Yesterday was a good news, bad news day. Today, Tuesday, is mostly a good news day
Yesterday’s good news: I didn’t faint on the way to the hospital. Unlike Friday. And they went ahead with the procedure. Unlike Friday. Good news too is how mild the side effects were yesterday. A weird headache. And cognitive exhaustion, especially when it came to screens. (I was better talking on the phone with the light dimmed than Zooming. The latter was very demanding.) The sore muscles were there again but much less pronounced, maybe because they only “jolted” me once yesterday. Continuing with the more “physical” side-effects, and how bearable they are, I was even able to do a 4 km run early this afternoon, only about 24 hours after the treatment.
Yesterday’s bad news: once in the treatment room, and under anesthetic, my pulse again dropped to around 30 beats per minute. They had to give me a drug to speed up my heart. Because this is a mite worrisome, they plan to move my treatments temporarily to the full-service hospital down the road from the Psychiatric one, in case anything goes wrong. There will be “crash carts” there and all the rest. More cautious, but already an unwelcome disruption. Worse, they need to get me scheduled in there, and I don’t know how long that will take: Victoria, the new venue, only takes four patients at a time, and it might be full. In addition, each patient at the main hospital does only two treatments per week as opposed to three where I am now, at Parkwood. That converts 6.5 weeks to 10 weeks.
All of this threatens to extend my treatment regime in terms of when I’ll finish, such that it may bump up against my Summer fishing trips. And looking ahead to those was all that kept me going for a while there in the Winter.
Today’s good news. Yesterday I was very anxious because of the changes to the schedule and the uncertainty. These treatments are the most frightening thing I’ve ever faced in many years, and I just want to get on with it. It’s frustrating to get stuck part way. However, yesterday was anomalous emotionally. In general, I am much less frightened of the procedure, having experienced it on two occasions now. More importantly, as my daughter Saima observed already last week, I am less frightened in general. Everyone is commenting on both my improved countenance and the tenor of my voice; my own first-person impression too is that the ECT is helping with the anxiety and depression symptoms after only three of my scheduled 20 “jolts”. My psychiatrist thinks that could very well be – the technique is that powerful, when it works – and if the treatment is helping already, that bodes really well for the effectiveness of the whole course.