week #4: "I do not experience paranoia, phobias, and other tendencies more than half the days"
the halfway point!
Hi, welcome back to Secret Blog ᕙ(‾̀◡‾́)ᕗ
Today, Week #4. For those of you just tuning in, I’m undergoing an 8 week course of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (aka “TMS”) for my lifelong, severe depression. The previous entry can be found here, and the very first one where I sort of talk about the science can be found here.
Let’s get into it.
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Session #15
"Morning writing, fine zaps, machine making insane sounds, tech hiccups.”
Monday got off to a whatever start, I felt cosmically bored and zoned out while reading my book. Over the weekend I’d picked back up Authority, the second in the Southern Reach Trilogy, after a break of two years and had been dutifully reading my way through it all weekend.
Sunday night, leaking into the drive over on Monday morning, I’d started to feel a little nervous about treatments. What if this week was shit again? What if I was just … Not going to get better? I don’t know.
“Mondays aren’t easy,” cooed my tech before launching into her own series of Monday ilks, most notably of which, is a persistent hiccup she’d been fighting off for the last few hours. I was distracted from my distracted reverie by the sound of the machine, which I feel like I hadn’t really noticed until now.
I asked about it, both out of general curiosity and a “hey lol so this crazy powerful magnet you’re about to blast at my head is making a fucking ABSURD sound” kind of curiosity.
“She’s *hiccup* really going off today. Just happens *hiccup* sometimes,” and that was that.
It was a weird duet, the squeaking of the machine and the tech’s hiccup-giggle-apology.
On my way out I saw a piece of paper on the her desk — a long list with the title “Betrayal Kills.” Stuff was underlined and circled, but the only word I could pick up politely from the corner of my eye was “yearning.” I quickly shuffled out of the room and down the charcoal hallway.
Outside the clinic was a beachy, condensation-laden grey. If I closed my eyes I could convince myself I was in the thicket of sprawltown before the coastline, and I tried telling myself I smelled for salt on the breeze. I leaned against my car for a bit, watching the road. A man with a sloping nub at the end of a handless arm passed by, doing waves out the passenger window, a huge grin on his face.
Side effects:
- I painted all night, which felt incredible. I felt like I was playing in the form more than trying to create something with commercial appeal. I was exploring and experimenting in ways I’d not done in years. I felt like I’d burned out my creative receptors after a few years as a freelance designer, and today I felt like I was just making for the sake and sensation of having made.
✶
Session #16
“Feel like I’m buzzing an a little trapped.”
I awoke this morning to two of my least favorite kind of texts. One that derails the idea I’d had in my head of the kind of day I was going to have, and another that derailed the idea I’d had in my head for plans in the distance. Awesome.
To start, TMS was cancelled for me — something about “staff illness.” I felt aimless and adrift, full of forward momentum with no destination. I set off to a coffee shop, but couldn’t make my mind up for which one to go to. Craving matcha moreso than espresso this morning (my daily driver shop is coffee exclusive), I settled on an old standby. I kept taking wrong turns (or weird turns down streets I’d never been down before) to get there, and stretched a 10 minute drive into 20 minutes. I stumbled through ordering, ignored a call, and sat upstairs with my drink, realizing one sip in that it was (unfortunately) fucking disgusting.
I spun out and tried to juggle my competing tasks and complicated schedule Tetris. I anxiously browsed review comparisons for XL checked bags, looked at flights, opened up Instagram a zillion times, tried then failed to write this, and finally, gave up and peaced out. I tossed half of the unfinished matcha in the trash out back.
Side effects:
- Elevated anxiety from having so many additional variables added to my day, but I didn’t spin out. My family is probably my biggest shutdown trigger, and instead of blacking out and lying under my covers, I kept going. I found out that my sister is graduating college (yay!) a year earlier than we all thought, but her graduation is the day before some old friends’ wedding in Montana (nooooo). The threat alone of this fallout is usually enough to send me into a full tailspin, but it didn’t this time. I acknowledged that no matter what I do there will be a nuclear blast, might as well just do what I want. Growth!
- Painted again!
- Started clawing back my weekly yoga practice
✶
Session #17
“Different tech, the machine setup was different.”
After yesterday’s cancelled session I was very glad to be back. Sitting in the waiting room, a new tech came and got me. She was nice, but I felt on edge, slightly nervous to have someone new so close and in my space… like to say “What are you doing in my brain?”
Side effects:
- Slight eye and jaw sparkles when the tech started, but a quick adjustment fixed that. Felt a lingering slowness in my left eye for a few hours after TMS but it went away
- Less anxious then yesterday about the family stuff
- Elevated energy levels again, but felt a little more restless than I wanted
- Found I could return to activities like painting and writing and feel comfort
✶
Session #18
“Halfway point! They say my numbers have been halved. Whoa.”
At the midpoint of a TMS therapy course you will need to get your brain remapped, a process that requires the head doctor to come in and do the thumb-twitch zapping business from the first day. This is to measure how sensitive your brain is, if the magnet’s strength needs to be adjusted, and an opportunity to check in with the doctor about your feelings generally.
“So how are you feeling?” he asked me once I’d gotten situated in my heinous cap and chair. My doctor has a certain way of tilting his head that makes it seem like he’s slyly filling me in on something. “Good, I think I’m doing better.”
It’s hard for me to answer the “How are you feeling” type questions — historically they’ve made me burst into tears if I had to talk about myself for more than 5 minutes. A routine “How are you feeling today” from a nurse filling out paperwork ahead of a routine checkup resulted in a full breakdown on my part, necessitating an immediate course of medication and therapy recommendations… But today, I didn’t feel that way. I feel embarrassed talking about myself, especially emotions, but I wasn’t lying… I felt good, I think. I shared my rocky Week #1 and Week #2 peak then valley, and my hopes for continued progress, then ran out of the few things I had to say.
“Well, the good news is that your numbers? They’re about half of what they were.”
“My numbers? Like my brain?”
“Your depression scores from the survey, they’re way down.”
Every week I take one of those classic anxiety/ depression surveys, which for the unfamiliar, are designed to assign numerical value to how shitty you feel.
The one I take is more in depth, but you get the gist.
At the beginning of my therapy I marked “Nearly every day” for pretty much every question on my survey. And while these are usually kind of annoying to fill out (hosted on a terrible website, they send it to me on Fridays which is essentially asking, begging, me to ignore it) I do my best to sit intentionally and answer the questions truthfully. I did notice last week that I’d marked “Several days” for most of my questions instead of “Nearly every day,” a first in the roughly 10 years I’ve been seeking psychiatric care.
I sat with that while he zapped away, my thumb twitching wildly, before he announced I could go down two percent in pulse strength. I’d assumed that over the course of therapy you’d want to crank it up as your brain got used to it, but it turns out TMS calls for the opposite. As your brain gets used to the stimulation, you don’t need as strong of a pulse to activate the zone. You can get by with less, and it’s encouraged. Going too strong can (puts coin in jar) cause seizures.
Later on, I went and saw Challengers with some friends and we stood around chitchatting outside the theater.
“How are you doing?”
“Really, really good.”
Side effects:
- Improved mood
- Clarity in thinking about myself in relation to others
- Slight body buzz
- Feeling good :)
✶
Session #19
“I’m aware my time is dwindling.”
Please note that this was about TMS, not some grand depressive statement — I actually felt really really good today. “I feel moved to do things I gave up,” I wrote in my journal.
The night before I biked downtown from my house in East Nashville, a crazy feat for someone who’s been suffering from bike anxiety (I got run off the road twice by someone who aggressively chased me down one night in Memphis), and general agoraphobia that settled in after my assault, heightened by my move and subsequent Covid lockdown. I also had a bike I loved stolen out of my garage, and a whole other laundry list of reasons that I created to keep me from getting on my bike.
But today, I biked! I felt a motion, power and desire to a) not be in my fucking car during rush hour, and b) to feel the flight and speed of my bike. I couldn’t find my helmet, but I didn’t let that stop me. I grabbed Jacob’s and hopped on for the almost entirely uphill ride to a brewery where some friends were celebrating the end of their school year. I felt powerful, free.
Later, I got invited to a movie spur of the moment, and gave a quick yes. I’d settled into a pattern where I’d say no to sudden plans like that, creating some excuse for myself that I needed more time to think about it or something. I missed out on a lot of fun that way, and I felt relieved to just say yes and go. We saw Stress Positions with a Q&A by John Early. Batshit movie, I’m glad I went.
The “What did I learn today” line in my journal has “I am enjoying stuff again” written next to it. On the line below “What do I want to remember from today” I wrote “Basically that.”
Side effects:
- A lot of energy
- Painted every day this week!
- I feel less desperate about things — about nailing a social interaction, choosing the right course of action, making the best painting, etc. I feel light
- I get asked how I feel a lot, and I’m still working on how to answer that succinctly. I feel good? I feel weird? I feel like his left-hand-arm-man? I’m working on a boiler plate response, but a lot of the time I just say “I’m just flowing with it” and guess that’s a fine enough response, but it feels like I’m doing the thing of tempering my own experiences to be less cringey. I feel good! I feel happy. Mostly, I feel.
✶
It feels like the engines of an old, powerful machine are rumbling back on for the first time in forever, the vines and growth that had settled on them disintegrating and shaking away.
Onward and upward, see you next week ~
٩(^◡^)۶
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