The Electric Slide

When the antidepressants haven't worked yet, and you haven't killed yourself yet, the options start to narrow. I mean, what's a guy to do when he has crossed the border into breakdown territory, when a wife's departure is the straw that broke the camel's back, when the cumulative weight of a lifetime has become more than he can bear? Electroconvulsive therapy, of course. ECT. The measure that some consider draconian. The undoing of Randle Patrick McMurphy.
It really is a measure of last resort because, well, it's pretty fucking inconvenient. Expensive, too. So I guess I should be thankful that I was able to afford it. It also fucks up your memory, so my reconstruction is necessarily somewhat patchy, but it's mine, and at no time have I ever felt as alone as when the wires were attached to my head and the anesthesia was injected. Counting down from 100, I considered that those might be my last utterances, and I could see them informing my mother, "We're sorry, but his last words were '100, 99, 98, 97...."
Now, if I remember correctly, there were seven treatments over two weeks. I remember the gurney, and the institutionally white walls. I had an invasive physical exam. I was treated like a child. I was accused of being a drug user because of my perforated septum. I was more exposed and vulnerable than at any other time, a denuded, lightning-struck tree buffeted by the elements and whose roots held only a tenuous grip on the ground. I stood outside and smoked, in the middle of March. The ides of march, when spring hadn't arrived and winter hadn't departed. A brackish season of windy transition that left me feeling even more desolate and bereft of any justification for existing. The translucent and twisting cigarette smoke floated ethereally until dispersed by the chilly breeze.
When one has to resort to being strapped down, anesthetized and electrified, the bright side of life, a locale I never inhabited, becomes that much more dim. It might be lonely at the top, but it's pretty lonely at the bottom, also.
I attended group-therapy sessions that seemed to be a way for them to soak me for more money, though perhaps I'm being too cynical. Mostly I sat with drug addicts. I played the piano and played ping-pong. I received visitors and cried. I looked at my comatose roommate, also in for some ECT, and thought, 'Well, I guess I'm not as bad off as that motherfucker.' I drank the institutional fruit drink and ate the institutional food and conversed with an elderly lady who was in for her maintenance ECT. Every five years. She highly recommended it. I read a book and later had to read it again, because I remembered nary a detail.
And I wrestled with the aftermath. Someone showed up at the hospital whom I didn't recognize, even though I had known him for years. Flashes of recollection peeked out from behind the shadows on my brain. I would think I knew someone at the 7-11 and then doubt that I did. But I thought that they knew me, that they saw through me for who I was. I needed about a year for my memory to recover. A sharp memory is both a blessing and a curse, but I was accustomed to retaining information easily.
ECT, nevertheless, perhaps saved my life, a stopgap measure that helped to provide a bridge to a more effective treatment regimen.
I swore I wouldn't do it again and, to date, I haven't. The trauma leaves a lasting impression, even 15 years later, and the medication has been enough to stave off the most imposing demons. They lurk, though, in pursuit of a crack through which to slip, reassuring me that there's no escape from my own charged brain.