SAN DIEGO — It was August of 2014 inside a crowded Sunset Boulevard nightclub in Los Angeles.
Megan Hawkins, now 29, remembers being invited to celebrate a friend’s birthday at the packed nightclub. Rapper Chris Brown was on stage and producer Suge Knight was in the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd.
“All of a sudden just these shots started firing off. And of course, again, I thought they were the fireworks, but everybody else in the club is screaming and dropping to the floor,” Hawkins, a former international fashion model told CBS 8’s Heather Myers.
Hawkins, who was 19 at the time, remembers people trampling over those who had fallen to the ground in a desperate attempt to get out of the club. When Hawkins got outside, a friend noticed blood on the back of her denim shorts. She was put in an ambulance and rushed to a hospital. Doctors discovered that Hawkins had been shot in the lower back and the bullet was lodged in her front hip.
Despite the injury, Hawkins recovered quickly and seemed to be doing fine mentally. Then a month later, she was invited to share her story on the show “The Doctors.” Producers of the show had put together an animated video of the bullet entering Megan’s back and just narrowly missing her spine and vital organs.
“It wasn't until I saw this, that my brain connected those dots. And all of a sudden I'm like, holy crap that is me like this person's body, that is me. And when that happened, everything just kind of started going downhill from there,” said Megan Hawkins.
Megan said it started with vivid nightmares, then depression. She quit modeling and was prescribed several antidepressants.
“Like I genuinely really don't remember very much from that entire period of my life just because I was so drugged out on so many different things,” said Megan.
It took years, but Megan says eventually she tried Ketamine therapy.
It’s a psychedelic treatment for depression usually only prescribed when other therapies have failed. Ketamine was originally intended for use as an anesthetic and became abused on the streets known as “Special K.”
Megan says she had so much success with it in treating her PTSD symptoms, that she co-founded a company called Better U. Under the care of a physician via telehealth, an approved patient can order a Better U Ketamine box sent to their home. The video provided by the company shows Megan placing a Ketamine lozenge in her mouth and putting on an eye mask.
“It's a different experience for everybody. It can be incredibly visual, you can have out-of-body experiences, where sometimes you can feel like your body is floating or moving. We've had some patients that have said they're like I was flying through the universe, I met God, I've had a couple of those experiences myself for sure. But yeah, it's a very internal journey inward,” described Megan.
CBS 8 reached out to Dr. Cory Weissman, the medical director for interventional psychiatry at UCSD.
“The thought is at low doses when you have a little bit of that, that could probably be tied to underlying neuroplasticity in the brain which we think is connected to improvement in depression,” said Dr. Weissman.
Dr. Weissman says the only FDA-approved form of Ketamine for depression is the nasal spray. He says the lozenge form doesn’t have adequate research and is not for everyone.
“If you have a history of past drug use problems, if you have a history of severe cardiovascular disease or liver disease or bladder cystitis, these are all things that it would probably be best to avoid this kind of treatment,” said Weisman.
Dr. Weissman is also concerned that a monthly box sent to people's homes doesn't have proper oversight.
“Ketamine can be a drug of abuse so individuals could be getting prescribed this mail-in Ketamine and they could use it for whatever they want, they could sell it on the street,” said Weissman.
In late 2023, the FDA warned about using at-home Ketamine due to a lack of oversight while the patient uses the drug.
But Megan says even though a bullet nearly took her life, she believes this form of therapy saved her.
“I was able to come full circle and discover the true purpose of why I'm here. And now all I can hope for is to help another lost soul when they were at the place that I was at,” said Megan.
The Better U boxes which include four to eight sessions, can cost between $600- $1000. They are not covered by insurance.
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