I hated doctors when I was a little girl, and it was all my babysitters fault.
I must have been very little, maybe two-and-a-half or three years old, when I first developed a phobia about doctors. For years I had nightmares about a doctor holding a needle in his hand, coming towards me to give me a shot. Always I was trying to get away, but a nurse would be holding me down while I pulled and tugged and cried, because the hypodermic syringe was really full of poison and the doctor was trying to kill me. I would wake up in a cold sweat, shaking all over, scared to death.
It all started one night when Mom and Dad left us home with a babysitter. She put Keith and I to bed at our regular time, but I didn't fall to sleep like I was supposed to. Finally I got out of bed and walked into the living room. The babysitter was sitting on our couch, watching a movie on TV. Perhaps it was a soap opera, or maybe a horror show, I have no idea, but the part I saw showed a doctor with a hypodermic needle, apparently about to kill someone. I suspect the babysitter realized I was in the room about that time and put me back to bed. Maybe the movie was so scary she even turned it off and decided not to watch it herself, I don't know. All I know is, it scared the living daylights out of me, and I had recurring nightmares from it for years.
I knew where the dream came from, but even so I couldn't escape my fear of doctors. They just gave me the heebie jeebies. Our doctors were all nice, too. A few years later I had to have my tonsils taken out, and the doctor even told mom to feed me ice cream afterwards. What kind of bad guy would do that? Still, up into my teens I carried a mistrust and dislike for doctors that I couldn't shake.
See what a great responsibility it is to be a good babysitter, and what a scaredy cat little girl I was?
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