being ill

My mother had extensive abdominal surgery when I was 3. As a result,I thought all hospital visits ended with a huge scar on your stomach. The fear of tonsil removal was overpowering,and my poor parents had no idea what my problem was. When I came to,I kept checking my stomach. Thought someone had made a mistake.

Peggy

My dad was always sick when I was little and he would tell me that he, "Caught a bug" After that I was carful to never touch a bug becase I would get sick!

Dana

For years i thought varicose veins were "very close veins" which explained the problem. They were just too darn close to each other.

skot

My friend told me when i was 10 that if i shaved my arms i would get cancer. I went on believing this for years. I never thought shaving my legs would be a problem..but my arms were a no no!

Sharon

i thought that when i got a splinter, if i didn't get it out of my skin right away, that it would get into my blood stream and flow straight to my heart, causing a heart attack.

dani

I used to believe that if you walked outside in the cold with your shoes off you could get a cold.

Chelsea

My Gran used to tell me that if I went out in the rain without a hat on I would get polio (from about age 3 onwards). I must have looked real odd in the hats my Gran used to knit for me. They were all hideous. Strange thing is, she told me this again when I was 33, but I refused to wear the dire object that was handed to me.

Anon

I used to think that if you pinched someone...they'd get cancer.

Anon

When I was little my mother used to complain about her carpal tunnel syndrome. I believed it was actually called "carpool tunnel syndrome" and for the longest time I envisioned little cars driving through her veins.

Emily S.

Once I had what I now know to be pleurisy and I was so scared that I was going to die that I didn't tell anybody. I was only in the 7th grade and terrified!

RT

I used to believe my father when he told me that if I sat on cold concrete I would get hemorrhoids.

Anon

When I was much younger, I lived on a military base in Norfolk (my Dad was in the RAF). Out the back of our house were a number of fields, and where the corners of the fields met there was a kind of wasteland all the local kids called "Mud Hill". There were trees, a big mound of earth and most interestingly the broken remains of what must have been a small building at one point. One day me and my friends were mucking about there (one of us keeping an eye out for the evil farmer), and my mate told me that the broken down building used to be a bunker where they housed all the nuclear and chemical weapons. Of course, this was patently untrue (hindsight's a wonderful thing), but unfortunately later that day I began to suffer from the first symptoms of hayfever I'd ever experienced.

Naturally, I knew nothing of hayfever, never having suffered from it before then, and could only surmise that I'd been contaminated by the chemical weapons under Mud Hill, and that I was gonna die. Even worse, I couldn't tell my parents that I was dying because they'd be angry with me for going there in the first place.

Luckily my Mum found me crying and put me straight. Phew! I was so relieved I forgot to even feel stupid :-)

Gav

My daughter had a blood blister on her finger and asked me if she could have a bandaid. I told her she wouldn't need a badaid unless the blister burst. It was out of my mouth before I realized what must be going through her head. Sure enough, she let out a scream and started sobbing because she thought her finger was going to blow up.

Jennifer

My father had a fake eye and during the winter(in Michigan)he wore an eye patch to protect it from the cold. When I asked my mother (at age 3) why he looked like a pirate, she replied that he had a cold in his eye. From that remark and others about people having chest colds, I came to believe that you could catch a cold in any part of your body (hand colds, leg colds, etc.). I was quite old (11 or so) before I realized this was not the case.

Carol