IN my early 30s, for a few months, I altered my body chemistry and hormones so that I was closer to a man in his early 20s. I was blown away by how dramatically my thoughts changed. I was angry almost all the time, thought about sex constantly, and assumed I was the smartest person in the entire world. Over the years I had met guys rather like this.

I was not experimenting with hormone levels out of idle curiosity or in some kind of quirky science experiment. I was on hormone treatments because I’d had a tumor removed along with part of my pituitary gland, which makes key hormones the body needs to function.

This long journey may have started as early as 1978, when I was 13. I spent a summer in intensive care with an unknown disease. After that summer, I never thought I would live a long life. So I wanted to live, to do interesting, fascinating work in the limited time I thought I had left. I took on the math-intensive art form of holography, and in my early 20s traveled the world, living on university fellowships to pursue this esoteric craft. I didn’t date much, really — perhaps because I didn’t have many hormones, though I didn’t know that at the time. I worked as an artist, played in a band, met Andy Warhol, Christo, Lou Reed and David Byrne. I had fun. But the gravity of my illness grew in the 1990s.

The growth that shut down my pituitary gland’s ability to produce hormones did so insidiously over many years. By my early 20s it was, I suspect in retrospect, causing misdiagnosis of symptoms that were most likely caused by lack of hormones like cortisol. No diagnosis was found, despite the efforts of many doctors. I was a doctoral student in electrical engineering at an Ivy League school, but was growing progressively worse. I routinely slept about 20 hours a day, lived with a constant blistering headache and frequent vomiting, and was periodically wheelchair-bound. Large sections of my skin cycled through a rainbow of colors and sores, half of my face wouldn’t move as if Novocain had been applied. I drooled. Worse: I felt stupid. I couldn’t subtract anymore. I couldn’t make a to-do list, let alone accomplish items on one. I recognized that I wasn’t capable of continuing in graduate school. Utterly defeated, I filled out the paperwork to drop out.