Sweet Forty-Two(56)

“So?” Mom put a loaf of bread on the counter to cool and began pulling out ingredients for what seemed to be cookies.

She put the ingredients down and looked me straight in the eye. “The board accepted my resignation this week.”

I knew it was coming, but hearing the words caused the muscles in my abdomen to squeeze around themselves. I nodded, keeping my trained stiff upper lip in place.

“Did they, um, say anything?” I wrapped my arms around my stomach.

“They thanked me for my service, praised me for addressing my condition head on, and sent confirmation that my license to practice is now null and void.”

“How are you feeling?” I slid off the stool and walked on shaky ground over to where she stood, unmoving.

“Twenty years as a board certified psychiatrist. When I started, I had a fire inside me, Georgia. A fire to help people like your grandfather. To heal families from all kinds of trouble. It was only in my worst nightmares that I’d turn into one of those people.” She looked into the distance, smiling through barely visible tears.

I wrapped an arm around her waist, resting my head on her shoulder. We’d talked about her resignation for months. Years, if we were both honest with ourselves. She’d only been practicing for a few years before she was diagnosed. At the time, she took it in stride. She didn’t crumble and try to run away, as I’m sure I would have. She faced it head on and turned her brain into a case study.

It wasn’t until her first major catatonic episode five years ago that she started to question the ethics of her oath. Once she was regulated again with new medication, all was well. Until this year, when my dad died.

Though my parents had long been divorced, his death triggered a series of devastating episodes for her, starting with her yelling at a patient, and ending most recently with her crying in the fetal position under her desk. I had to go get her. That was the last time she was ever there as Dr. Hall. The next time she walked through the doors of the medical center, it was as a patient-only. I tried to encourage her to go somewhere else, somewhere she wouldn’t feel so exposed, but she wouldn’t have it. She reminded me that she worked at the best facility in California and intended to have her treatment carried out at the same place.

“Well,” I sighed, pulling up my emotional big-girl panties, “let’s talk about the ECT, shall we?”

My mom wiped under her eyes. “You’re not going to yell at me and storm out, are you?”

“No. Promise.” I took her hand and led her into the seating area, sitting us in a booth in the front window. “Tell me everything.”

For years my mother had warned me about ECT, only having recommended it to her own patients in extreme life-threatening circumstances.

“The medication alone isn’t working anymore, Georgia. You know as well as I do that there are triggers that can set off schizophrenia in someone who hasn’t ever experienced symptoms, and in those who are already diagnosed, can trigger episodes like I’ve been experiencing. The therapy and medicine aren’t enough anymore.” She repeated her last line almost as an affirmation. Or surrender.

“So ... what will this do, then? Have you been thinking about hurting yourself?” While she’d never exhibited suicidal ideation around me, terminology I’d picked up from years of studying psychiatry along with her, it was never far from my mind that her father ended his own life.

She reached across the table and set her hand on mine. “No. This isn’t like your grandfather.”

“But he had—” I started, and she cut me off.

“I speculate that he had schizophrenia, Georgia. All the signs were there, and had I read a file on him after I graduated college, I could have diagnosed him from that alone. But, he was never diagnosed. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. Grandma only said he felt ‘watched’ all the time, like he was going crazy. He didn’t have help. That’s why he killed himself.”

I nodded in understanding, and she continued.

“While I’ll never practice psychiatry again, I need to be able to live as stable a life as possible. I want to enjoy life. You know me—I’m not going to sit in a rocking chair at Breezy Pointe until the day I die. The ECT can help my brain get out of the cycle it seems to have been in since your dad died.”

“But, what about the side effects? What are they?” I hadn’t done in-depth research on the subject myself. My mother had made clear with me where my position was: a firm no.

“Varied. There are some physical side effects that I’m not at high risk for. The main thing that’s kept me away from it all of these years is the high possibility of memory loss.” She bit her pinky fingernail and looked out the window.

I took a deep breath. “What kind of memory loss? Like, how much?”

“Usually it’s only trouble remembering things in the weeks leading up to treatment, and trouble with memory during the three to four weeks it takes to complete a treatment cycle.”

“So ... like this conversation?” My chin quivered.

She nodded. “Maybe.”

Couldn’t it just mess with the bad and leave the good? Why did everything have to go ... potentially?

“The benefit, sweetie, is that I might never need it again after this. It could completely reroute whatever’s gone haywire and set me straight again. For a long time, if not forever.”