Lasting tenderness/bizarre sensation after im ketamine.

[THECATINTHEHAT]

First of all let me apologise if this is the wrong section, please move if necessary. Secondly let me say that i know the real answer to this question is go to the fucking doctors, but for various reasons I am either reluctant or unable to at least for the moment. Now I'll get to the point.

A week or so ago I was injecting ketamine, trying to iv but on various occasions failing and putting the hit in to a muscle, on a couple of occasions with blood from the iv attempt in the barrel. The last time I did this was last Wednesday and i have injected ketamine both im and iv many many times before. At first i noticed nothing different, but come Friday I started to notice a bizarre sensation in the muscle I injected in to (right quad). It feels kind of swollen, like the muscle is holding fluid and tender but at the same time slightly numb (i know that is paradoxical). This sensation has steadily grown and got worse to the point where its kind of impossible to ignore it, but there doesn't seem to be any outward visible signs of an infection. There is no noticeable swelling, no redness of the skin or anything like that.

Anyone got any idea what the fuck is going on? It seems weird that it didn't appear at first and has taken a while to appear but there is no signs of infection. Obviously I'm concerned but I'm properly clueless as to what is going on, anyone had a similar experience. I am a very experienced user of various drugs via injection and I've never had anything like this.

 

[Morphling]

If you don't rotate IM injection sites it can result in small deposits of medication in the muscle. Thats one of the reasons you're supposed to rub the site after injection, to help absorption. Muscle tissue doesn't have a great deal of sensory nerves, I do believe, so it wouldn't necessarily be painful.

 

[THECATINTHEHAT]

I didn't put that much in to the muscle, just a few ml. Nothing different to what I have done before. Thinking it might be some kind of nervous damage as it is essentially numbness I guess. Don't understand why it took a couple of days to appear though.

 

[Solipsis]

The ketamine may have acted as an analgesic.

You really ought to rotate I.M. sites and massage the injection site afterwards, that prevents this sort of thing. I've felt alternating numbness and tenderness when I did a lot of I.M. ketamine although I was never really worried about it. But I did get sore. It could be that one time I felt zero pain from injecting into a tender over-used quad muscle, and the next few times it would be sensitive as hell.
Now I know better and I take the precautions (plus I learned that other injection sites than the quads aren't as awkward as I thought they would be - buttocks and shoulders basically). Also I reduced my use so all the factors together make it much more responsible this way.

In conclusion: I just think it takes a bit of time to heal and it is nowhere near as serious as an infection. But make sure it doesn't happen again because it can't be good either.