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VANCOUVER — Ed Thompson remembers the helplessness he felt each of the thousands of times his twin daughters would turn blue and go lifeless in his arms.

The young girls suffered from acute breath-holding spells, an involuntary condition that causes children to pass out, in their case up to 40 times a day.

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“Having your kids die in your arms 7,500 times kind of sucks,” he said.

The girls’ conditions eventually improved, but the experience compounded earlier trauma Thompson had witnessed as a firefighter in South Carolina, sending him into a spiral of post-traumatic stress, substance abuse and thoughts of suicide.

That all changed in 2015 after Thompson enrolled in an experimental psychotherapy trial that used clinical-grade MDMA, also known as the party drug ecstasy, to treat patients suffering from severe cases of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Thompson said the experience saved his life and kept his family together.