Hello,
Thanks everyone for all of your responses.
VNS does require you to continue on meds, although you can sometimes decrease them over time.
What really disturbs me about the VNS (and I got this from info that they sent me) is that it can take up to a year to work and then only works for 30% of people. What is worse than that is that it only works for a year after that for 70% of the people that it initially works for. That means that you can undergo surgery and only have like a 10% chance that the relief will last for longer than a year. I want to get better, but I would rather stay sick than get better for one year, get my life back together, lose my disability and then end up as bad as I was before (or worse for having been temporarily well).
To sum it up, you have a 30% chance of any relief and a 10% chance that the relief will last. I have decided that the odds are too low for me...maybe they should just stick to epilepsy and not raise up people's hopes that it can cure depression....one year worth of relief is not enough...