When I was a kid, I always envied my friends who had all the cool toys. One of my friends had like 20 Barbie dolls, complete with the Barbie house, car, clothes and everything else that could possibly come with it. She also had a computer. A family friend of ours used to have the kids' birthday parties at cool places like Kathy's Toys in Jaya Supermarket, where we could all go on the rides for free. Neat stuff!
What did we have? Nothing other kids would envy. We had some Legos, a set of encyclopedias and bicycles. I had one Skipper doll. So most of our childhood days were spent on make believe games, like "masak-masak", "cikgu-cikgu", "doctor-doctor", etc. The usual games kids would play, and most of the time we didn't have the proper equipment, except for when it came to playing "doctor-doctor". We had proper syringes, in many sizes!
My dad used to bring home syringes from his clinic. We had a stethoscope and a doctor's coat at home. There were 4 of us, so there would be one doctor, a patient and 2 nurses. Most of the time we would fight because there were 3 boys and myself, and no one wanted to become the nurses. We sometimes pretended that we were conducting surgery, like the time my youngest brother's favorite teddy bear's arm got ripped apart while we were bullying him and we had to sew it back. Or the time when the third brother became the patient and we told him that the birthmark on his face was dangerous and had to be removed. We used the syringes when we needed to "inject" anesthetics or medication (water) and "withdraw" blood (air sirap). No needles, of course! It's unbelievable, after all that time we spent playing doctor-doctor, none of us have become doctors so far. Instead, three of us are now working in IT, and the youngest is still in school. I guess there is still hope for dad, although I wouldn't put too much hope. :-)
Anyway, when we got tired of playing doctor-doctor, we found other uses for the syringes. One of my brother had the cool idea to draw drinks (like air sirap) into a syringe and drink from it. Or we would try to shoot the drink into each other's mouth and made such a mess. Another time, we wanted to play water guns but didn't have any, so we used the syringes as water guns and had so much fun with it. Of course the only problem was that our "guns" had to be refilled after each shot.
Ok, enough already with the syringe stories, you say. Well, it's just that seeing syringe after syringe everyday now suddenly reminded me of my childhood days, when syringes were fun toys instead of something that causes me physical pain from the daily jabs and blood sample drawings..Oh well, I suppose it's the pain one has to go through to get better.
