RTMS: The Treatment I was Beginning to Suspect was a Hoax

Last week I was typing away industriously at my job, feeling hopeless and overwhelmed. Completely overwhelmed. I'd been keeping my phone on my lap for the past few weeks, waiting and waiting and waiting for someone -- anyone -- to call me.

I was waiting for a new psychologist to get in touch with me after I broke the last one. And, most of all, I was waiting for the Douglas to call and say they had an availability for my treatment.

I had had an assessment early in February, after finally being referred in January, having gone so spectacularly downhill that I needed to be hospitalized. They didn't call me back, and I had no timeline for my admission into the clinical trial. Finally, they returned my phone calls in early April to schedule a second assessment because it had been so long since the first one. Thank you. Basically, the meeting started with the doctor asking me, "So, are you still sick? Do you still need treatment?" and ended with "I hope this helps you."

Whereupon, back on the waiting list, for three to six weeks. I ran to the bus stop, missed the bus, and promptly started crying into my mittens while waiting for public transit. I was thinking, "I will never make it six weeks." I was thinking, "If I've returned to work full-time by then, my renewed claim will probably be denied, and I'll have to choose between my job and this treatment. I will probably die." (which, actually, is not that far off; my short-term disabilities officer is contacting the director of the trial directly to try and figure out if there's some way that I can work and go to treatment at the same time. Because obviously I should be able to work, and fuck the fact that I'm still sick.) I was thinking, "This is so unfair. If any of my doctors had agreed to ECT, which I said I was willing to try both in 2009 and now, I would probably have been treated by now, and maybe even have been all the way better, instead of living through months of hell."

But I digress.

I was sitting at my desk, industriously typing away, proving my corporate worth by shattering the hourly production quotas, and my cellphone rang, vibrating happily in my lap. I answered it, suddenly breathless, my pulse racing as if I'd run a marathon. This was it: finally, something was happening.

It was an automated message congratulating me on having won a cruise.

Fuck you, scammers.

I was so disappointed. I felt...I don't know...crushed. They were never going to call me. What was the point of hoping for anything different, anything better. I started to think maybe this whole thing was an elaborate ruse deigned to trick people with treatment-resistant depression into hanging on until they spontaneously go into remission on their own. Like a carrot, designed to keep us running after a last vestige of hope for months, never amounting to anything except one more strategy for buying time. I felt like, for all these years I've been trying so hard, but it wasn't amounting to anything at all. What was the point? One more day of tearing up at my desk, or running off to cry quietly in the bathroom, using up precious break time?

Finally, the Douglas did call me a few days later, telling me there was an opening, and it was mine if I wanted it. It couldn't have come a day too soon.