As luck wouldn’t have it, all this coincided with the exact moment that I was scheduled to take my show on the road. And that is not a euphemism for anything. Wishful Drinking was actually booked into the Berkeley Repertory Theatre for a two-month run in early 2008. And the only thought going through my head, pretty much 24-7 then, was, “My daughter hates me.” Well, that and, “I’m hungry for fattening food.”
There I was getting up onstage every night, delighting people with my hilarious life story and sharing all this perspective and insight that I’d gained by circling the drain and such, and if people had known how I really felt, I’d have been nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress even though I wasn’t in a film or portraying a character other than my measly aging self. I don’t know how I got through it. Or maybe I didn’t get through it, but either way I was a mess.
Offstage, I couldn’t put things into words, and that was the one thing I’d always been able to rely on. Putting my feelings into words and praying they wouldn’t be able to get out again. It had always been my salvation. If I could get it into words, I could escape the slow quicksand of almost any bad feeling, but now I’d lost my ability to even do that. I was in pain squared, pain cubed, pain to the nth power. And this wasn’t the more noble sort of pain—this was that embarrassing pain of self-pity because I truly believed that Billie would never be able to forgive me. And so naturally I would never be able to forgive myself. She hated me, and I just knew she hated me, because she had every right to hate me. I hated me. Join the crowd! It was a trend!
I started seeing this child psychologist to help me help Billie through this, and one afternoon at the conclusion of our session, she studied me briefly and said something like, “You know, I hope you’re not considering some sort of self-harm or suicide, because that would be really bad for Billie.” So, see? She was helpful, because that would never have occurred to me.
By then, it won’t stun you to learn, I was truly ready to try anything. Someone could even have recommended a therapy where you just climb into a big vat of dyslexic snakes, or a therapy where they cover you with orange sherbet and drizzle maple syrup on you—anything! But, no, what they suggested was electroconvulsive therapy, and I must have said, Why not?
At that point I didn’t know anyone who’d ever undergone this treatment. Oh, sure I remembered hearing a woman talk about it in her clearly audible voice during her brief stay in a mental hospital back east. This pale, gaunt depressive told our little damaged group, “I was planning to kill myself, but then I thought, ‘Well, okay, I can always do that, I definitely have that option, but maybe first I’ll try this ECT thing. And then if that doesn’t work, then I can kill myself.’” It occurred to me that was its place in the pantheon of remedies—the last resort for those people whose only other options are the taste of a gun barrel, a long hard fall, a carful of carbon monoxide, an overdose, or a noose.
Happily, none of the stories I’d previously heard about ECT turned out to be true anymore. Spoiler alert: You’re given a short-acting anesthetic and a very effective anticonvulsant, you go to sleep for about ten minutes, and your big toe moves a bit, which is all that remains of the bone-snapping thrashing of old.
I’ve found that people are especially curious about how I was convinced to submit to a treatment I’d spent my entire life regarding as tantamount to torture. What was said that enabled me to finally agree to let them put their little nicotine-patch-looking things on either side of my head? And the answer is, I don’t remember. I don’t. I’ve found that the truly negative side effect of ECT is that it’s incredibly hungry and the only thing it has a taste for is memory. I can’t begin to tell you how many friends have asked me what it felt like waiting for that first shock, and all I could answer was, “You know what? I seriously can’t remember a fucking thing. For all I know, they could have dressed me in a ball gown, surrounded me with dancing dolphins, and married me off to Rush Limbaugh.”
But, after doing it a few dozen times, you gradually find yourself able to recall and even describe the experience. The nurses lay you gently down on a gurney. Then these attendants wheel you over next to a doctor standing in front of what essentially looks like a record player—something about the size of a small television. Then the doctor puts cute little sticky pieces of film that are attached to wires on each side of your forehead. And then, who should merrily materialize at your side but the trusty anesthesiologist, and as he starts the injection, he says something reassuring like, “Now dream a nice dream.”
So I attempt to oblige him and maybe fifteen minutes later, I wake and trade in my backless gown for my street (Rodeo Drive) clothes and take the elevator back to the underground parking lot, where I get in my car and lie down in the back seat, and someone who hasn’t just had significant amounts of electricity sent howling through his head drives me home, where I sleep for the next three or four hours.
And whereas before my brain had felt as though it was set in cement, leaving me… I don’t know… kind of stuck, the ECT blasted my Hoover Dam head wide open, moving the immoveable.
In the beginning, they did it three times a week for three weeks. Eventually we settled into once every six weeks—which is where we’ve set down roots and stayed. And, over time, this fucking thing punched the dark lights out of my depression. It did for me what drugs had done for me. It was like a mute button muffling the noise of my shrieking feelings. Your whole life you hear about this terrifying treatment that turns you into a vegetable, only to finally find out that it had all the charming qualities of no big deal. Sort of like getting your nails done, if your nails were in your cerebral cortex.
So here I am, on maintenance now, and for now, at least, here I intend to stay. I go in for a tune-up whenever I notice the onset of depression, which I frequently don’t recognize until it’s within earshot of too late. Sometimes a few weeks might pass until I say, “Oh, wait! Shit! I don’t think I’ve changed clothes in maybe five days.” Then I might start to feel like doing drugs would maybe be a sensible idea, and that right there is pretty much the clincher.
But did I tell you that this thing is a bitch on memory? Probably, but it might be worth repeating. I mean, let’s say, I read an e-mail—“That was a fantastic dinner the other night. Thank you so much”—and I have absolutely no clue who wrote it, what we ate, or where we ate it. Anybody I’d met during that first intense blast of silent shock is gone. Everybody. In a way, you don’t tend to forget old memories so much as you lose the ability to generate new ones.
What I’ve noticed recently is that ECT doesn’t remove entire chunks of memory so much as little bits of it. It’s sort of like, I don’t have too much trouble remembering events, but what I now lose are words, and sometimes they’re really basic ones, which can be pretty embarrassing, so I’m not really a big fan of that. And I’m not talking about obscure words here. These can be ones that you might really need a lot. You know, whereas before I might occasionally lose words that anybody might misplace—like “pastiche” or “schadenfreude” or “Luddite”—now I can even lose more practical words, and I lose them a lot. For example, “practical.” I can lose that word, and I’ll be fumbling, “Um, uh,” looking for it everywhere and I don’t even get close. So whoever I’m talking to might end up fumbling around with me, and chances are they’ll find the word a lot sooner than I will. And when they do, it turns out that I haven’t even gotten remotely near it. Sure, I know the feeling of the word and I might even be able to locate one with the same amount of letters or syllables, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to get near the fucker, because I’ve lost all the energy or enthusiasm for the hunt. It becomes not worth it. You know, how much rummaging around can you do to find this word you’re only going to use occasionally at best?