I'm driving along half listening to a talk show. The subject is Women and Depression and it's the call-in time. The caller asks about her elderly mother and ECT. "Should she have it? Is it safe?" Before the guest on the show can answer the question, the host blurts out, "I didn't know they still did that anymore!" I pound the dashboard. Where has this woman been? I recall that cold rainy January morning before dawn when my husband drove me to Ross Hospital, a small private hospital in Marin County to have my first round of unilateral electroconvulsive therapy or ECT.

"I'll walk in with you," Jim says holding on to my arm.

    "No, that's okay. You can just drop me off. They say you can come back in two hours," I reply as if I were being dropped off for a business meeting.

    "I'm coming in anyway."

    I notice he sets his jaw firmly.

    Since I'd suffered for five years with major depression and had already tried 30 medicines that hadn't worked, it made sense to now try ECT. I had reached the end of my rope. There were too many times I was stuck in traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge, compressed between cars, feeling I would be crushed to death if I didn't jump out of my car and leap over the railing. There were the suicide notes I neatly typed up and then shredded into tiny pieces, flushing them down the toilet where they would be embraced by the sewers. Something had to change and I was willing to look at any possibility.

   My hands are clammy, my stomach is growling and I want to be home, hiding under the blankets. But I had already made the decision to go ahead.

    When the elevator doors open on the restricted psych ward, Jim and I walk over to the admitting desk and the attendant checks me in, gives me a blue gown and shows me to a changing room. I sit on the bed and jiggle my foot. I am more nervous about the anesthesia than the actual treatment itself but I have been assured I would be completely out and wouldn't feel anything.

    "I'll be back by 9:00 am. I love you," Jim says as he kisses me goodbye. I don't even feel him put his arms around me. My tall, dark-haired husband has been the pillar of strength through all this. I don't know what I would do without him.

    Another attendant comes in and asks me to follow him, motions to a chair outside the reception area and tells me to wait there. A woman in a pink velour bathrobe floats into the day room, picks up a magazine, and holds it straight out in front of her. She wears a vacant stare as if heavily medicated, and I assume she is an inpatient. I watch her and think, what am I doing here? I appear to be normal compared to this woman. I can still carry on a conversation. I don't have long to think about it because a nurse comes out and tells me to follow him into the treatment room.

   It's a small area with a long metal table placed in the middle of the room. Dr. Nickels, a tall, gray-haired man with gentle blue eyes, takes my hand.

   "Please give me something to control the nausea that I always get with any anesthesia," I say curling and uncurling my fingers of my other hand. "You'll be under such a short time it won't really affect you," he replies.

   I don't argue. I figure he knows best.

   I lie down on the table, electrodes are placed on my chest, and then he applies some gel to my head where the other electrodes will go.

   "I need to mess up your hair."

   The gel is cold and I want to tell him to shut up and to get it over with.

   I stare at the ceiling and the anesthesiologist hooks me up to an IV. He tells me to think pleasant thoughts and relax. I don't know what that means. I close my eyes.

    "You've had your treatment," a deep voice says. "Would you like some breakfast?"

   "No," I manage to say. I have a pounding headache and want to throw up. I grab at the sheets.

    "Let me get you some Advil. It'll help with the headache," the voice continues.

   Opening my eyes, I realize I am back in the same room where I first changed my clothes. I feel very queasy, sit up, run into the bathroom, and grab the sink. Alternating between chills and nausea I start to cry. Then I vomit. I lean into the soothing, cool porcelain for comfort. The attendant returns with a cup of water and the Advil.

   "Are you okay?" he asks.

   "Why didn't they listen to me? I told them I always get sick from the anesthesia!" I yell.

   "I'll make a note in your chart so they'll be able to do something about it next time," the attendant says.

   I sit back down on the bed, look at the clothes I need to put on. My stomach feels like an empty fish bowl. Jim comes in and helps me walk over to the elevators. I go home and climb into bed. The doctor had told me the best thing to do after a treatment was to go to sleep. The rain beats against the windows, and the room is as if I never had left it. Even the dog is lying in the same spot.

   For two and a half weeks I am supposed to have a total of seven treatments every other day. After the third and fourth treatments I think the ECT might be helping. I get out my worn address book and call a few people whom I haven't seen in a while. Before, I wasn't even returning their phone calls. The depression is over, I think to myself. I can start to have a life again.

Shortly after the fifth treatment I'm sitting in the car with the motor turned off in the closed garage. I stare at the garden hose snaked around the hook on the side of the wall and grip the steering wheel. I'm crying. I know I need to get out of the car now.

I go in the house and call my psychiatrist, Ira. I tell him I'm drowning in pain. Dumbbells are on my chest, and I can't breath. I have two more treatments left, but I'm not feeling optimistic at all.

"I understand how you can feel that way. Let's see what happens over the next few days. We're meeting tomorrow, but call me anytime before then," he says calmly.

I know he's trying to reassure me, but it can't seem to reach the depths inside me. I'm scared.

I have the sixth treatment, and that afternoon cancel three upcoming lunch dates. I don't want to go out of the house.

   I show up for the seventh treatment and dread facing the nausea and the pounding headache. I lean against the wall of the treatment room and ask Dr. Nickels if the seventh one will make any difference.

   "No. It really won't," he replies.

   "Then I don't want to have it. I want to get changed and call my husband," I say.

   While I wait for Jim to come pick me up I sit in the same hall chair where I had been for the first treatment and watch the woman in the pink bathrobe wander around. I longed to be as out of it as she seems to be. Maybe it would dull my internal turmoil. It's the medication that keeps me functioning. It's the small day-to-day commitments of walking the dog, taking my children to school, or deciding what to have for dinner that keeps me living from moment to moment or even hour by hour. Yet on some level I am envious of that woman. There are too many times I just want to give up and not have to function. Two years pass in a blur of experimental medicines, other psychiatric consultations ("Why are you still so depressed?" they always ask as if it were my fault), and my ongoing cries to Ira, "I can't stand it anymore. I don't how long I can keep going." I go back to Dr. Nickels to discuss having ECT again. "I would be willing to try it one more time. Do you think bilateral ECT would make any difference?" I ask as I pick at a piece of loose leather on his chair.

"No, I'm sorry," he says to me, smoothing his pants. "If it didn't work the first time the odds are that it won't work the second time, and you wouldn't want to subject yourself to unnecessary anesthesia."

I stand, tears welling up in my eyes. "Good luck," he says. I drive to nearest shopping center where everyone else seems to be moving in a trance, preoccupied with late afternoon errands, and call Ira.

"How can he say 'good luck?' He makes it sound like all I'm doing is trying out for the high school track team," I sob to Ira. "This is my life!"

"There's bound to be something that will work. I'll hang in there for as long as it takes," he says.
I hear him take a deep breath.
I clench my fingers together.

   It has been six years since the ECT. On those cold, dark mornings when I lie in bed I sometimes wonder if that seventh treatment would have made a difference. Today I have to pick up my son from school, take him to baseball practice, help my daughter with her college applications, go to San Francisco for a meeting, make dinner, and find energy to exercise. I sigh and get up, step over the dog, and take the dozen pills I ingest each day in order to keep the depression in some sort of control. It is still not enough.

Married and a mother of two children, Wendy Coblentz is a former fundraising consultant for non-profit organizations. More recently she is a writer and has had two pieces published in The Journal, edited by Dan Weisburd. "I have personal experience with mental illness and have suffered from depression for over 11 years," she writes.

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