Slavin, is that Russian?

This afternoon I met with the neurosurgeon who would perform the VNS surgery if I choose to go thru with it. His last name is Slavin and he went to med school in Azerbaijan before coming to America to do his residency. Is that in Russia? I suck at geography. Not that it matters where he's from, I've just always been curious as to how well med schools in other countries teach their students.

Anyway, I really had no idea what questions to ask. The only one I could think of was how many of these surgeries has he performed. Thinking back now, he didn't actually answer the question. He only said how many he's done for people with depression, which was between 4-6 (yep, that few). Didn't mention how many he's done total, including those for epilepsy though.

He said that he only started doing the ones for depression in December, so it's too soon to know if any of those patients have seen an improvement. He assured me that I was an ideal candidate for this procedure, even if the success rate is only 50%. He said since the number of patients with treatment resistant depression isn't very high, that 50% is a pretty good number.

I have to decide fairly quick if I want to have this surgery. They did get it approved with both Medicare and Medicaid, but there's one slight catch. As of July, Medicare is no longer going to cover it so if I'm going to do it, I have to do it before then. But I have to decide as soon as possible because he only performs this procedure on Tuesdays and they would need to get me on the schedule quickly.

I know that I couldn't do it until June 6th at the earliest. May is already pretty full with end of the year school stuff and several other things. I don't want to do the surgery this month in case there are any complications because I can't afford to miss any of these functions, especially graduation.

I'm at a loss as to what to decide. As crazy as it sounds, my biggest fear is that it will work. I don't know life without depression. I can't even fathom what it would be like. But I'm also afraid of it not working because that will be yet another failure that I know I can't handle.

So I suppose I'll pose the question to everyone, just to see the responses. If you were at the point where it was a life or death matter and you knew there was a surgery that had only a 50% chance of working to make you better, would you go thru with it?