority and invested heavily in it.

If you have never done psychedelics, Ketamine is a slow roller coaster ride through your soul. Colors, patterns, and imageries relatable to Tron, Super Mario Brothers, and The Matrix wash through your closed eyes, dragging you through an alternate universe that is as real as anything else in life. 

My sense of self disappeared. My name and everything I defined myself as—husband, Nurse, First Responder, brother, friend, American—disintegrated into little boxes floating into a dusky universe. Once again, I was surrounded by darkness, with a half-moon light in the bottom corner of my vision…just like when I was a child and the door from the kitchen was shut behind me, forcing me to descend alone into a dark basement to an eerie light in the corner. 

This time, I was sick of being scared and wanted to engage the light. I ran to it, but the light drifted off, not wanting a confrontation. It felt empowering. For once, I wasn’t afraid, and fear actually feared me.

Another wave of colors swept me through to a different scene. It was beautiful and calming, allowing a sense of peace to soak through my broken body. I convulsed with deep sobs; sadness was being replaced with acceptance. A sense of self returned. “I am exactly who I am supposed to be,” my voice whispered. “And I am exactly who I want to be.” 

There was a red fox checking in on me. Four Samari on horseback rode through and stopped; their silence was captivating. My stomach turned to mud and flowed out an endless stream of pent-up pain. An ancient scroll I could not decipher spun in front of my eyes. Old church songs from my childhood were sung and then dissipated. A blocky robot loomed over me with flashing lights; his presence was hundreds of feet tall, like I was looking up the side of a building. He watched my stillness, then floated away. 

Through all six sessions, I felt love because I recognized my self-worth and discovered it had always been there—just hidden, like something standing outside a closed window curtain, yearning to be opened.

When I awoke in the recliner I had rested in, my musculoskeletal system regained function. I felt the limitations of bone structures again. My tongue curled around the back of my teeth—I thought they disappeared. A warm buzz percolated through my legs, but I felt sore like I had just had a tough squat session. 

Instantly the self-hate subsided. I no longer called myself a ‘piece of shit’ but instead saw my value while feeling a greater empathy for those around me, even towards the people who had hurt me. 

My past was no longer a curse but a gift because I persevered and became who I am. I was grateful for fear’s lessons but felt free from shame. The macro view of life I experienced under Ketamine made me appreciate my micro life and how I fit in. 

Months after my ketamine session, I began to sleep even better. Without the sub-conscious trauma lurking in the darkness of the night, and with the foundational work I did with 62 Romeo, I have true nuggets of gold.  

A year later, I still have tough nights, but the intensity is much less. My irritability does come out occasionally but most often is in check, held at arm’s length away. I still work on my self-confidence, but I don’t hate myself. I have built a toolkit of wellness: yoga, meditation, breathing, jui-jitsu, weightlifting, walking, writing, daily gratitude journals, and nightly cuddles with the dog and cat. And my relationship with my wife has deepened.  

For the first time in a long time, I am at peace. 

Will I return to the flight world? I still could, but at this point, I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

---

D.D. Finder is an RN, former EMT, Flight Nurse, and the author of Ready Left. Ready Right., a gritty, unflinching medical thriller set in the medevac world. His second novel, Two Minutes Out, will be released in 2025. Both novels are fictionalized compilations of real-life scenarios that he has witnessed or heard about as a first responder and nurse. A portion of the proceeds from his books is donated to non-profits supporting first responders and nurses, including 62 Romeo.

Check out his novels on Amazon! You can also connect with D.D. Finder on Instragram at @d.d.finder