Content warning: This piece contains hospitalisation, medical treatment, altered consciousness, fear, dissociation and discussion of fragile consent. Please take care while reading, and step away if you need to.
Author’s note: This piece was written after I was hospitalised in January 2024, during which I received 24 electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) treatments. It is about consent that is spoken but not embodied, about survival choices made under pressure. This is not an argument against or for treatment. It is a record of what it felt like to me.
I signed the forms. Agreed to the procedure. Nodded last-minute consent with polite smiles. I sit in that waiting room, my minder from the unit watchful, bored. I want to scream. I want to tear everything down.
Pacing. Stretching. Scrolling. Fists curled. Jaw locked. Ever listening.
Listening for the clinical hum of current.
Hum. Shrill. Electric.
It climbs. It drops.
I like to clack my teeth in time with the pulse counting each interval like measuring the seconds between thunder and lightning, waiting for the strike.
I EXHALE too loud. People look. I forget people can see me. Stay. Still.
Sometimes I cry. Tears slide silently onto my shirt. One tissue. Handed. Measured care. I’m being watched. Silent, tidy crying is fine. Any sob—too loud. Not allowed.
Weeks pass. Objections stuck in my throat: No. Stop. I don’t want. Week by week, fading, dimmer, present just enough to float through my life.
For someone who once had very little will to live, these liminal waiting-room moments feel like reviewing my life in fragments. Strange, to be terrified of forgetting a life I once had no interest in participating in. Not the big things. The big things can be relearned. But the little ones. The smell of violin rosin. Looking back at my friends mid-paddle on a canoe trip, laughing. The weight of my dog pressed against my leg, chin perfectly in the crook of my knee. Eager hands tugging at my sleeve. Tiny shoes I helped tie, loops and knots over and over. Small. Insignificant. Moments that make me me, even as parts of me vanish.
Name called. Sweater, phone, glasses given over. I half-blind shuffle to a too-bright room. A kind nurse shows me dog pictures. Safe? I’m supposed to smile, right? To say “I’m ok.. This is fine.”
Oxygen. Electrodes. “Consent confirmed.” The anesthesia starts. The room stays but I don’t. Something slams. Not sleep, not floating, a cliff. Pinned, muted, but aware. Large hands on shoulders, pressure, tether. “You are safe.” I don’t believe him.
Time fractures, skips, body gone then dragged back. Too fast. Too sharp. Air forced in. Again. Again. “Big breaths, [Rosa]. You’re just panicking...” I choke. Flail. Sputter.
I’m not dead. maimed, or disfigured. But I am furious.
Not at wires. Not at electricity or the cold clinical nature of it all.
At needing it. At saying yes despite my body saying no. At how quickly I can stop existing. At how fast I fade.
Rolled back to the unit. Efficient. Routine. Resolved. Handed a juice and cookie like some reward for learning to disappear politely.
After the last session, I can take my body home—but not all of it.
Some pieces stay behind.
They ask, “You feel better, right?” “Yes,ofcourse” I say, automatically. “I signed the forms.”
