Ellen Wilson: HIGHWAY 90 • Cleaver Magazine

Nonfiction by Ellen Wilson
HIGHWAY 90

We made the drive for the first time on Thanksgiving morning.

My one-night stay was planned, but I had to be admitted through the emergency room, and our thinking was that by leaving in the morning we could beat all the cuts and burns that would come into the ER later that day, as Thanksgiving cooking really got underway. I packed a pair of pajamas, clothes for the next day, a book, a coloring book, and colored pencils.

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Highway 90 runs for 1633 miles, from Florida through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Singing River Hospital, which we had never heard of, was located just off the highway in Pascagoula, Mississippi, approximately an hour from our home in Alabama.

To get to 90 from our house, we made a left turn, a right turn, a left turn, and a right turn, then eventually a right turn into the hospital parking lot. Due to the procedure’s use of general anesthesia, I was not permitted to drive myself.

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There was no wait at the ER, but since I was going to the psychiatric unit, they searched my tote bag and confiscated everything. I pondered how many paper cuts it would take for the injuries to be fatal, though I could see their point with the pencils.

Without a book, I spent most of the day watching Hometown on HGTV on a television encased in plastic. I had to ask a staff member to set the channel for me. When the doctor came by, he rolled his eyes at the book confiscation, and later returned with it, though I did not have the attention span to read it. Early the next morning, a staff member woke me up and instructed me to shower. “Be sure to soap up carefully,” she said.

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Highway 90 alternates between being a two-lane and four-lane highway, though prior to Hurricane Katrina it was almost all four-lanes through Mississippi. The spots where the roads widen and allow passing became markers on our trips. Sights turned familiar: cotton bales outside St. Elmo, the Mobile International Speedway, a mobile home development bordering on dystopian. A restaurant called Kitchen of the Sea advertised ice cream from a local favorite in Mobile.

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People frequently think of electroconvulsive therapy as primitive, violent, and imposed on others. Media depictions show patients fighting against it, being forced to bite down on something and then convulsing wildly before waking up as vegetables.

Did I make the decision to have ECT? Yes, but at the time I was desperate and it was presented to me as the next logical step, which was a therapeutically correct decision. I agreed. But the real consent to the treatment came earlier, when I was more rational, and investigated it out of curiosity after reading an article about Kitty Dukakis’ efforts to destigmatize the treatment. My doctor suggested it on Tuesday. The doctor who performed the treatment, a state away, called the next day, and then offered to do the first treatment Friday, with my reporting to the hospital a day before for tests. Later, I learned some of the nurses had wanted to hit Black Friday sales instead of treating patients.

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We passed a sign for a Christmas tree farm. Treatment extended through December, into January, but we never considered getting a live tree. A few years later, with a new lease on life, I was saddened to learn the farm had closed and our chance at the experience ended.

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I filled out a depression assessment and changed into a hospital gown and socks. A nurse inserted an IV. Eventually, I switched from the recliner in the outpatient surgery room to a gurney to be taken to the surgery waiting area, a curtained area holding multiple beds. I waited. Occasionally, the nurse would fuss about my blood pressure. The anesthesiologist or nurse anesthetist eventually came in to go over the procedure. After what seemed like an interminable wait, they rolled me into the operating room, which looked disconcertingly like an office rather than what I’d seen on television.

Everything sped up. A nurse put a blood pressure cuff on my lower calf. They placed a mask over my face and told me to breathe in and count. Every time, I got to four and thought, “it’s not working” before a giant, euphoric woosh took me under. This is what I’m told happened. While under general anesthesia, the doctor placed a paddle on my temple to induce a seizure. Since I was paralyzed from the medication, I was still, except for the foot below the blood pressure cuff, cut off from the muscle relaxant, which convulsed. They timed this and noted it. I woke up elsewhere, where a nurse would sometimes compliment me on the length of the seizure and give me a paper telling me when to come back for the next session. Eventually, they would call my husband, who was waiting in the car due to COVID-19 precautions at the hospital, and he would take me home.

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On the way out of the hospital, I was dazed and frequently starving due to fasting before the surgery. A McDonald’s sat across the street and I often requested a milkshake. This request exasperated my husband, who needed to get home to go into work, and often led to disappointment for me: the shake machine was usually broken.

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I’m not sure exactly how many sessions we did. We made the trip two to three times per week for about six weeks, and stopped when the depression inventory indicated progress. I did feel better, and nodded at the doctor’s instructions to call if I started to slip, because, I learned then, ECT has a high relapse rate. I relapsed, but did not call.

We were tired of the drive.

Ellen Wilson is an academic librarian, dog mom, and pizza aficionado who lives, works, writes, and reads in South Alabama. This is her first published piece.