Taking a minute to answer a few questions.

I want to thank everyone who has visited my blog over the last few days to read about my experiences with ECT. There are a couple of questions I wanted to address that were left in the comments sections…

Didn’t they show you the procedure on dvd or photos? How did they inform you about the procedure?

Yes, actually, they showed us two older videos on ECT while I was getting some inpatient treatment. I actually elected to undergo the procedure on my own after talking to a therapist in my psychiatrist’s office.

I’ve tried to locate the videos we watched somewhere online, but I’m not succeeding. One was a general video and the other was, I suspect, from a 20/20 episode several many years ago.

At any rate, I suspect my confusion about being intubated, and I think that was your question, might have been a bit of residual memory stuff that’s going on that I completely expected. If it is, it’s important to note that this is the ONLY memory problem I’m having.

I don’t know if this is typical or not. I know that memory loss is a great concern for most patients-and it was for me as well. And as I’ve mentioned before, most people-myself included-have memory loss with depression anyway, so it’s tough to say if the memory problems predate the treatments.

To me, in weighing the options, facing even losing six months of memory (which I am told is about the worst case scenario and is very rare) was a gamble I was willing to take for some relief.

Back to how I prepared myself for the treatments, though. A friend shared this article in Slate magazine online which I found very useful. Also, I took the time to ask a number of people about their experiences-mostly nurses but also my psychiatrist (who administers the therapy.)

NONE of those people-and I must have talked to at least 10-have really ever seen any significant problems with ECT and patient recovery. This was HUGE for me.

It is worth mentioning here the my hospital uses a lower current or voltage or whatever the right word is than some other hospitals. In the upcoming days, I’ll see if I can get them to tell me what that is versus what is used in other hospitals so I can pass that along here.