“How do you feel, ma’am?”asks neurologist Helen Mayberg. “Lighter”Brandy Ellis stammers, her head covered with a blue sheet. “That is to say? “the doctor continues. “I feel like air is entering my body”the patient responds, lying down.
This conversation was recorded on October 12, 2011, in the operating room at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, USA. The medical team periodically asks the thirty-year-old American woman to have a deep brain implant placed under local anesthesia, targeting an area of the prefrontal cortex called “CG25.” Brandy Ellis is participating in this pioneering clinical trial because she hopes to improve her severe depression, which has resisted twenty treatments in four years. The operation, Curated by Helen Mayberg The procedure, which will be carried out by neurosurgeon Robert Gross, will last almost six hours and will allow the installation of, in addition to the electrode, an internal circuit that will connect it to a battery located under the skin, not far from the right armpit. This complete system must continuously deliver high-frequency electrical stimulation that will inactivate the area identified as dysfunctional.
Almost thirteen years later, in Paris, before the Olympic Games, Brandy Ellis, 48, still wearing the implant, came to share her experience at a neurotechnology conference at the Collège de France. Impeccably dressed and with her hair neatly combed, she explains that she no longer feels depressed on a daily basis and considers this operation to be the happiest day of her life. “I am a cyborg, like those wounded people from old television shows who became bionic. [en référence à L’Homme qui valait 3 milliards (1973-1978) ou Super Jaimie (1976-1978)] »She adds with a smile. This MBA graduate who became an executive at an international insurance company, however, skillfully masks a not so simple everyday life. Along the questions asked during our conversation, she will answer ” I don’t know “ repeatedly, before scrolling through hundreds of lines on his smartphone screen listing his own history: his key dates, his treatments, the doses received… His phone even contains video clips of his operation. “Between March and September 2008, two years before the implantation, I underwent twenty-four VCE sessions [électroconvulsivothérapie, ex-électrochocs] »specifies. “It left its mark. I lost part of my memory.”
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