It's long since been removed from the market, but they used to sell Christmas tree tinsel that was pure lead. It was shiny, heavy, slinky and irresistible for one 3 or 4 year old to put in his mouth and chew on. That's what I did, all day on Christmas 1955 or '56. I can attest to the fact that lead is sweet. Sickly sweet. My parents were horrified when they caught me doing it and made me turn over the big wad I'd been chewing on, but amazingly they didn't think to take the stuff off the darn tree. And of course, having been told not to do something, it became a power struggle and I immediately scooped up another handful and started munching again the minute they weren't looking. Sometime later that day or the next day I fell flat on my face and couldn't get up. That's when my older sister discovered I was still chewing on that wad of lead and only then did it occur to my parents that maybe it would be a good idea to remove the rest of it from the tree. Reading about lead poisoning decades later, I discovered that the motor impairment comes last, at very high blood levels of it, so I must have been quite seriously poisoned. My memories are foggy after that but if I received any medical help for it I'm not aware of it. There were a lot of dirty little secrets in my family and I suspect that the fact that I'd been seriously poisoned was just swept under the rug like everything else.
I was a terrible, temperamental little brat as I grew up, but was always told that was just because I was a bad kid. I was allowed to get away with murder, and escaped any legal consequences for my actions but was guilt tripped over them endlessly and grew up hating myself. My father, who never got over the death of his first wife, was the gloomiest guy I've ever known and he NEVER smiled except when he told me what a total disgrace and failure I was going to be in life. I have to wonder if he knew what that lead poisoning had done to me. I first got drunk at a very young age, after a relative handed me a very big glass of rum and coke that was 90% rum at a new years eve party, 1959 or '60. Again I was falling flat on my face. I didn't start drinking in earnest till a few years later, but the seed had been planted. In addition, I was at just the right, impressionable age to sucked up into the drug subculture when It metastasized through America in the late 1960's, and I embraced it with a zeal that can only be described as religious. I was on small doses of antipsychotics for a couple years after one psych hospitalization in 1971, and on 10-15 mg/day of valium for 5 years, which I mixed with every other drug you can imagine and copious amounts of alcohol as well. Somehow, I survived and had my last drink in November, 1975 after a near-death experience that affected me profoundly, and quit all the other drugs one at a time over then next eighteen months.
I know that I suffered some brain damage from sniffing cleaning fluid to get high on in the early seventies because I simply couldn't speak for a week or so afterwards. And I've had three diagnosed concussions after fights or accidents, two of which also rendered my unable to speak for a period of time. And once in 7th grade, after the class bully snuck up behind me and delivered two staggering karate chops to the back of my neck without any provocation, I was shaky and nauseous all day afterwards- a sure sign of a concussion, but I didn't receive any medical help and don't remember any speech impairment. (He grew up to be a cop, but I digress...) The last one in 1994 landed me on the ICU for two weeks and I developed grand mal epilepsy from it, but that is well controlled with medication and a combination of herbs and food supplements that I started on after the meds failed to stop endless partial seizures that would not knock me down or render me unconscious like the grand mal variety but which were nonetheless very irksome.
Probably unrelated to the lead poisoning, I suffered from a chronic bowel disease for 14 years and have had 4 major surgeries for it without any narcotics for pain afterwards, simply because I didn't want to get started. And it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be. If you could imagine just being very, very sore after doing sit-ups all day, that's what the aftermath of abdominal surgery feels like.
My life's been a mess, but from that mess I've assembled something that's well worth living. Frustration has always been physically painful for me- like a prickly red haze descending over my head- but over the years I've learned to handle it without lashing out or making an ass out of myself. I exercise like a maniac and until a couple years ago I was racing college kids uphill on my mountain bike, and beating them. At 63, I'm more excited about creative projects that I'm working on than at any time in my life and although I may seem eccentric or even crazy to people who don't know me, I know it's a matter of them being unable or unwilling to see, not of me being irrational. Yeah, lead poisoning can make your life difficult, but it doesn't have to be a life sentence. Don't let their low expectations keep you down.