CHAPTER THREE
WHEN DOCTORS don’t know what the problem is they normally prescribe something to make you think they know what they’re doing. You know something is terribly wrong with your physical and mental health but nobody can pinpoint it. That’s when I began to distrust doctors. You thought they were gods, especially at ten years old, but they weren’t.
They were only people trained to treat what they thought was wrong, and then pray that they were right. My life was in their hands, and I think if I were in their shoes I would have been a little shaky and lost a lot of sleep.
During the summer of ’73 I saw a doctor for migraine headaches. But the headaches were getting progressively worse. I would go to sleep with them and wake up at 5 AM. It got to be such a routine that if I woke up at 5 AM out of habit, I would wonder what was wrong. Mom, Dad and my brother were always asleep at that early hour, and I could tell they were getting a little tired of me always waking them up. So I would go into my little laboratory and work.
The lab was a storage room. It held all the junk and gadgets. I could rebuild anything from a radio to a set of power tools. Here I passed the time. Deep in work that I felt was important. Not important enough to change the world perhaps, but to me, it seemed that way.
But my mother began to worry about my headaches and my obsession with work. My mind was a whirlwind, never stopping to do anything but think. She had to come into the room and interrupt me in my own little world to eat or go to school.
I was burning the candle at both ends: her way of helping was to take me to a doctor. He was only a general practitioner, but it was a start. He checked me over and gave me a clean bill of health. He said my headaches were due to nerves, and prescribed medicine for hyperactivity and gave me some advice – slow down.
Obviously this didn’t work. Th