LogFAQs > #979577462

That was part of it. My mom was already in tons of debt and she was paying for most of it. I didn't want to put her in more debt.

I was also dealing with health issues because I got viral meningitis the summer before 9th grade. It caused me to have infected fluid in my brain and spine, which gave me some brain tumors and I started having seizures randomly. They put me on dilantin to control the seizures. It wasn't until years after I stopped taking dilantin that I found out that it causes short term memory loss.

It was bad. I was an A and B student in school and I graduated from middle school in the top 15% of my class. School was easy for me back then. After I started taking dilantin, I would forget stuff a LOT. The teacher would teach us stuff and I'd understand the stuff perfectly. Sometimes, by the time the teacher handed out worksheets so we could practice what we learned, I would have already forgotten it all.

When I was in college, my mom gave me an ATM card so that I could withdraw money if I needed to buy something. There was a time where I put the card in the ATM, pulled money out, then walked away without the card. By the time I realized I forgot the card, the machine ate it. My mom overnighted me another card. I did the exact same thing the next day. There was also a time where I got on the bus to go home with my backpack full of books. I got off the bus without my backpack and started walking home. I was about half way to my apartment when I realized I didn't have my backpack any more. I went back to school and waited hours for all the buses to come around. My backpack was gone and no one had turned it in to lost and found.

I did relatively OK in school that year, but not as well as I would have hoped. I was wanting to major in computer science, but I was frustrated that none of my classes had anything to do with computers. I was taking a bunch of classes that I didn't care about and didn't want to do more "pre-requisite" classes the next year.

So I just dropped out.