My good friend, DT, is enjoying his retirement from the teaching profession, having successfully eluded prosecution, and firing, at the very minimum, for keeping dodgeball in the fifth grade phys. ed. curriculum. Dodgeball has been outlawed by the state school board. Rather than submit to the authoritarian state, in quiet protest against the regime, he circumvented the rule by changing the name of the game.
DT and I found out that a guy who played on our college baseball team died recently. He suffered from a rare disorder called Pick's Disease. The dementia-causing brain disease attacked him before age 30, early by most estimates. He behaved inappropriately as a teacher in the classroom. Apparently, the disease first became manifest in his case by extreme outbursts of temper, aggression, and hypersexual behavior, from which sprang a preoccupation with sexual expressions, sexual jokes, and compulsive masturbation, which are not good traits for an elementary school teacher. He was run out of town for his strange behavior, but was eventually diagnosed and was able to retire from teaching due to his disability. His father stood by him before he was diagnosed. His father knew something was wrong with his intelligent and talented son and finally found the reason and that the disease was not curable. His father stood by him for the next 20 years, dealing with and witnessing continuing changes in his son's personality and impairment in his reasoning and memory.
When I saw Jeff about 10 years ago at the annual college Homecoming alumni baseball game, he didn't remember me. He didn't remember much of anything else, for that matter.
Why is expanded federal funding for embryonic stem cell research such a bad thing? New avenues of research into treatment for those suffering from brain- and nerve-wasting diseases would open up.
We've already shown that we, as Americans, are pretty damn good at exterminating people. Can we please show the rest of the world how good Americans can be at saving people?
Posted by Bill at October 2, 2005 10:52 PMYour friend sounds like a sufferer of bipolar disorder which is a brain disease. How is Picks Disease different in its etiology?
Posted by: Joel at October 3, 2005 06:17 PMHave you written about your friend before? Either I've read a very similar post before or I'm experiencing the biggest, strongest case of deja vu ever.
Posted by: Elle at October 3, 2005 06:47 PMDT is the dude with the farm where you go and shoot at things and strut around and be manly, right?
Posted by: lucy at October 8, 2005 09:50 AM