Story time.

I have always been what my mom calls a "third shift baby." During the majority of my life, my mom has worked as a third shift nurse at the local medical center. Ironically, the fact that she slept during the day, resulted in me having strange sleeping patterns. My insomnia aside, her work also helped me to sculpt my idea of a dream job.
My mother would constantly bring home random little hospital trinkets to appease my need to play doctor. However, I was anything but a normal doctor.
As a 6 year old child, I felt that it was my duty to save lives, one tragic emergency room patient after another. I can remember making CAT scans with Microsoft Paint, and drawing up MRI brain scans with my crayons. My mom would be working in our garage as I would create a appalling story of how her darling infant little girl tumbled down two flights of stairs and received massive brain damage.
As the child's doctor and neurosurgeon, I would report to the mother every few minutes. Due to my early pessimism, things would take a turn for the worse fairly quickly. The unsuspecting infant doll would enter my E.R in fairly stable condition. I would then quickly assess the situation as critical, screaming commands as I ran around my house. After I obtained the results of the x-rays and scans, I would diagram parts of the brain and then debrief the grief stricken mother in my garage.
 Her child, as always, would probably not make it.
Meanwhile, I had the wretched doll strapped down to my kitchen table. She had I.V's coming out of every vein and orifice and at least two casts on somewhere on her decrepit body. I would give the "child" shots of "morphine" which was slightly reminiscent of salt water, as I checked the data from her chart.
With my imaginary doctorate from John Hopkins University, the kid never had a chance.
I would have to tell the mother that her child had entered a comatose state that she would probably never come out of. I had to pronounce the child brain dead. It was one of the hardest moments of my imaginary career. Although it was hard, I got some kind of sick sense of pleasure that I had the child's imaginary life in my hands. With one piece of fictional scientific data, I could bring a smile or a tear. I was God, or so I thought and I was sure that I was destined to be on an episode of Trauma: Life in The E.R.
It turned out that John Hopkins University was a bit harder to get into than I anticipated and I hated math and biology. I soon realized that I would have to settle for portraying a doctor as an actor.
I am a pretender.

les