Working Life is a monthly column in which Texans talk about their jobs.

Tammy Vaught, who is 49, is a certified registered nurse anesthetist and a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner.

My first exposure to ketamine was as an ER nurse. We used it to help sedate patients in orthopedics, in pain-management cases, and even for general surgery, so that we didn’t have to give so much opioid medication.

I had a dear friend who was suffering from chronic pain and treatment-resistant major depressive disorder. Nothing was working. I was researching out-of-the-box options for him, and ketamine came up in my search, but there were no clinics here in Midland. My friend ended up dying by suicide before I ever got to treat him. When I opened my own clinic, in 2017, there were probably only

See Full Page