being ill

When I was younger I used to believe that children with Down's Syndrome gestated for more months than the average child. After all, they were physically one age, but mentally younger.

J

For some reason I used to think that whenever I woke up with a really bad sore throat it was beacause I didn't brush my teeth properly the night before. Now that I'm older and know this isn't the case, I still brush my teeth a little bit longer when I have a sore throat!

Lauren

My mom used to tell me that if I didn't brush my teeth, a family of "cavity creeps" would sneak into my mouth in the middle of the night and give me cavities. There was a mom, a dad, and their son, whose name was Junior.

Anon

my sister believed that she was very sick with a disease called hypochondria. (all right, so i'm the one who told her she had hypochondria.)

Shoshana

i thought getting a shot at the doctor's office meant you got spanked on your bottom with one of those little plastic shovels that are used to scoop up sand on the beach.

jenny

When I was very young, my mother told me that if you stood up while getting your temperature taken by mouth, the temperature would be wrong. (probably to keep me from running with a glass thermometer in my mouth) To this day, whenever I take me temperature by mouth, I have to remind myself that it's okay to stand up if I want to.

Overly gullible

This is somewhat bizarre: I used to believe that my mother would be able to remove the solid matter from my vomit and that I'd be able to use the resulting liquid as brown paint.

Anon

I broke my arm when I was 6. After it healed, I had to go back to the orthopedic clinic a couple times a year for checkups "to make sure it was growing right." From this I gathered that there was a serious danger that my arm would stop growing. I was terrified of becoming a full-grown adult with one little child-sized arm!

I don't think I ever told my parents of this fear, because they would have set me straight. I just gradually forgot about it after I stopped having to go to the doctor, and eventually I noticed that my arm had grown just fine along with the rest of me.

Katrin

I used to hold my breath when my mom took my temperature, assured it would make me appear to have a fever. After all, dead people didn't breath, and they were certainly sick. Here's the odd part: it worked.

david

I was born under cancer and as a child I was sure that everyone born under that sign would die of the disease! I never asked my parents or anyone else for that matter because I thought it was understood and nobody liked to talk about it. In time I learn on my own that this was not the case but in the meantime I suffered a lot because of this belief.

Rick Salas, Panama City, Panama

i used to think that a local anaesthetic was the type used in your area and a general was nationwide. so herts would have a different local anaesthetic from yorks.......

scott_the_geeza

I used to wonder what happened to people when the doctors couldn't make them better, because naturally you don't die until you're really old

Chris

My aunt used to tell me that, if you squeezed the skin under your chin, you would eventually get cancer. And I was only 7 when she told me this!!!

kathi

when i first heard about someone dying of a heart attack, my mind was immediately filled with the imagery of someone standing on the roof of his house defending himself against an attack by hundreds of native americans (the very stereotypical bugs bunny representation thereof), and for a while i thought people died of heart attacks because they got hit in the heart with a spear (this for some reason always took place on one's roof).

lou

When I was young I used to be terrified of throwing up. I used to make up all sorts of safety measures to keep myself from doing it, like if I laid on my back while I slept, or if I held my lips closed, or repeated over and over to myself "I feel fine..." I used to think that if anyone else threw up, I was in immenent danger of doing the same, so I'd start to shake all over and get as far away from the person as possible.

hds

Up until I was about six, I thought that pain was transferrable. When I skinned my knee, I thought my mother could put her hand on it and feel how much it hurt to me.

Jocelyn