Dear Linmarie -

Worth the wait may be more like it. I have an appointment with an ECT specialist next month, who originally wasn't that interested in seeing me, but becacame intrigued and invited me in to see him. He did so however with a warning, that, at least in California, ECT is used in purely a psychiatric context and by law you have to get three doctors to sign off before it can go forward, so he wasn't terribly optomistic.

As things stand, I may have a better chance of getting into a controlled study that's more than a year away at a local medical school. I would wish you better luck in your jurisdiction, but I see you're in CA as well. Anyhow, I'll report back if I get good news.

Mike

ps On the short-term memory issue. In working on the article, I found that while my ability to understand technical materials remained relatively intact, my “expressive” functions deteriorated to the point that I could work almost for a full day and then have only a paragraph to show for it. And then, after I had “completed" a section of the article, I reviewed ten pages of it in double-spaced type, only to see the it was incomprehensible, with thoughts at once scattered and repeated throughout, in no apparent order. Finally, I would up printing the pages out and taping them in order to my dining room table, where I could see it as a complete visual whole. I then spent three full days deciding where each and every paragraph, sentence and phrase belonged, until it assumed some level of cogency.

Further frustrating my effort was my inability to compose at all from memory: I was like a child in 6th grade continually referring to his notes as each paragraph was laboriously strung together, one by one. Even now, six weeks after the work was submitted, as I review the finished piece, I am continuously surprised with almost every paragraph, as though meeting a long forgotten friend.