TMS Part 1: The Before & The Commitment

This past fall, I started TMS treatment - Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. I stumbled upon it while seeking out a psychiatrist and it is worth talking about in case you've never heard of it either.

Spoiler: It changed my life.

Qualifications: Patient, not doctor. Depressed, Anxious, but also Borderline, amongst others. A complicated web of things that contradict each other in everything I do, every day.

The height of the pandemic crippled me. I was comfortable in isolation. I loved being alone, drinking all day and no one thinking anything of it. Laying in my parents pool and avoiding people without raising suspicion. I did my best to maintain normalcy through structure by packing the 9-5 with apartment hunting, by working out outside as many mornings as I could, by having coffee on the porch as slowly as possible.

Then, after a while, it came time to make new friends. To find and have reasons to leave the house. To explore a brand new city and state where I knew no one. To reintegrate with my Colorado community that I'd left behind two-ish years prior without any real goodbye. There'd been moves to new homes and new relationships. New people were hanging out with my friends every day that I'd need to meet and ideally form sustainable friendships with.

Eventually, the social anxiety ruined me. I was overthinking everything - with people who were... my people. My used - to - be every day people. People who I'd already vetted, and had already vetted me. People who'd already proved they'd stay no matter how many times I showed up unannounced, left a box of my favorite wine in their fridge for next time, or texted them every time Avocados went on sale three years after the joke was made. But I would sit in the corner, silent, my voice shaking and my hands rustling on my lap.

I felt 14 again. A weirdo kid who hadn't found their niche, their voice, their self yet. The confidence to be fucking weird, happily and shamelessly. It was horribly regressive and made me feel like all the work I'd done in Colorado had suddenly become undone.

I realized I was having anxiety attacks again and struggling to do simple self care tasks. The world felt insanely heavy, like my legs were concrete and showing up to a social event would require a week or more to recover from.

I decided to explore medication again, after almost a decade without it. I hadn't had a consistent psychiatrist I liked in a long time, and even when I did have one consistently it took some serious effort to find them. I was terrified to try to start the process, with what little energy I had left, to find one who wouldn't sedate me, gaslight me, and feed me the newest trending pill.

I found a mental health center that seemed to offer a variety of treatments, not just medication. I called them one day while I was a mess on the floor, desperate for anything to hold onto, and the operator talked to me for over an hour.

That alone, brought me change. He listened to me, and all he said was "that sounds really hard" or "you don't deserve to live like that" or "I think we can help". It was a slow moving conversation, my emotional state obvious and taking precedence over any call center queue. I was finally able to exhale.

He recommended a combination of Ketamine treatments and TMS. I debated the Ketamine heavily, but ultimately decided against it given the additional time commitment and the out of pocket cost. TMS, though, was covered by insurance. At the end of it all, I owed a little bit over $400.

Probably helpful if I tell you what the heck this thing even is -

TMS is, in it's simplest terms, where you get a helmet strapped to your head and a series of electronic pulses are sent into your brain at very specific locations. The main process is geared towards depression, but as time goes on you can work with your specialist to add in extras. I did anxiety and gut health. The whole appointment takes about 20 or 30 minutes each session.

During the treatment, you're doing any number of activities. Some days I needed to sit and stare at the wall, some days I needed to be heard (god bless my tech who just listened), some days we worked through positive affirmations, reflection, or worksheets.

The entire process happened over 6 weeks, 5 days a week. Every night after work I drove myself over there and let them zap my brain for half an hour. I finished the whole thing around Thanksgiving.

A big reason I struggled with finding a solution was because I was so hesitant to get back on medication. I'd been heavily focused on other areas of my mental health in the last decade or so, and depression was something I'd been treating unintentionally as a symptom of something else. It had been a really long time since I couldn't get out of bed for days on end for seemingly no external reason.

I was one of those Ritalin kids in the early 2000s and one of the things I wrestle with most about all of it, was how I just kept getting more medications to deal with the side effects of the last one. I eventually was numb, but I didn't even realize it because it had all started in elementary school. The last thing I wanted was to start down a road of chemical intervention that would pull me so fa away from my true nature again.

I liked the idea of doing something physical and potentially long lasting to my brain. I liked the idea of sitting in a chair and talking about happy things for twenty minutes a day instead of feeling everything, always, or nothingness that was so overwhelming it had to somehow count as somethingness. The revelation that I could essentially fix something while sitting still was all I needed to hear.

So, I said yes.