Part 3 of 5
Stunned. Again. My hands fell away from my face, and now it
was me staring at her. And I started shaking my head. "What's that? That's
not like brain shock, is it?"
Mel nodded. "Yeah. He's taking me off everything, then
try a few ECTs, then reintroduce meds, and do a few more ECTs."
"Dr. B is an asshole," I said. "Don't do it.
Oh, Mel. Please, don't."
"Dr. B is a genius," she said.
"He's still an asshole." I'd met him a couple of
times over the years, and the man had absolutely no bedside manner. One of
those doctors who clearly thinks he's God. I didn't like him at all. And I
didn't trust him. "That's like…" words failed for a moment, but then
I found the right one. "It's barbaric. I mean, I can't believe they even
do that these days."
Melanie was laughing at me. "Oh, Jessie. It's not like
the old movies, honestly, it's not. They won't strap me down. And it all
happens under anesthesia. It's not at all what you're thinking."
"I'm thinking they're going to zap your brain with
electricity. It's awful. Are you in your right mind? Because I don't know how
you can even consider this."
There were tears on her face. "I knew you guys would
react like this. It's not like it's an easy decision, but I don't know what
else to do. I can't do weeks of med changes. I can't. I can't do it without
mom."
"Why? What did mom do that we can't? There's a whole
truck-load of us. We'll help you through it."
Her tears kept coming, and because she was lying on her
side, I watched their slow progress, a pool in the corner of her eye until it
welled over, slid across the bridge of her nose and along the bottom of her
other eye, and then zipped past her temple to get soaked up by her hair. My
poor, damaged sister.
She whispered, the girl who tried to leave her voice behind,
and she said, "When I was frustrated, I screamed at her. When I was
hopeless, I'd lay with my head in her lap and sob like I was a little girl
again. When I was scared I'd call her and say, 'Mommy, mommy, mommy,' over and
over again, and she'd say, 'I'm here, I'm here, I'm here,' over and over again.
"I was old enough to know what happened to little girls
who were taken," she said, and I cringed.
I'd been old enough to know
that, too.
"I wasn't the first girl he took. But I was the only one found
alive."
I knew that. Or had known it at one time, because though the
fact was buried deep in my brain, the words gave me an eerie sense of déjà vu.
"I was tied up and gagged, and I was so desperate I
chewed through the cloth – the ugly, gray dirty thing he had stuffed in my
mouth and tied around my head. I gnashed my teeth, gagged, and ground my teeth
together some more. I broke two of my teeth, remember?
"Everyone thought he hit
me in some struggle to rape me, but it wasn't true. I just let him do that. But
when he was gone, I broke my teeth chewing through that rag. And then I
screamed for my mother. And I screamed and screamed until my voice was gone. And someone heard me.
Someone heard a desperate child screaming for her mommy, and that someone saved
my life.
"I remember the sunlight so bright that it hurt my
eyes, and hands picking me up, and then I went away inside my head again, the
way I did when he raped me, not realizing I'd just been rescued. And then mom
was there, and her arms were holding me, and her smell was all around me, and I
thought, She came. When I was so scared I
thought I would die, I yelled for her and she found me. It took me a long
time to believe that a stranger saved my life, not mom. I asked her about it
several times, and she told me the truth, but even now, what I remember is that
I screamed for her, and she was there, and we were completely connected. And now when I scream for my mommy, no one
answers."
My heart broke right then, and I was crying with her.
Josie nudged me and I found myself returned to the dining room table, surrounded by siblings. "Hey dreamer, what should I
Google?"
"Bi-polar treatments," I said, and then, without
thinking it through, "ECT." The letters had been flashing on and off
in my head since visiting Melanie yesterday. Three neon letters were just
begging for Google results.
All eyes turned to me.
I shrugged. "Let's just do a little research,
okay?"
"Electroconvulsive Therapy, ECT, formerly known as
electroshock," Josie read from Wikipedia. We crowded around her, pulling
our chairs closer, leaning over the table to see the screen. No one asked me
any questions. We just read along.
After a few minutes, Silas got up and went outside. He came
back with his briefcase, and pulled out his own iPad.
"So basically," Josie said, "they zap
people's heads with electricity, which makes them have a seizure. And this is
supposed to improve depression, but nobody seems to know why."
Silas was reading something different. "Side effects
are headache, nausea, and memory loss. And some of these links talk about brain
damage."
"We can't let her consent to this," Liz said.
"I mean, if she's that sick, she's not capable of giving consent,
right?"
"Yeah, you would think," I said. "But
honestly? She seems pretty clear in her head. Way more clear than a lot of
people there."
"Yeah, but this is so extreme." Liz's voice held a
tremor. "My beautiful little sister getting shock treatment? That's just…
God. I don't even know."
"Here's a video," Silas said, so we turned our
attention to his screen.
We watched people talk about the hopelessness pain of
depression, of choosing ECT over suicide.
We found a list of people who'd had ECT, including Sylvia
Plath, Kitty Dukakis, Princess Leia actress and comedienne Carrie Fisher.
And we read people's testimonies from people who said it
saved their lives, and also from people who said it ruined their lives.
There was way too much information, and so conflicting that
it was difficult to know whether to support Melanie's decision or to decry it.
I said, "I'm not sure that we have a say."
Liz wondered, "Could we get a court order to stop her
from doing this? Have her declared incompetent?"
"She said Dr. B would commit her if she tried to leave
the hospital. So maybe she is incompetent. But then she should do what Dr. B
wants, right? And we should support that."
"But ECT?" Liz again. "No. It's a terrible
idea. Let's clean up this mess, and then me and Jessie will go talk Melanie out
of this."
Jeremy had finished picking at the remnants of the BBQ, and
was sitting apart from us, watching and listening. And then he said, "My
grandma had ECT at Mayo."
Every one of our heads snapped up to look at him.
"Your grandma?" Liz asked. "Really?"
He nodded. "Yeah. And it helped her a lot. They do a
series, you know, eight or ten treatments in two or three weeks. She said it
saved her life. She'd stopped eating, like the woman in that video talked about.
Some kind of psychotic depression."
"How old was she?" Josie asked.
Jeremy shrugged. "I don't know. In her seventies, I
think. I remember my grandfather had died and my grandma never got over being
sad. But that wasn't all of it. She started thinking crazy stuff, and then she
tried to overdose on her cardiac medication. ECT was safe enough, I
guess, and like I said, it helped. My mom and dad were freaked out, but it worked."
"Did she lose her memory?" Silas asked.
Jeremy shrugged. "Maybe some. She was confused for a
lot of the time she was in the hospital. I was pretty young, but I remember
feeling scared when we visited because she talked about grandpa like he was
alive, and called me by my dad's name. And she said her brother had come to see
her, but he was dead, too, so that was just crazy talk. My mom said she
probably remembered my dad visiting, and got him, her son, confused with her
brother. It got better, though, by the time she went home. And I don't remember
her being weird or particularly forgetful after that."
Dang, just when I stopped being surprised by Jeremy, he came
out with weird knowledge of something like this.
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