Yesterday I went to an appointment to check in with one of my crazy head docs. I see Dr. Day sporadically, for meds maintenance and talk therapy. I see her probably a half-dozen times per year. My last appointment with her was a couple of months ago, before I began the TMS. In fact, she is the one who told me– months ago– about a number of brain therapies for bipolar drepression which I might want to check into, one of which was TMS. She hasn’t been involved in any aspect of the TMS itself.
Anyhoo… The last time I visited with Dr. Day, I was flat and affectless as could be. Of course, that’s the reason she brought up TMS in the first place. But yesterday, before I could sit my butt down on the couch in her office, she said, “You have some life in you today! You’re looking alive!” I said, “I only have two TMS sessions left.” And then she said, “Oh my gosh! I forgot you went forward with the TMS. Do you feel like it’s helping?” It must be working if she noticed a difference in me. That was exactly what I needed to hear.
The truth is I haven’t been sure TMS is working. I don’t know how I’m supposed to be feeling while I’m going through the treatments. I do know that whatever’s going on (or isn’t going on) is happening gradually. It’s like that pesky ten pounds that somehow makes its way to your gut: It creeps on. You don’t see every tiny blob of fat as it decides to make its home on you, but one day you go to button your shorts and you finally notice ten pounds somehow showed up under your very eyes.
My potential brain change, however, would be a welcome change. But mostly, I think I’m too close to my situation to really notice TMS effects. I’m with me 24/7. I’m looking so closely at every little thing I do, every thought I have, and every hint of emotion that I don’t know if I’ve improved or not. Is my depression really improving? Am I starting to feel authentic things deeply? Or is it just my wishful thinking that I see some progress?
But Dr. Day’s reaction to my simply walking into her office yesterday eased my worries of TMS failure immensely. Her reaction makes it pretty clear to me that I’m probably doing noticeably better than I was before the TMS.
When Suzanne and I first discussed the possibility of me trying TMS to combat my evil bipolar depression, one of the minuses of going ahead with treatment was the high cost. Insurance covers only a wee bit of it, and that’s after the Treatment Resistant Mood Disorder Clinic @ UNI did much begging with the insurance company on my behalf. I think I’ve been trying to see more bang for my buck, so to speak. If I’m payin’ bigly bucks, I expect to see bigly positive change. But I’ve decided it’s kinda selfish and demanding of me to think that way. The desired outcome would be one enormous emotional change, but I’m thinking the non-flashy, simpler, thousands of tiny changes might add up to a longer-lasting, more thorough mental change.
If you think about it, you’ll see that’s how most change happens. Need a cinderblock fence around your yard? That’ll happen one cinderblock at a time. Teaching your kid how to walk? That’ll be one step at a time. Teaching someone to drive a car? That’ll be one driving skill upon another. Need a doctor to hack out 2/3 of your stoopid pancreas? The hours-long surgery officially begins with one cut. And then the next thing happens, and then the next, next thing happens. And so on.
It’ll probably take some time for me to truly analyze how effective the TMS has been. Patience is better than fretting about it. Since Suzanne is the person I’m around most, she’s the one whose opinion on the treatment’s success or failure is most crucial. She’s not ready to offer up her vote yet.
When we talked about cost and time commitment for the required 36 TMS treatments, I asked Suzanne, “If, after the boatloads of money and eons of time spent, TMS ends up helping my loony head improve only 1 percent, will it be worth it to you that it cost us our emergency fund?”
Suzanne is famous for being silent while she completely thinks through every word of her answers to even the simplest questions before she speaks. (Sometimes it’s annoying.) But she wasn’t silent at all after I asked her that question. Her head cogs didn’t turn. They didn’t even creak. She just immediately said, “Yes. It’ll be worth it.”
See why I agreed to give it a try?