Just thinking, with the Fake Doctor Incident that came up in tags earlier. That was another thing which turned out more humiliating than it needed to, in a taking kids seriously kind of way. (As is unfortunately common.) Enough that I even remember it after all these years.

Based on my limited experience up to that point, I was very concerned that this random white guy in the ER was impersonating a doctor. And somehow my parents didn’t seem to notice or care, which was extra worrying.

(I don’t even recall why we were there that time, though I may well have knocked my head on something again. I ended up there a lot, because nervous mother. And I had seriously never seen a non-Asian doctor in that hospital before, in 3 or 4 years of my little accident-prone ass getting hauled in enough that the regular ER staff were probably sick of us.)

It seemed like a much better idea to pull one or both of them aside to raise these urgent concerns. Not only had I already learned that it might be very rude otherwise, I’d watched enough movies and TV to know that might not be safe. What is this person likely to do if he’s exposed as a fraud in front of a whole ER full of people? We just don’t know, but it’s unlikely to be good!

(The whole situation seemed creepy enough already, but this guy had also somehow managed to fool a whole ER full of professionals into thinking he was a doctor when he clearly was not. Someone to watch out for.)

Anyway, it was extremely worrying when nobody was willing to talk privately. Granted, my communicative speech was not up to much then, and I was very prone to having meltdowns and getting wrestled down in medical settings. (Which–surprise!–did not make me less terrified or prone to meltdowns in those settings. Kinda the opposite.)

In retrospect, my parents probably assumed that I was “just” trying to leave because it was the ER and I really didn’t want to be there. No doubt also true, but not even the most pressing motivation in that case for getting well away from Dr. Fraud.

So, I ended up having to blurt it out in front of everybody, including him. It wasn’t only that I didn’t want to go back and get treated by Not A Doctor, I was also concerned about other patients and felt like I needed to speak up before something bad happened.

That went over about as well as you might expect. Complete with all the adults present going into laughing fits and talking like I wasn’t even in the room. While admitting that, based on the limited information at hand? That conclusion made a lot of sense. (Among themselves. Not to me.) Which made it funnier, in the laughing at and not with sort of way which is somehow acceptable dealing with kids.

The laughing at didn’t make me trust that doctor more, I tell you what. And nobody apparently considered that if a little kid did not trust a particular doctor for whatever reason, maybe they should find another one.

I can kind of understand the laughter reaction, because that situation is pretty funny if you’re not the frightened small child in question. But, there are ways of handling it, and then there are ways. The way that was handled would have made me hesitate to say anything in the future if I’d seen Jason Voorhees doing rounds with his machete.

And that does seem too common, dealing with kids. Who are, indeed, usually doing their best to make sense of the world around them, based on the sometimes very limited information available. Ridicule doesn’t exactly encourage that.