A Day in the OCD Life
One of our longtime contributors gives a personal account of undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation therapy to battle his Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, which he was diagnosed with when he was 16 years old.
Wake up. Get out of bed. It’s about the fifth day of your medical treatment for your Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and you’re late. You leave your building, zoom down York Avenue.
It’s packed at this early hour on a Friday morning. Doctors and nurses grabbing coffee from food carts before going about their work.
Phones to their ears, wedding rings on their fingers, you want to be like them. Assured, relaxed, even married. But you’re not. Thirty-two-years-old, in what’s either an extended quarter-life crisis or an early mid-life one, you’re battling your OCD.
As defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-5, OCD is “Recurrent and persistent thoughts, urges or images that are experienced, at some time during the disturbance, as intrusive, unwanted, and that in most individuals cause marked anxiety or distress.”
Yet it’s so much more. Often, you try and try, and just can’t relax. Today, weaving through the crowd, you’re rushing and feel like your head is on fire.
Finally, you make it to the doctor’s office where two nurses in blue scrubs smile and lead you to a room where you huff down in the chair.
A box-shaped machine connected to two beige helmets, this is the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) chair. As the Mayo Clinic says, TMS “uses magnetic fields to stimulate nerve cells in the brain to improve symptoms of major depression.” When used for OCD, the treatment “involves delivering repeated magnetic pulses, so it’s called repetitive TMS or rTMS.”
The nurses are setting everything up. Pressing buttons on the machine, checking levels on the screen, craning the helmet so that it sits right above your head. Almost ready for treatment.
But, first, the nurses hold your hands. “Squeeze, wiggle, rock,” they say, inspecting movement in your fingers in order to detect areas of OCD-related anxiety in your brain. “Squeeze, wiggle, rock,” they repeat. Okay, ready for treatment.
“Think,” the nurse with the glasses says, asking you to deliberately think the thoughts that that are making you anxious. The TMS machine then buzzes and essentially catches the thoughts. So you close your eyes and think:
Why was I late this morning? I should have gotten up earlier. Late. I’m always late. What’s wrong with me? This therapy is important. I should have been on time. Never mind the nurses’ smiles. Should have been on time. I’m just so silly. I’m a bad patient. Bad son. Bad brother. Bad employee. Bad person. Such a bad person.
The TMS session continues for another twenty minutes. You keep thinking these painful thoughts and comply with the treatment.
Sitting there, you recall what one of your doctors, a specialist in OCD, has said. Something like, “The OCD tries to convince you that you’re a bad this or a bad that. It tries to trick you and make you actually believe what it’s saying. Just don’t pay attention to it.”
But it’s not easy. Ever since you were diagnosed with the disorder as a sixteen-year-old, you’ve believed so much. That you’re irresponsible, insensitive, and malicious. That, for example, you tried to cause an accident while driving, that you offended someone at a birthday party, that you’re intent on upsetting everyone you know. Countless nights, the illness has peaked around the corner, gripped you, and fed you falsities.
At its core, OCD, which afflicts one in every forty Americans, is about doubt. You begin to doubt everything. Questions, and nagging thoughts, pop into your head and linger. Did I turn off the faucet this morning? Am I dressed well enough for work? Am I going to get fired because I’m not dressed well enough? OCD is, in fact, called, “The Doubting Disease.”
However, treatment methods exist. Chief among these is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which, in part, exposes the OCD sufferer to his/her/their fears in order to eventually strip them of their power. So, for example, someone who experiences anxiety upon getting dirt on their hands will deliberately have dirt be placed on their hands while the person afraid of taking the train will purposefully take the train. There is also talk therapy, which can be very helpful. And then there is TMS.
The session stops. You open your eyes, rise from your chair. The day waits. You’re still battling, but are making peace with the beast.