Marcea

I think I’ve always had depression. One of my earliest memories has been as a little girl on the playground watching other children playing and having a good time and being alone on the sidelines and wondering why I couldn’t have that kind of fun. Depression first began to interfere with my life in my early twenties and I began to get treatment for it. For thirty years I was in and out of hospitals with severe depression. I can’t even count the number of medications and hospitalizations. I was willing to do anything. My mother’s new boyfriend happened to be a psychiatrist who attended a seminar about TMS. He mentioned it to me and my mom and we went to a consultation. I was hopeful but very frightened. I was scared to be hopeful because so many times doctors have said “this is what is going to work for you” and it would maybe work for a couple of months and then it wouldn’t work so I was always being disappointed.

I was concerned about the cost but it was my mom who said to me, “don’t you want to try something that could possibly change your life, no matter what the cost?” And I really wanted to try.

I wasn’t quite sure when I started feeling better but I think it was a couple of weeks into treatment. My mom started noticing I was more alert and aware and my face wasn’t so tight.

TMS has helped me to feel the best I have ever felt. I have come off an enormous amount of medications from which I suffered a great deal of side effects. Fatigue during the day, all day was the worst side effect for me to deal with. This made it very difficult to keep a job. Now I am alert and awake and I sleep like a normal person. I am not falling asleep in the afternoon and unable to get out of bed in the morning. That has been the best change and that has been because I have been taken off so much medication.

If I had given into my fears I could probably right now be in the hospital, feeling helpless and hopeless and not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. That is so far from where I am right now.