It has been a few months since I had my 6 month follow-up appointment for the Magnetic Resonance-guided Focused Ultrasound Surgery (MRgFUS) that I had last November to try and cure my treatment-resistant depression. I haven't posted any blog articles in that time since there hasn't really been much to report. My depression has not improved. Except for the brief, small improvement that I had in the spring, my depression has not gotten better since I had the surgery. My anxiety, however, has gotten somewhat better. I have been able to go out to events that I have not been able to attend for a number of years. For example, I was able to attend my son's high school graduation, whereas I was not able to attend my other son's graduation two years earlier due to my overwhelming anxiety. Similarly, I am now able to attend weekly Mass at my local church, which I haven't been able to do in a number of years. The improvement in my anxiety is good. However, my depression is still just at bad as it has ever been, and it is still making my life very difficult to live.
In order to try and get better, I am continuing to try various medications that were recommended to my psychiatrist by Dr. Anthony Levitt, the psychiatrist for the study in which I am taking part. Nothing has worked so far, and, honestly, I am losing hope that I will find a solution in yet another pill. I believe that my depression is such that pills alone won't help. That is one of the reasons why I tried MRgFUS. The hope was that the surgery would give a boost to the medications and something would work. It doesn't appear that this boost is materializing, however.
As you may recall, when I first started this journey, there were two different surgeries that I was considering. They were MRgFUS and a surgery known as Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS). I discussed them here and here. Originally I was leaning towards doing DBS, which involves drilling a couple of holes in my skull and inserting electrodes in my brain that would hopefully change my thought patterns and cure my of my depression, but after discussions with Dr. Levitt and my neurosurgeon, Dr. Nir Lipsman, I decided to go with MRgFUS.
Since I haven't been getting any positive results from my MRgFUS surgery, I decided to explore whether it would be possible to now have DBS performed and to see if that would work. A few weeks ago I wrote to the co-ordinator of both the MRgFUS and the DBS research studies and asked her if that would be possible. She put me in contact with Dr. Lipsman's resident who said that nobody has had DBS after having MRgFUS before, but some people have had it done after having other lesioning procedures, so he would bring it up with their team and see what they had to say. Yesterday I received an email from the resident saying that the team met to discuss my case and if I still do not see any improvement at the time of my 12 month follow-up appointment in November then I would be a candidate for having DBS performed.
This is both good news and a little frightening at the same time. DBS gives me another option to possibly get better after years of suffering. However, it is also much more invasive and would involve implanting electrodes into my brain, which is kind of scary. I'm not quite sure how to feel about it, but I think that if I do not get better, then it is something that I must try. It is a promising procedure and I have to try everything possible in order to get better.
For more information on DBS you can watch the video below:
