My brother taught me to read when I was 4 or 5 (sometime before kindergarten). No one knows how (including he or I). He was tired of me asking him to read to me, so he taught me how to read so that I would leave him alone.

Heh. I taught myself how to read at 4 because I was bored (my sister was gravely ill, my parents were understandably distracted). Which led to me getting "The Secret Garden" as a gift that Christmas from one grandmother, and the other grandmother (who hadn't spent much time with me) freaking out about how I was too young to have a non-picture book, and then being flabbergasted at me reading the first chapter to her.

Steph-- What kind of pain did you have that was tendon related (so I have an idea of what to look out for).

Not to be coy, but you'll know it if you have it. My achilles tendons had a constant, dull, moderately severe ache for about 3 weeks. My jaw ached constantly like it does after going to the dentist and having to hold your mouth open for hours. Any area that has tendons is fair game, and if you start having any kind of pain in or around your tendons that wasn't there before, stop the antibiotic and call your doctor. It can fuck you up big time, and there are lots of other antibiotics that won't rupture your tendons.

FYI: Cipro and Avelox are in the same class and can do the same thing, so switching to either one of those won't help.

Those drugs are powerful and fairly broad-spectrum, and it sounds like that's exactly what your infection needs, since it's been going on for so long. Just keep an eye out for any new pain.

My brother taught me to read when I was 4 or 5 (sometime before kindergarten). No one knows how (including he or I). He was tired of me asking him to read to me, so he taught me how to read so that I would leave him alone.

My exact experience.

All I know about my reading is that I was apparently reading the newspaper at age seven, but that does not appear to be a mean feat in these parts.

My parents taught me to read when they got tired of reading me the same book over and over. Education as self defense is more common than I'd originally imagined.

I went from not reading to reading almost instantly .1st grade? the bad thing, I never figured out phonics. Therefore, I can't spell.

Or that is this week's excuse

I learned how to read when I was four. I had hardly any friends my own age, and I was surrounded by older people who spent pretty much all their leisure time with books in their hands.

I did end up fitting in poorly with my peer group in school, so the early reading didn't necessarily do me any favors.

Tendon pain is ... not easy to miss, I will say. Fucking tendons.

(Of course, she was also the only one of us with any kind of social skills, so it's possible she was just out having friends while the rest of us hid in our rooms and read. We still thought she was weird.)

Cause she was. Socially ept freak.

I somehow learned how to read at 4-nearly-5 years old. My mom came home and found me reading a book out loud and thought, "Oh, how cute, she's pretending to read that book." Then she realized it was a new book and not one I had already memorized. She double-checked with Dad to see if he had read it to me, and when he said he hadn't, she pulled out the flash cards, which I breezed through.

We figure it was a combo: genetics (Mom's dad was a bookaholic, too--she still sees him in me whenever she watches me read a book), Sesame Street (started when I was three), older sister playing school with me, and parents always reading to us every chance they got.

I was completely ignored, so like others here, taught myself to read out of boredom. BUT I distinctly remember my school in Hawaii calling MOT into counseling and persuading her to authorize all kinds of tests for me because I refused to sound out words. I was given a battery of tests; I recall Rorsharch (sp?) and various IQ tests. I flunked one test that the counselor was giving me, because I was reading the answers (upside down) that were lying on the desk in front of him! So they told MOT that I was a problematic cheater.

She said "she's reading the answers upside and backwards from 4 feet away? She's obviously able to read and doesn't need to sound out shit."

I edited to add the part where she said "shit" to the counselor, because I remember she got asked to leave. Heh. And the teachers stopped asking me to sound out words and just let me be to read.