I do not want to read your final papers ...

[hunter]

6. I feel sorry for all the professors and teaching assistants who suffered my madness...

... and very thankful for the few who recognized it for what it was.

I once turned in a paper that was pure gibberish, just after I'd changed my meds, one med some newly approved oral steroid that's not used anymore. I was feeling pretty good actually but my professor took me firmly by the hand and escorted me to the student health center nevertheless.

Of course the first thing the overworked, underpaid, and largely inexperienced student health center staff thought was "LSD" or "'shrooms" or something similar, so they put me aside to sleep it off. At some point, I'm not sure when, a doctor who knew me stopped by and figured out it was the change of meds, I'm guessing now the steroid.

Modern medicines are so much better than the meds I suffered when I was young. I haven't had to visit an ER for asthma or crazy since the later 'eighties. Before then I was a frequent flyer.

Another professor got me back into school the second time I'd been "asked" to take time off, or else... The first time was for fighting with a teaching assistant. When I went back to school after the second time-out the professor whose TA I'd fought with was now a dean, and skeptical, even with recommendations from one somewhat celebrity science professor, and a promise from another prominent science professor to look after me.

I retook the class I'd fought with the TA in and got an "A." I didn't fight with this TA, but he wasn't strung so tight.