So I guess you're probably clever enough to understand that I'm still not feeling well at all. I've been pretty quiet about this since after I got out of the hospital, but lately I have felt that perhaps writing things out would be therapeutic...so here I am. I had hope when I left the hospital. There was suddenly a light because my medicine had finally been adjusted by an expert and maybe, just maybe, that would give my brain the opportunity to level itself out. I held onto that bit of hope for the recommended 6 weeks that they tell you to give the medication to do its thing. Time passed and that hope began to fade. 6 weeks went by and there was no change. There came a night that was so dark that I literally gave up on everything, I was so upset to wake up the next morning. For weeks after that I struggled with processing this and coming to terms with the fact that I had failed even at giving up on life. I'm still trying to come to terms with it, really. But I just kept on living after that.
Then one morning I woke up and I felt great! I woke up the next day and it happened again; I was so happy to see a change. I thought things were finally turning around. After a week and a half of feeling great, things went down hill again. Now I feel like I'm back at square -5 and still falling all the time. One thing that never fails to upset me is seeing and knowing other people that get better. It certainly makes me feel like a terrible person, but I can't help but hate it when someone else tells me that medication helped them almost immediately. Here I am on huge doses and still surrounded by a cloud of depression.
I feel as though I have lost most of what makes me me. The neat freak in me has apparently gone to sleep as my house remains unclean and my dishes pile up in the sink. The independent part of me has come to rely on my mother to bring me groceries as going shopping alone causes me huge amounts of anxiety. I've quit doing anything besides going to work and sleeping. Oh, once a week I manage to drag myself to the therapist for an hour but that is only out of obligation, not because I feel like it does any good. Watching movies, doing puzzles, reading, coloring, spending time with people, etc. have all become things that feel like monumental amounts of effort that I simply cannot muster. A full day of work tires me out to the point that 12 hours of sleep never even seems like enough anymore. But there's one little glimmering ray of terrifying hope on the horizon and that is ECT.
On December 19, I will begin Electroconvulsive therapy as basically a last ditch effort to make my brain work right again. ECT is the process of sending an electric shock through your brain and inducing a short seizure. This is done several times over a span of 2 weeks. The idea is basically the same as turning a computer off and back on again. It's uncertain exactly how it works, but this therapy is said to be effective in about 80% of people versus the roughly 40% that medication helps. It is terrifying, to be certain. I am scared out of my mind. Even though it's much safer than the old versions of shock therapy, it seems like there's so much that can go wrong when playing around directly with your brain. But as I have told my family, my brain and the thoughts that it produces are far scarier to me than even the idea of lost memory or any other unfavorable outcome. For now, I will hold into this last little bit of hope and maybe, just maybe, I will get to actually start 2017 fresh and not in this deep dark hole which I have lived in for so long now.
