being ill

When I was six or seven I read in the paper that a girl who had been struck by a car had an injured face. I asked my Dad what injured meant. He said "Oh if you lose a leg or an arm or something"
For ages I kept thinking of that poor girl with no face.

Janet

When I was about six, I was told about someone getting their tonsils taken out. I asked my mom how they did that, and she said, "Well, the doctor just goes in and takes them out." I thought that the doctor somehow shrinks down really small, climbs in your mouth, removes the tonsils, and comes back out and gets back to his normal size! I finally figured out the truth about two years later!

Beth

I used to believe that people got lead poisoning from being stabbed (accidentally) with pencils.

Anon

I thought when you got food poisoning it might someone had put poison in your food

Bootlebat

When I was younger, I used to believe that "head ache" or "stomach ache" was "head egg/stomach egg", and I thought it hurt because an egg was growing inside of your head or stomach.

Anon

When I was a kid, I used to believe that everyone had two bugs in their stomachs... One to digest food, the other to pass liquid. Whenever someone had a stomach bug, that meant one of their bugs were sick.

Joshua

I used to think Cancer Research was just people learning about the disease and didn't realise that it was an actual charity!

Anon

On my 6th birthday, I remember very clearly waking up early in the morning, before school and before my parents were up, and watching cartoons with my younger brother. I noticed little itchy bumps on my legs and arms; I thought they were mosquito bites (in the winter.) For some reason I thought that peanut butter was a remedy for itching. So I went upstairs and got the peanut butter and started putting it on the bumps on my legs. I soon had a lot of peanut butter on my legs and the carpet. My mom came in and I explained what I was doing. She told me gently that peanut butter is not a treatment for mosquito bites, and further, there are no mosquitos in November.

I was so disappointed when she told me I had to stay home from school because I had the chicken pox!

Anon

I used to think that when you got run over by a car it flattened you like a peice of paper and people hed to blow air into you ot get you back to normal.

Aubrey

When I was little my mum would tell me that if I took medicine and I didnt need it I would get the illness it was prescribed for. Eg. If I took headache tablets and I didnt have a headache I would get one. So I was always very careful when I told mum I was sick.

Joey

When I was three or four, I was playing at my cousins house when I got a nosebleed. I think we must have had hot dogs with ketchup for lunch earlier that day, because I was so confused why all of this ketchup was coming out of my nose. It didn't hurt, so I didn't understand that I was bleeding. When my aunt tried to explain to me what a nosebleed was, I didn't believe her, I was convinced it was ketchup and kept arguing with her.

Jennifer

i used to belive that when the doctor opened his mouth and went aaaaaa i thought he was trying to eat me.

matt

i used to believe that if you had a heart attack , your heart would jump out and attack you! it scared me to death....

foxy

for years i was afraid to throw up because i thought it meant i was possessed like in the exorcist.

Anon

I used to believe that "ambulatory" meant "sick". After all, ambulances are for sick people, right? I was confused when there was a Disney ride that said "must be ambulatory" because why would you need to be sick to go on a ride?

ambulatory

I used to think that a general anasthetic was one used widely, all over the country, and a local anasthetice was a shot of rum or some tradiotional remidy only used locally.

Anon

A few years ago, my friends little sister believed that when you were sick and took a capsule, a mini-doctor would pop out and pull out a carry-case. He would then run around fixing you up with his little hammer, and when he was done, he would jump back in the capsule and dissapear.

Anon

I used to believe that when you had a blood transfusion, all your blood was removed and then replaced by new blood.

kittycat

I went to boarding school when I was 11 and on the first tour of the place, I was shown round the sick bay. There were notices up stating surgery times... I almost threw up I was so scared! Once my Mum left me there it was clear that they had veto over me to operate on me whenever they liked, they could amputate all my limbs and sell them to the zoo if they wanted to! It was three years before I went down there for an illness - I treated everything myself, with hot ribena.

Anon

When I was in elementary school, the school nurse would do lice checks about once a school year and I always thought that instead of saying "head lice" everyone was saying "headlights". So I always thought to myself, "how silly these people are, you don't have to do a special check to see that I don't have headlights on my head."

Deirdre