I was hospitalized on December 31, 1986 through February 6, 1987 at the Bradley Center on 2000 Sixteenth Avenue in Columbus, GA at a cost of $5,642.00 most of which was covered by my dad’s and mom’s insurance. I had enrolled again at LaGrange College in the Fall Quarter of 1986 in four courses: Introduction to Microcomputer Programming I, Numerical Methods, Analysis I, and Introduction to Special Relativity. Sometime in early November 1986 I started having a break from reality and I quit going to classes. I wound up with D, C, F, and F in my courses, respectively.
In December I started fantasizing again that I was somehow affiliated with the CIA and I could communicate telepathically or via a brain implanted device with headquarters in Virginia via my television. Now the brain implant delusion began to dominate my thinking. Here is how the fantasy went. Sometime in the summer of 1983 the CIA clandestinely implanted a subcutaneous transceiver device in my head. I had the coupled delusion that before the implant operation, which incidentally I fantasized had happened at the Comfort Inn on North Avenue just over the I-85 bridge from the Varsity Drive-In Restaurant, that the CIA had used some sort of advanced scanning device to read my thoughts while I was asleep at the Comfort Inn. I assumed they (the CIA operatives) had used something like a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectroscope to perform the brain scan feat. I did not know about MRI at the time and I don’t think the Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanner had been invented at that time. Anyway, I had the fantasy that when I went to get a CAT (now CT) scan at West Georgia Medical Center in December 1986 that this scan would somehow deactivate the transceiver in brain. I remember that Susan wanted me to get a CT scan since she erroneously assumed that I was a paranoid schizophrenic. I think that Dr. Kratina, my psychiatrist in December 1986, also incorrectly diagnosed me as a schizophrenic. Anyway, mother and father bought that nonsensical bill of goods hook, line, and sinker. I was a bi-polar individual who could easily be misdiagnosed as schizophrenic since I had a history of heavy cannabis sativa and cannabis indica usage as a late teenager, a teenage alcohol problem, and a history of hallucinogenic drug abuse as a young adult. Back to the CT scan. I had drunk beer before with the MD who did the scan at Foster’s Bar and Grill where I worked in the late 1970s and 1980s. It was reassuring that the CT scanner was guided and recorded by a Data General Eclipse minicomputer. I knew the Data General Eclipse line of computers well and I had been programming the Eclipse at LaGrange College off and on, mostly on, since the summer quarter of 1978. Not soon after the scan I had to affirm the blatant lie that “I was a danger to myself and/or others” in order to get into the Bradley Center.
I was in a private room at the Bradley Center without an occupant in the second bed for a while then I had a roommate. About all I can remember about my experience was my tremendous homesickness, the negative side effects of the terrible anti-psychotic drug Haldol and the almost daily walks to a nearby park for exercise.
Sometime after being released from the hospital in 1987, again due to Susan’s recommendation, I started treatment with a neuropsychiatrist in Opelika, Alabama. I think his name was Dr. Sampson. Anyway, he used to smoke cigars I believe. I can remember being really embarrassed about being brought to the appointments by my father with my mother in tow. I was almost thirty-five years old at the time and not driving and still living at home! Well this went on for several months before I became associated with Pathways in about late 1987 or early 1988. Again, Susan was with dad and I when I was inducted into the Pathways Center Mental Health Clinic of Troup County in LaGrange, Georgia.
Numerical Explorations 