Ernest Feaster: the model-train man whose fondest dream was anhedonia

texture · ~YDPAH (2008), "two years ago"

• When: she "came to know" him at Newton-Wellesley Hospital "two years ago" (~YDPAH by the YDAU frame)
• What: During an earlier hospitalization Kate knew a fellow psychotically-depressed patient, a civil engineer (model-train hobbyist) in his fifties who said he had suffered psychotic depression for seventeen straight years after a fall, never once tried suicide but yearned for unconsciousness without end; nothing — Tricyclics, MAOIs, insulin-comas, SSRIs, high-amperage ECT — relieved It. He was transferred to be evaluated for radical psychosurgery to yank out the limbic system, i.e. surgically induced anhedonia, "death in life." He and his wife (Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Feaster of Wellesley Hills) sent Kate Xmas cards with locomotive watercolors on them; his case "gave Kate Gompert the howling fantods." He is her benchmark of a depression beyond human aid.