The day I got a ketamine infusion while my house burned down.
When you hear “now-houseless Angeleno got a ketamine infusion while their home burned down,” I promise you what happened was weirder, worse, and also possibly better, than what you’re imagining. Less of a privileged designer drug experimenter, more “intersection of multiple American tragedies.” The infusion treatment I need every two weeks to keep my progressive neurological disorder — Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, also known charmingly as “Crips” or “the suicide disease” — at bay used to be continually authorized, but Blue Shield started side-eyeing its cost last year. Now, about every six months, they completely stop and restart the treatment, demanding I jump through hoops and wait for weeks to months for it to get re-approved. Wednesday morning, January 8th, 2025, was due to be my last infusion before I performed the latest late-capitalist dystopian rites.
By the time I checked in at 7am, I looked harrowed. The head nurse, seeing my disheveled outfit and dark eyes, asked what happened. I held up my phone casually and shrugged with the ease of a surfer. “Oh, just got evacuated, twice, kind of,” I said. “Apparently the school right across the street from my place is on fire right now, so I think my apartment is gonna burn down while I’m in this ketamine infusion, or already is.”
And I was right.
When I moved to Lake Avenue in Altadena, California in early May 2023, I was already disabled from my condition and an eventual partial amputation on my right hand, so I didn’t drive anymore — a special kind of curse in LA. Altadena was a happy compromise for me — affordable, quirky, still connected to LA directly via public transit but a haven of plentiful trailheads and green spaces. A bus stopped right outside of my building to take me down the road to the metro station, whisking me to downtown LA in just about an hour’s journey. I could still see the San Gabriels in sweeping ridgelines from my north-facing windows. Sunrises painted them in hues of warm gold and indigo, sunsets dipped them in lavender. In the treasured times when I felt well enough, I loved to hike the trails at the top of Lake, drinking tea on a bench overlooking the whole of Los Angeles as the sun rose.
My unit was a back house built above garages that stood behind a larger main building. It seemed shadily (read: illegally) converted, with the Post Office not recognizing it as a residential address and odd things like the gas stove having no vent or hood in the kitchen. A corporate van stayed parked right outside the garages, and on more than one occasion, I caught glimpses inside the garages themselves, revealing cans of paint and fuel. I planted a garden on my balcony, particularly fond of succulents hanging wildly in pots off the side of the building, blissfully unaware my front porch was essentially sitting on a bomb. I would go out there and do yoga in the mornings, listening to the screeches of the wild parrots — a quirk of some LA neighborhoods — and the beautiful background noises of a place teeming with life.
Supercharged and unusual Santa Ana winds whipped and howled the night of January 7th. The Palisades fire was burning on the western side of the county. My friend Jeremy was over that evening — I still had power, even though most of my neighborhood had been preemptively shut off by SoCalEd for public safety, so I offered him a place to hang out.
We were about to watch Dr. Who, but I paused and tilted my head at something I heard. I listened to a sheriff’s car driving down streets a short distance away. The car kept making this distinctive siren on a loop —a short woop, woop, woop–followed by some words over a loudspeaker that I couldn’t make out. In 2021, I’d spent six months living up in the rural Sierra Nevadas in a town just a little southeast of Paradise — the mountain town where 85 people, mostly elderly and disabled folks, perished in a horrific 2018 blaze. Sometimes, when the power was out, sheriff’s cars would make that noise to alert people to possible danger. A “go look at the sky or check Google” alert.
“Hey, let’s check the fire map,” I told Jeremy. “Just to be safe.”
Sure enough, ten minutes before, a fire had sparked in Eaton Canyon almost two miles due east of me. Evacuation orders were already being pushed out, basically from the canyon eastward to Lake Avenue. Some sites said “up to the east side of Lake Avenue.” Others said “Lake Avenue” as though it was included. It wasn’t clear if my side of the street counted — we certainly didn’t get an audible text alert. In fact, we weren’t even listed in an evacuation warning zone at that point. Clearly, though, my neighbors in the front building thought it applied to us — they were all immediately packing up and heading out, too.
In hopes that we’d be reassured by what we saw, Jeremy and I ran to the front of my building. The air was thick and acrid with angry, fresh smoke. As far as the eye could see, stretching up Lake Avenue until it disappeared in the haze and the orange brightness of flame, there were cars bumper-to-bumper. Most of the street lights were down. The fire’s glow was ominously close and bright in the background.
Oh, fuck no, I thought, instantly recalling some of the most horrible deaths from Paradise and Lahaina, thinking about the hundreds of people who’d been forced to abandon their cars and run in Palisades earlier that day. Of all the ways to die in a fire, that option terrified me the most. So, unclear evacuation order or not, we decided it was time to go.
Jeremy helped me wrangle my cat while I frantically grabbed what I could. I feel so unprepared in hindsight. I used to have a “go bag” when I lived in the mountains and suddenly, I was caught in the thrashing current of “oh, shit, I wish I had thought of this before now.” I took my controlled medications — things that I knew would be impossible to replace — and a framed photo of my father that my sister sent me after his death. I grabbed a few spiritual and sentimental items, but not even a full change of clothes.
I didn’t grab any of my plants, not even a cutting of the succulents. I spent hours and hours learning to love nature through them. Many were plants that I’d grown for years. One was a gift from a now-deceased friend. The orange tree had only just started to bloom for the second-ever time and it somehow didn’t cross my mind to grab it, even with Jeremy’s truck. My art. Nearly all of my clothes and shoes. Most of my books. I just didn’t think of it.
As we drove to Jeremy’s house a few miles to the west that night, we watched the fire start to consume the hillsides and burn down towards Lake Avenue. Hilltop trees ignited in the distance. I cried. My brain logically knew that if the top of Lake Avenue was burning, my place was going to burn too — in hurricane-force gusts of fire, the destruction tends to be random and unforgiving, and it was going to be a long night of uncontrolled growth. By midnight, a fire official was asked by a CNN reporter if there was any chance of containing it at all, and the answer was no. Still, though, no expanded evacuation orders.
I didn’t know it yet, but according to the LATimes, a spot fire caused by blown embers erupted on Calaveras Street at 10:51pm, just three blocks north of my apartment and miles away from the main fire front. A neighbor took a photo of the flames from my balcony before fleeing. The fire was in our neighborhood, in our designated evacuation zone — the “Ald-Calaveras Zone” and yet, nothing. At 2:30am, a woman was pulled from a burning building near the Lake and Woodbury intersection just south of my apartment. At 3:30am, some expanded evacuation alerts went out — but while they finally covered the zones immediately north and west of Ald-Calaveras, Ald-Calaveras wasn’t included.
At 5:55am, moments before my alarm was set to go off, Jeremy and I were awakened by blaring alarms on our phones. Finally, more extensive expanded orders had come — but they extended far and wide, including all of Altadena, La Canada Flintridge, and parts of Glendale, as well as upper Pasadena. This was the first alert that Ald-Calavares, which had been burning since 11pm the night before, got. To say that it came too late is a massive understatement.
In a daze and not grasping how much danger we were in, Jeremy decided to drop me off at the hospital and then go back for his cat and mine. He also wanted to help his neighbors do some fire defense work — namely, gathering up the match-stick fences that had blown over in the winds, hosing them down, and wetting everyone’s roof. While I got yeeted across the spacetime continuum with nearly 300mgs of ketamine, 10mgs of oral valium, and a total of 6mgs of IV Versed, his block worked to save their houses at the same time mine burned.
I almost never sleep through my ketamine infusions, let alone the hour-long observation period afterward. I am always twisting and turning, falling through time, body fighting the uncanny. But that day, I did, and when the nurses woke me up to go, it was like waking up in the wrong universe. When I came out of my ketamine infusion at 12:30 or 1 pm on Wednesday the 8th, the fires had become international news. Since I was unconscious during the infusion, my phone had been in airplane mode so my binaural beats wouldn’t be interrupted. I turned it back on to a cascade of panicked texts, calls, and voicemails, and people sending me clips of my street on fire. Still kind of seeing double, I attempted to reassure people that I was safe, but that I wasn’t sure what was waiting for me in Altadena.
Jeremy breathlessly told me that he had been unable to wrangle our very freaked-out cats before coming back to the hospital to get me. We raced back to the north end Pasadena and were stopped at a barricade just two blocks away from his house. The cop manning the checkpoint let a guy in a civilian car with Montana plates and a “let’s go Brandon” bumper sticker, but halted us, trying to give us the run-around. I wasn’t in the mood to play. I pulled down my shirt, revealing a needle sticking out of my chest. “I have a central line, I’m on chemotherapy.” (For MCAS, not cancer, but he didn’t need to know that.) “My meds are at his house just two blocks up, please.”
The sight of a sickly white fem was enough for the cop to roll his eyes and let us pass. The air was acrid and felt like it was sticking to my skin. I saw Jeremy’s neighbors on their roofs with hoses and a dual feeling of pride and anxiety struck me. We went inside and got the cats in their carriers, grabbed the things Jeremy had packed, and got in the truck.
Since we were already behind the barricade, and it frankly looked from videos I was seeing like the worst of the fire had burned through hours ago up in my neighborhood, we decided to see how close we could get. Crucially, the winds had died down enough that water tankers were finally being used, slowing the spread of devastation.
As we got closer to Lake Avenue, the destruction was evident. Ghostly. Bombed out. Apocalyptic. Reeking of burnt plastic and copper. We turned down the side streets. A neighbor’s house on the corner of El Molino & Sacramento previously had a cactus and a grapevine, like something out of the Garden of Eden, hanging off the side of their property. It took me a moment to realize it was completely burnt out. This beautiful place, blocks south and east of me — I knew in my heart that if this had burned, my place burned too.
We passed by ruin after ruin, fires still actively smoldering and burning. Jeremy noted hopefully that he could still see the front building by my apartment, but my eyes were trained on the walkway to the back unit, how the stairs suddenly disappeared into nothingness. We pulled closer and my world stopped. My entire unit had burned and caved in. Jeremy began to cry. I made a choked noise and either leaned over or keeled.
I read an article the other week about how in the case of floods, the damage lingers and you might find fragments, but in fires, there’s just nothing. (And, to the poor souls digging through toxic rubble in hopes of finding something to save, they will pay the price with their bodies for their grief and I hate that.)
I survived acute compartment syndrome in late 2021. One of the tips of my fingers that became necrotic never healed right, and I developed a bone infection there a year later. Months of IV antibiotics failed to clear it. It was intensely painful — nearly no soft tissue had grown back over the bone. We amputated the fingertip. It was like my healing was finally able to begin once we did.
Sometimes, having something left is worse than having nothing. Perhaps it is good that there is nothing left of my life but ash.
Looking back on the past few weeks, it feels like the bad ending to a psychedelic trip. A k-hole I’ve yet to emerge from. My psychiatrist said that though it undoubtedly felt like shit in the moment, chemically, your brain being full of ketamine and benzodiazepines is probably the best state you could possibly be in when your life burns and you come face-to-face with the ruins. Ketamine inhibits the neurotransmitters involved in “giving up.” So I am not giving up.
The Eaton fire killed dozens of people and many more are still missing. At least one death was in my zone, just a half block or so to the south of my apartment. The details of all the losses are gutting, but one story gets me particularly livid. A fellow amputee and extraordinary father named Anthony Mitchell died trying to save his sick son, Justin Mitchell, after an ambulance they called for on Tuesday night did not come to save them. They lived just northeast of me — walking distance for me. If Jeremy hadn’t been there at my place already — someone with a car, someone who could evacuate me because I couldn’t do it myself as a disabled person — I have no idea what I would’ve done. What happened to Anthony Mitchell could’ve happened to me or anybody you know or love. And it will happen to more people unless we do something.
Over and over again, disabled people, elderly people, and people of color are left to die in natural disasters. How many more vulnerable people must perish in these inhumane ways before we accept the chronic nature of this problem and actually resolve to do something about it? How many more Paradises, Lahainas, Altadenas?
There is a direct line between the ashes of Altadena and the profit in someone’s bank account. Will SoCalEd become a climate-conscious provider? Doubtful, considering it appears they left their huge equipment energized, sparking the fire that would consume Altadena, as though we’ve learned nothing from the many devastating, deadly ignitions that have happened that way over the past few years. Will Chevron decarbonize their business and stop poisoning kids in the name of oil refinement in south LA? Will the companies exploiting our communities look at this as an inflection point or yet again more collateral damage for money?
Or when I rebuild my dreams yet again, will they become tinder for next year’s unprecedented catastrophe and record profits?
Veins full of ketamine, a heart full of righteous anger, and a home that has burned to the ground, the air full of lead and asbestos and lithium ion batteries. I am an Angeleno’s guide to the apocalypse. Where will I go from here? I don’t know. But if there’s one thing I have acquired after hundreds of ketamine infusions, it’s the conviction that I am not afraid to die anymore. I am afraid to live like this. So, I will do something about this or die trying. That is true for all of us, whether or not you want it to be. And I promise you, the fire or the flood or the freak heatwave will come for you too. Be more prepared than I was, please.
If this account of the Eaton Fire touches you, please consider donating to my GoFundMe. Thank you & be well.
