Special K

Well, it would appear that my brother didn’t die from heart disease or epilepsy.

Ketamine is more than likely what killed him. And this is why the medical examiner said that his death certificate wouldn’t be issued until after the toxicology tests.

The medical examiner said that he had some broken ribs, which would probably be the case with ketamine. He would have dropped like a stone. And he was about 230 to 250, more than enough to break a rib or two.

Apparently Scott had started snorting ketamine quite a few years ago. I didn’t even know that you could snort this shit.

I’ve seen ketamine injected a few times at work. The emergency department will call us up periodically to help out with patient issues. Twice I was involved with removing roofing nails from body parts. Once was through a foot, and once was through a knuckle. Both time I had to explain that you couldn’t simply pull these nails out using a claw hammer as the nails a nail gun fires usually have flutes on them to prevent them from pulling out. Both times I’d get the heads of the nails cut off and then the docs would get me to pull the nail through with vice grips while they stabilized the patient’s foot or hand. Both time, before pulling, the nursing staff would administer a small shot of ketamine into the patient’s IV and out like a fucking light and off to dream land in under 10 to 15 seconds.

Also, having served on the Occupational Health and Safety Committee we had to deal with the possibility drug addiction amongst staff. Years ago there was a nurse at VGH that had been helping herself to the partially used vials of ketamine. One day she grabbed a vial of a partially used paralytic agent and took it home and injected herself with it. It’s assumed that she died instantly as this paralytic agent would have stopped her breathing. Since then drugs like ketamine are controlled in that the unused portions must be returned to the pharmacy and the surgical staff are not allowed to place ketamine into the used surgical sharps containers of the surgical carts.

The person I spoke to at Scott’s condo said that Scott had been known to have started partaking drugs years ago. He started off with weed, then graduated to mushrooms, and somewhere along the line he started into “Special K”. Ketamine isn’t a hard drug to get on the streets. It’s known to be a recreational “clubbing drug” in which users try to enter the “k-hole”.

Like any drug, it has its downfalls. And one of those downfalls is overdose and then death.

The person who let me into Scott’s apartment explained how he came to be found. No one had heard from him for a few days. Then the occupant of the condo below his started to report stains on their ceiling and then a fluid. At about this time the residents on Scott’s floor stated to notice a smell of something rotting.

The Edmonton Police Service was summonsed to do a wellness check.

It’s an older building that used to be apartments. It looks like at some point in time the apartment was changed from rental to condominium and Scott had purchased a suite for about $30k.

It was a mess, and not just from his death, but messy in general.

The stench of his decomposition was still heavy in the air. I don’t know how you ever get rid of that smell. This is one of the reasons that I want MAiD. I couldn’t kill myself knowing that I’d leave this type of mess behind and fuck the people up who found me. Sure, Scott didn’t mean to kill himself, but the damage was staggering .

The flooring from around where he fell had to be removed. His body has obviously gone through algor mortis, livor mortis, rigor mortis, and then into bloating, and finally decay.

The white marks on the trusses are where his fluids seeped in and couldn’t be removed. You can also see the drywall that had to be removed as it was damaged.

He was a heavy smoker, and a drinker from the looks of it.

The Gill family and alcohol are a deadly combination. Grandma was a prolific alcoholic. Her son, my father, was a piss tank alcoholic. I don’t know what Scott’s drinking level was but I was never willing to play with the alcohol gods.

Growing up in a military family living on military bases, both Scott and I started smoking at a young age. I started smoking when I was 13. Scott was already smoking before I was which meant that he started around 11. And I think it would be fair to say that about 40 percent of early teens on Canadian Forces Base Downsview were smoking. Smoking was a way to calm your nerves. With our father and stepmother we needed all the help we could get.

Richard didn’t care that we smoked in the PMQ. His only rule was that we were never to touch his smokes, and if he ever ran out of cigarettes, we had to give him ours until he could go get a new pack. And there were lots of stores around base that were willing to sell smokes to kids.

I started smoking Player’s Extra Light just like Richard was smoking. Scott was smoking DuMaurier. I couldn’t figure out why until he told me it was so that Richard wouldn’t poach his smokes. I switched to Players Unfiltered.

I was up to two packs a day by the time I was sixteen. But that plummeted to less than a pack a day after I moved out of Richard’s PMQ.

I quit smoking when I was 25 and I haven’t smoked since. But it looks as if Scott wasn’t able to shake the cigarette habit.

What does concern me is the butane torch. Scott was no pastry chef, so it wasn’t like he was making crème brûlée, and I don’t think that he was using the torch to sear his steaks.

Was he using this for a water bong for weed, or was he cooking something a little harder with this? Guess I’ll have to wait for the toxicology reports.

I know that Scott had issues. I grew up in the same defective family that he did with the same defective parents that he did.

And having lived through what we lived through it’s no surprise that he had issues.

I’m no saint, but the one thing I was able to do was stay clear of drugs. The only needles that I’ve ever done for pleasure are my tattoos.

It’s obvious that for whatever reason, Scott wasn’t able to stay clear.

I know that there were indications when we lived on Canadian Forces Base Downsview that Scott was doing something, but neither Richard nor Sue seemed to concerned about it. They would literally lock themselves in their bedroom and spend the evening watching TV.

As Scott’s drug use seems to have ramped after 2011 when the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service contacted him for a witness statement. Was it bringing the past into the modern day that set him on the path to self destruction?

I know that in 2013 after I had given Richard his written examination for Federal Court, Richard had tracked Scott down and talked to him, Scott even admitted as much. And that’s when Scott started accusing me of letting the babysitter molest him, just as Richard and Captain Totzke had blamed me years ago. Did Richard lie to Scott in 2013? Did Richard tell Scott the “official Canadian Forces approved version” of what happened from 1978 to 1980?

When it was revealed in 2020 that I had told the absolute truth about the whole CFB Namao affair and that it was in fact a much larger scandal than just Captain McRae having consensual homosexual sex with the 14 year old babysitter, did this shatter Scott’s world as Richard had built it for him?

Doesn’t matter much now, does it?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I’ll never understand why I didn’t get addicted to drugs, be it booze, pot, opioids, etc. Why Scott got addicted and I didn’t is always going to be a fucking mystery. We both grew up is the same fucked up dysfunctional military family living on military bases. We both lost our mother due to abuse of military procedures. We both got sexually abused and swept under the rug by defects in the National Defence Act.

I have no one to impress, but then either did Scott. I don’t have a “dad” that I always wanted to impress, and neither did Scott. I couldn’t give a flying fuck what Sue has to say, and I don’t think Scott cared for Sue either. And Marie was never around. This is why I really want to donate my brain to science after I die.

If my brain can offer clues as to why someone who went through the shit I went through never got addicted to drugs, then giving my brain to science would be worth it.