January 17, 2019

"By the time I got readmitted to the school district, I was 14 but looked pretty much as I do now: six feet tall, full beard, lean, hairy."

"But something miraculous was happening; my peers were catching up to me. Other kids in my grade had started shaving, developing muscles, and thinking about sex as obsessively as I had been since age 4. Plus I was going to a public high school in Los Angeles with 3,000 students. Suddenly, I was just another skinny white kid who smoked too much pot. I stopped sticking out. Most important, after more than a decade, puberty was finally done with me. The hormonal roller coaster leveled out. I calmed down. I could see beyond the immediate moment. Indeed, for the first time, I could see my future, and it scared the shit out of me. My past was stained with expulsions and arrests and violations. College seemed out of the question. It was this vision of personal apocalypse that spurred me to action. I pulled away from my friends, many of whom were getting into hard drugs and would soon end up in rehab or prison. I stopped smoking cigarettes and started playing sports. I read. I took honors classes. I had a long-term relationship with a girl who was smart and kind and ambitious. I got into Dartmouth and earned a fellowship to attend graduate school in Ireland. Along the way, I met Meredith, the woman I would marry, who went on to become an obstetrician/gynecologist and then a female-infertility specialist. Proving the gods do have a sense of humor, infertility medicine is a subspecialty of endocrinology — the field that also studies familial male-limited precocious puberty."

From "A 4-Year-Old Trapped in a Teenager’s Body 'I was all of the things people are when they’re 14 or 15' — except a decade younger" (New York Magazine)(about a man with a gene called the luteinizing hormone/choriogonadotropin receptor (LHCGR), which caused him to enter puberty at age 2).

13 comments:

Bob Boyd said...

All the girls he was interested in were so darn tall.

Darrell said...

Would you like to reconsider your comment, Bob Boyd. HE was the one fully mature at an extremely young age. The tall girls were adults. And he was taller than them.

Wince said...

"I got my first pubic hair when I was 2 years old. I couldn’t talk, I could barely walk, but I started growing a bush. Or so they tell me."

"Kid had a bush like a 40-year-old Serbian."

Bob Boyd said...

"The tall girls were adults. And he was taller than them."

At 2?

Darrell said...

At 4.

Bob Boyd said...

At 2 it was tougher, but worth the climb.

Birches said...

That article was fascinating. I love that he and his wife didn't test the embryos.

Kalli Davis said...

Yeah, same thing happened to me; I rode my bike out of labor and delivery, rode home and made my Dad Breakfast.

DrSquid said...

How did he keep on growing? I was taught that adult sex hormones (which cause the secondary sexual traits of adulthood) cause the closure of the growth plates of the long bones==>>cessation of growth. Guess I'll have to read the book.

Hammond X. Gritzkofe said...

Very interesting and informative. Thank you. Best wishes to Mr. Burleigh and wife - and to their progeny.

Off topic, but I appreciate the writing. Mornings, I routinely read aloud from the computer as Ms. Gritzkofe does house activities.

This being a lengthy article and after coffee, I was ripping through at a fast pace. Well constructed sentences allowed for appropriate voice inflections.

Newspaper writing, not so much. Whether the New York Times or the local rag, those must often be read slowly and in the monotone of computer text-to-speech. Phrases might attach to something nearby or to something far back in the paragraph.

Thank you again.

Yancey Ward said...

Dr.Squid,

It takes time for the chondrocytes (cartilage growth cells) to disappear completely at the bone ends (they slowly undergo cell death until depleted)- it isn't a quick process in adolescences.

Rosalyn C. said...

I was somewhat incredulous that they decided not to test the embryos. After all the research and the interference with scientific procedures they had already employed to get pregnant and be knowledgeable about the condition why not utilize that? I thought the reasons for not doing so were absurd. Who he is is not his body, his character is deeper than the ordeal he went through. That's basic reality.

I thought about this story and my reaction for awhile and perhaps my own childhood offers a clue. When I was about fifteen my dentist told my mother that I would benefit from getting braces. My father didn't want to pay for that extra expense, even though he could have afforded it. Instead he told me I shouldn't want to be like everyone else and that having crooked teeth gave me character, like Eleanor Roosevelt, someone I should want to aspire to be like. I knew at the moment what he said was BS, and years later when I told my orthodontist this story he laughed and said, Eleanor Roosevelt is why we have orthodontists. So I grew up being uncomfortable about my teeth and ashamed of my smile. Every time I had new dentist he would tell me I had very nice teeth and they would really look great if I had them straightened and had I ever thought of doing that? Then I would burst out crying because of course I had thought of it but I couldn't afford it. So I finally did get my teeth straightened as an adult which was of course extremely uncomfortable but undoubtedly worth it. Would I still be the wonderful person I am today if I had braces at fifteen? Yeah, of course I would be the same person, without the grief and painful memories.

I was glad to read that the children born to the precocious guy are OK because I'd hate to think how he would feel if he had a son who didn't have the strength to pull himself through. As he said, there were many men in his family who did not.

ken in tx said...

Mark Twain once made a crack about a kid that born supposedly premature, that he would be smoking cigars and voting by the time he was eight years old.