Prosthetic Legs and Tiger Cubs.

I've never been an especially good recipient of practical jokes.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I react pretty negatively when someone pulls a prank on me.

(My poor roommate learned this the hard way. I went completely ballistic on her a couple months ago because of a simple prank. But that's another story.)

For as long as I can remember, my parents have been heavily involved in medical missions in Haiti. Their mission work has impacted my life in a variety of ways over the years, but this was a manifestation of missions that I never would've predicted.

See, medical missions are unique in that the donations we receive can be quite--ah--unnerving.

You know, things like catheters, syringes…

And prosthetic legs.

Yes, prosthetic legs: the most threatening of all the medical supplies. The king of scariness. The archduke of gross.

For several years, we stored donations exclusively in my parents' garage. Every single day during this era, I was forced to walk dangerously close to these abominable appendages as I entered and exited my parents' house. And every single day, I got increasingly jittery as a direct result of their presence in my life.

One night, my dad had picked me up from whatever school or church activity I'd been at that day, and on the way home he made me promise that I'd have a good attitude about (as he put it) "whatever might happen." I reluctantly agreed to make that promise, but I wasn't thrilled about his secrecy surrounding this ambiguous phrase.

When we got home, I entered the house like a baby tiger ready to prey on his dinner. Though I wasn't sure quite what to expect, I wasn't about to let this vague "whatever might happen" make a fool of me.

My stint as a hungry tiger cub ended relatively quickly, as I determined that nothing was amiss in my parents' house that night.

Until I went to bed.

I walked down the long hallway that leads to my bedroom, as I'd done countless times before. As I neared the doorway, I looked into the bedroom and saw the one thing on the planet that I wanted to see less than anything else:

legs.

Two bacteria-infested, sin-laden, gag-reflex-inducing, repulsive legs were sticking out from underneath my bed.

I screamed loudly enough to have alerted the man in the moon of my fright, and my tiger-like instincts shifted quickly from "fight" to "flight". I ran like the wind down the stairs and to the opposite end of the house. I had to get far, far away from those monsters that were laying under my bed in all their disdainful glory.

And my dear sweet mother just stood there and watched, laughing hysterically as though Bill Cosby had just performed his bit about Froofie the Dog.

Could she not perceive my anguish?!

I refused to go to bed that night until my bedroom had once again become a no-prosthetics zone, a task which I didn't have the gumption to complete myself. My little brother was granted the onus of removing the legs and returning them to their humble home in the garage.

Once my room was cleared of the legs, I tentatively peered in through the doorway, hoping that these four walls would once again house a safety zone. As soon as I deemed it safe to enter, I leapt into my bed and hid underneath my magic covers.

So there you have it: that's why I have difficulty when in the presence of prostheses. To this day, anything even remotely similar to a prosthetic limb serves as an anti-me force field. Heck, even mannequins make me uneasy.

Since that time, I've moved 350 miles away from my parents' house [and the impending doom of prosthetic legs]. I won't say that the legs were what drove me away, but the newfound distance between the legs and me is most certainly an advantageous byproduct of my living in Nashville.