When I was a kid I overheard a discussion about how Blood Alcohol Content meters worked. Something about alcohol staying in the bloodstream after it was drunk.

For the longest time I believed that alcohol just accumulated in the body, never going away.

I didn't drink until I was past twenty because of this.

I used to think that a menstrual period's name came from the fact it resembled a punctuation period—just a little dot that showed up once a month.

I thought this up until a fateful day at age eleven when I woke up with my gift and promptly went off to school worry-free wearing white shorts.

Lyn from Australia sends in this bloody tale:

When I was a kid, I went through a phase of having incredibly bad nosebleeds. I can't remember why. What I can remember is the best thing to do was to hold a pack of ice at the back of my neck, and let the blood flow into the handbasin so it could be rinsed away.

Every single time I did that, I was terrified the police would see the blood coming through the drains, come to see who'd been murdered and arrest me or my family. Because what else would cops be doing but watching the drains for blood, right? Lord I was dumb.

Post Image: gaelx

Sam tells us about how he learned about gravity.

When I was five, I watched other, older children sliding down a railing outside of our apartment building. I remember thinking how fun it looked.

After the other kids left, I ran outside and hoisted myself upon the railing. There I sat, not moving an inch. I began pumping my legs and tush to get going, which caused me to lose my balance. I flipped upside down, fell and landed square on my head. What followed was a lot of blood on the pavement, bawling, my mother's terrified screams, and a trip to the ER to get stitches.

The older kids had been sliding down the stairwell railing. I had no concept of gravity, and had chosen a dead level section of the rail to slide on.

Before my inevitable fall, I must have looked like I was humping the damn thing.

K. Praslowicz dabbles with self-vampirism to save his own life:

One afternoon when I was about seven or eight I approached my friend Dan & Jon on the playground as they were in the middle of a conversation about dying from blood loss. Up until this point I had no clue about the role of blood in keeping a person alive, so this new fact that I learned about blood loss being causing death was astonishing, and scared me real bad.

Why would such a fact terrify a young boy you say? Well, my child mind didn't quite get the facts straight. I had taken it that the loss of a single drop of blood meant instant death. Jonathon cleared this confusion up a bit and informed me that a single drop off blood wouldn't cause me to die, but perhaps a small jar full of blood lost would do me in.

This new fact was often on my mind for a while, and eventually came to a head one day when my nose started bleeding of the blue. Fearful of dying from blood loss, I grabbed a small plastic Tupperware container and let my nose bleed into it.

The Tupperware container now became perverse backwards hourglass that held all of my attention as I dripped closer and closer to imminent death from blood loss. How big was the death jar was Jonathan talking about? Was it half the size of the one I had? Was it larger? I figured that I wouldn't know until it was too late, and that was unacceptable.

Unfamiliar with the workings of human digestive and circulatory systems, the most rational thing I could come up with while holding a small jar of my blood to save my life was that if the blood didn't remain outside of my body, I wouldn't die from losing it.

Bottoms up!

Sam writes in:

When I was a child, my mother had little discretion with regards to what I watched on television. As a result, I lived on a regular diet of violent and sexually explicit content.

At the age of 6 or 7, I asked her about the actors who were shot and killed on these shows and why they would voluntarily give up their lives for television roles. I think it was the fake blood that threw me.

How did I make it through 2nd grade?