Pagan struggled with her mental health (borderline personality disorder) and initially started drinking as a coping mechanism. Then she got involved with a group of people at the age of 17 who were using Ketamine and she started using it as well.
She used Ketamine for 13 years, inhaling it for 10 years and injecting for 3 years. She says she fell in love with it as it helped her with her mental health struggles and made her less angry.
Initially she was just using it over the weekends, but it then turned to using it every day. Pagan says there were some days she was using 12 grams of Ketamine a day.
She was dealing Ketamine in order to get hold of it. She never made money from dealing Ketamine – her payment came in the form of the drugs.
She tried working as a barmaid for a while but being around alcohol led her to drinking as well as using Ketamine.
When she was inhaling the drug, she used to get nosebleeds, cramps and bladder issues.
Pagan lost her daughter to adoption which led her to start injecting Ketamine. She noticed a couple of her best friends were injecting it and were getting a bigger reaction from a smaller dose by injecting rather than inhaling.
She says there was a brief period when she was abstinent but a combination of losing her daughter, the passing of her father (she had to give the go-ahead to turn his life-support off), and being assaulted by her brother, led her to relapse.
Pagan says she was killing herself from using Ketamine. She ended up having sepsis four times. Had operations on her legs because of abscesses and had to have muscle removed. She became incontinent had ulcers in her bladder which led to her peeing blood every day. Her kidneys also started to suffer.
She got to a point where she didn’t want that lifestyle anymore. She wanted to be able to see her daughter.
Pagan has been with Turning Point on and off for 8 years. She twice previously went through rehab but was unsuccessful. Last year, whilst she was in hospital with sepsis, pneumonia and TB, she told staff to take her to rehab.
Pagan has been off Ketamine now for a year. She is working as a peer mentor at the Oxfordshire service. Her goal is to help remove the stigma around Ketamine use and support those people struggling with it.
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