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Harvard’s health services had taken me off lithium halfway through my second year, when I discovered during anatomy that my thyroid was enlarged. After an ultrasound and a bunch of blood tests, it was determined that I had benign nodular thyromegaly and that the lithium the “vitamin doctors” had put me on might have something to do with it. I had some unsatisfactory sessions with the medical school shrink, who was annoyingly smug and fatherly. He didn’t have a diagnosis for whatever it was that had caused the three psychotic episodes in British Columbia, but going off the lithium was fine with me. I felt pretty much okay and all set forever.

When my sister got sick I hadn’t taken lithium for two years and my thyroid was still three times its normal size and lumpy. I was shaken and upset because no one else in my family seemed to be able to get it together to deal with anything and because there were too many dead-ringer parallels between my sister’s psychosis and mine and I still had no name for whatever it was I had. This was in 1979, eight years after my initial episodes. How could I be so sure I was finished with it if I didn’t know what it was?

I was the model of efficiency helping my sister in New York, at least partly because I was looking forward to telling Ned how it went.

I don’t tell Ned everything. The truth about the voices, my grandiosity, and flights of ideas would just upset him. He might feel the need to do something about them, and it would take more time than I have to reassure him that I’m really all right.

NED: “So what about thinking that people don’t know who you really are or that the radio is talking about you or to you?”

ME: “Not me, boss.”

The truth about the voices is that once you’ve heard them, they are always there, just more or less offstage and more or less intelligible. Once you’ve been talked to by voices, it’s not possible to go back to a world where talking to voices is not possible. Having been crazy, I know that God can, if He wants, run me like a toy train.

NED: “Do you ever ask God to help you with a diagnosis?”

ME: “No.”

I actually had tried that and found out that physical diagnosis wasn’t one of God’s strengths. To be precise, what He said was, “Why do you think I created Harvard? I wouldn’t have bothered to send you to medical school if I knew you were going to come back to me with questions about physical diagnosis. You already know the patient doesn’t have appendicitis. Don’t bother me with crap like this again.”

“But… ”

So if I’m really so all right, why do I go see a psychiatrist at all?

Over the years I’ve come to care about Ned, and I think I go mostly to make sure he’s okay. He comforts me about my increasingly balky memory and moodiness by assuring me that his memory and tendency to fly off the handle are worse than mine. It works for me.

I still consider myself an early-Christianity scholar on a spiritual quest that happened to lead to medical school. Ned and I don’t talk much about early Christianity, but we could. I have a problem with Saint Paul, who never actually met Jesus, and with whoever it was who wrote the book of Revelation (it was definitely not Saint John). I also take issue with the idea that Jesus, after the Crucifixion and Resurrection, started working out and riding horses and having second thoughts about the Sermon on the Mount and the beatitudes. Where did this new muscular Christ come from? What are the four horsemen of the apocalypse so pissed about? What situation could possibly be made better by unleashing war, pestilence, famine, and death?

Passing for normal hasn’t been a problem for me for a while now. I know how to dress and act and how to not exactly tell the truth about what’s going on. I could pass off the things that happened to me when I was crazy as just a bunch of craziness, but the problem is, when I’m trying my best to tell the truth to myself, I’m not sure I didn’t bargain God down from nuclear cataclysm to a relatively mild earthquake and stop my father from killing himself. I’m glad I got to meet and talk