The ECT is held in "recovery room" which looks more like warehouse building with beds lining the walls.
ONly one side is used for ECT, the rest for recovery from surgery.
I get this eerie sick feeling every time I enter early in the morning when the place and beds are completely empty. I imagine a great infectious catastrophe filling the enormous room with the sick and dying--nurses running around--doctors bumping into each other. TApe. IV. Smocks. Blood. Vomit.
Instead, it is silent, ran a bit like a normal, work, day-to-day office. Everyone knows their assignment.
The most dangerous part about ECT is not the treatment itself, but the anesthesia. When I wake up, I have a nurse watching me until I leave the building. She is dedicated to me, and me only. When I am done, she moves on to another patient.
There is nothing particularly fascinating about the process of ECT. They place monitors on me for blood pressure, heart rate, and EKG. They place another arm cuff to see how much I tense up during the seizure. From there, they put on two "stickers" one on the top of my head and the other on the side of my face to somehow transmit the electricity. Right before I pass out, they make me breathe oxygen through a mask.
I'm told that the whole process takes about 5 minutes. The seizure itself is about 30 seconds depending on the brain.
Despite this, many people are virulently against ECT. I have nothing to say to that except it is perhaps a last stop before suicide.
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