Free Swish by Joel Derfner Page B

cigarette, I decided to grow some shrooms. Sadly, the attempt coincided with a mouse infestation in my building, and the mice ate the shrooms before I could harvest them, which meant that I had OCD
and
an apartment full of tripping mice.
    So when I read about a New York–based study of a new technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, I was intrigued. This was shortly after I started to lose my enthusiasm for cheerleading; maybe I could get it back, I thought, if I recalibrated my brain.
    In many people with psychiatric problems, goes the idea behind TMS, certain areas of the brain are sluggish or hyperactive, but by aiming electromagnetic pulses at those areas, you can speed them up or slow them down. This is not electroconvulsive therapy, in which doctors anesthetize a patient and then send an electric shock through his or her entire brain strong enough to induce a seizure; TMS is much less drastic and more targeted.
    The only problem was that I didn’t actually have the illness the study was investigating. The doctors were looking for people with major depressive disorder—the kind that can prevent you from feeding yourself and sometimes from bathing—and whatever was going on in my brain, it wasn’t that. Furthermore, people with OCD were specifically excluded, and though I didn’t have classical OCD, what I did have was certainly close enough to disqualify me.
    However, I had exhausted all my other options, so I just signed up and lied through my teeth. True, they would be aiming the magnets at parts of my brain associated with a disorder I didn’t have, but hey, I thought, it’s not as if I can get any
worse,
so what do I have to lose?
    At my entrance interview I therefore exaggerated my depressive symptoms as much as I could and left out my obsessive ones entirely. One of the first questions they asked, for example, was whether I woke up earlier than I needed to and whether, if so, I could go back to sleep. I did in fact wake up earlier than I needed to, generally at around eight or nine, which for people in the theater is the middle of the night, but I didn’t think that would be convincing enough, so I told them I usually woke up between four and six and was unable to get to sleep again. There were about thirty of these diagnostic questions, all of which I answered as haltingly as I could, dulling my affect and crying the first chance I got. That night they called me and said I was eligible for the study and could I start on Monday and I said yes definitely.
    This turned out to be a bad idea.
    First of all, TMS was very boring. I went every weekday over the course of two and a half months and sat in a chair for forty-five minutes with a machine the size of a large stereo component at my back. A flexible tube connected the machine to a little plastic hat, which sat just above the hairline on the left side of my head. Twice a minute, electromagnetic pulses from the plastic hat would poke at my scalp like a manic woodpecker for several seconds. The pulses were slightly painful for the first few minutes of the first day, but after that my nerve endings got used to them. The study protocol forbade me to read or fall asleep, and my head was immobilized, so I ended up staring at the Monet print on the wall and contemplating my own existence. This was not fun.
    And what’s more, it didn’t do me any good. In fact, showing up every day and lying only made me exponentially more anxious. Compounding this anxiety was the repeat interview I had every two weeks; with each one it became increasingly difficult for me to keep track of my previous answers.
Crap,
I would think,
did I tell them last time that I had spent less than three hours a day in productive activity the previous week, or that I had spent more than three hours a day in productive activity but had had thoughts or feelings of incapacity, fatigue, or weakness?
Soon enough I
was
waking up between four and six every morning and unable to get back to