Holding Strong

 Here I am exactly 3 weeks since my last session on the even of session #31.  I was both thrilled after session 30 and worried about the next 3 weeks.  The last time I went 3 weeks between treatments I totally fell apart and all small gains that I had previously disappeared.  In addition it took months to get back to that place I was before going so long between treatments.  This is not how I wanted to live and I knew was not sustainable. 

In addition, session #30 was the most profound experience in treatment for me to date so to risk those enormous gains was a major concern to me.  But it had to happen.  The reality of this treatment is that getting to a clinic where you can have the treatment and be monitored is difficult because you need a driver.  It is a huge sacrifice of time.  When I started Spravato it was not intended to be forever.  There was a very real hope for remission.  But the journey to that seemed long and daunting. 

After 7 months of treatment I was finally starting to feel better and session 30 really seemed to push me over the top.  In the days to follow I felt amazing.  I was levelheaded.  I was seeing solutions to my problems and most importantly I was experiencing joy.  Over the last 7 years I had lost the ability to experience joy even while doing things I had previously loved.  All of my “feels” were gone.  But now they had returned rushing back to me like a dam had been broken.  I was flooded with mental relief in so many ways.  I knew this feeling because it was the same feeling I had 14 years ago with my acupuncture treatment that resulted in my remission.  It was the same feeling I had when I lost 100 pounds and summited a mountain still in that remission 7 years later.  But my remission ended and I reverted back to the disease of depression and sank heavily in the years to come into severe SI.

Only months ago I remember sitting in my car in my garage where I had accidentally, in a rush, started my car forgetting to open the door first.  As I reached for the button to open the door I had that brief pause where I stopped and considered how easy it would be to just not press it, to let my lungs fill with that gentle poison. But now here I was feeling this euphoria.    

For days I was cautious to even say the word remission or to acknowledge that it was even possible.  I was deathly afraid it would not last beyond those days.  But as the weeks slid by I found myself feeling better and better and not worse.  There has been no regression.  In fact I had to cancel my therapy due to a change of my plans and for the first time in YEARS actually didn’t feel I needed it! Literally none of my problems seemed insurmountable.  The same problems that have been there the whole time.  But for some reason now I felt they were fixable. 

I go into my treatment tomorrow and feel confident this will be even more healing and shoring up of the connections in my brain that have brought me to this place.  But it is enormously hopeful that I don’t desperately need it to stay alive.  This will be valuable if I can maintain right now as I have a few months coming up with work where even having one treatment a month will be simply not possible.  So knowing I can maintain means the world to me. 

A few weeks before my breakthrough I was feeling better and sitting in the clinic waiting area and I heard another patient setting up her next appointment and she mentioned not being able to come as much because she felt good enough finally to get a job.  It really made me smile hoping I would have results like that someday.  And now here I am.  I know it is extremely early to say I am in full remission and I suspect I will need booster treatments.  I also plan to continue going once a month (twice for some months) to front load myself and hope to sustain my results.  But as far as I am concerned this is finally the miracle I have been hoping for.  I hope it lasts and at the very least sustains me until something new opens new doors.  For now I plan to use every bit of this remission to better every aspect of my life that has suffered in the last 7 years since my last remission ended.