[Warning: Potentially Triggering Content]
Ketamine is a hell of a drug, y’all. Take it from a “party girl” opening up about how her habit became so aggressive for several years that she began to pee out her internal organs!
On Tuesday, DailyMail.com published a jaw-dropping interview with a 25-year-old Englishwoman named Paige Collins, and boy does this young woman have a story to tell! Paige (not her pictured, btw — that’s Seth Green in Party Monster), told the outlet that she started using ketamine — the same drug which caused Friends star Matthew Perry‘s overdose death in 2023 — when she was just 19.
Related: Matthew Perry Was Given INSANE Amounts Of Ketamine In The Days Before His Death
From there, the self-proclaimed “party girl” from Hampshire quickly got hooked. And things got unimaginably bad. She recalled how it all began so innocently back when she was just a teenager going to one of her first raves:
“I was 19 — my friend asked me to get some for a rave we were going to and it started from there.”
And for a while after that, it was fine. Collins said ketamine use was a “once-in-a-blue-moon thing” for her.
But before long, the drug — which the US Drug Enforcement Administration says can have hallucinogenic effects as well as feelings of deep calm, pain relief, and amnesia among other things — took its hold.
Collins said her usage really began to pick up during the COVID-19 pandemic:
“It was a weekend thing, then [it] started picking up during COVID to once a week, then several days and then every day. Initially I really enjoyed it. It took me three years to realize I was addicted.”
At that point, Paige recalled, she was snorting the drug daily. And the expenses were skyrocketing! She claimed to spend roughly $1,200 per month to keep up her habit around that time. Damn!
But that was only the tip of the iceberg. Before long, daily usage turned into a terrifying pee problem. Collins recalled:
“It started with more frequent toilet trips. But after a little while I started peeing jelly.”
It wasn’t “jelly” that she was peeing out, though. It was HER BLADDER LINING!
She’d been using the drug so aggressively that it had extensively (and permanently!) damaged her bladder!
OMG!!!
Bladder issues are a known aspect of ketamine addiction. According to the National Library of Medicine, ketamine use can lead to “serious and frequently irreversible damage to the urinary tract.” Those issues include something called cystitis, which a paper in the journal Health Psychology Research has defined as “urinary pain and discomfort, bladder epithelial barrier damage, reduced bladder storage and increased pressure, ureter stenosis, and kidney failure.”
That journal wasn’t kidding about the “reduced bladder storage” comment, either. And Collins would quickly find that out!
She told the outlet that she “didn’t leave the house” for months on end during 2023 because she was using the bathroom as often as 50 times every single day!! In fact, she claimed to the media org that her ketamine use caused her bladder to shrink SO much that it can now hold only 5% of its previously healthy capacity.
WTF?!?!
But even through all that, she found it hard to quit ketamine:
“I was stuck in a cycle of waking up, doing it, crying, saying I’m never going to touch it again then picking it up again.”
Ugh. And her addiction ended up lasting so long that doctors now say her bladder damage can’t be undone:
“They’ve said the damage is irreversible. There’s nothing I can do to make my bladder the way it once was.”
Today, Collins’ health issues are so severe that she is unable to work. She sees doctors and undergoes regular treatments to try to stretch out her bladder in the hope that she’ll somehow be able to restore at least some of its capacity. But in the meantime, she was keen on warning everyone else against trying — and especially getting hooked on — ketamine.
She concluded:
“I was a party girl. Ket was an escape mechanism for me, which I know it also is for lots of other people. I want to raise awareness as I know the physical and emotional pain this has caused me. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
No kidding…
WTF do we even say to this? What a wild and unsettling story. We feel so bad for her!
Thoughts, y’all?! Share ’em (below)…
If you or someone you know is experiencing substance abuse, help is available. Consider checking out the resources SAMHSA provides at https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/national-helpline or check out StartYourRecovery.org
[Image via Strand Releasing/Lighter/YouTube.]
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