What's the cheapest thing your family did growing up?

Growing up, my family was really poor. I was one of twelve kids. Our situation was due largely in part to most of our money going to our father's legal expenses. The government had come down on him pretty hard over his taxes. Something to do with religious exemptions he felt he was eligible for. The IRS did not agree with him. He was stubborn, though, and fought them for years. Didn't leave much money for his wives and kids.

We got by as best we could. I can say I never went without food. However, during the leaner times, there wasn't much variety on my plate. One week, for instance, I ate nothing but sweet potatoes and goat milk (the milk also tasted like sweet potatoes because that's all the goats were eating, too). The potatoes weren't even mashed or fried. Just microwaved. I ate so many of them, I actually got keratosis and turned a shade of orange. I looked like an Oompa Loompa, only not as sexy. It's funny; when I first saw MTV years later, I thought Snookie had been through a similar situation. But that want the case. My situation involved a father who hated the paying taxes almost as much as he hated pulling out. Her "situation" was a spray tanned meathead and famed spreader of the herp. Anyway...

Because we were so poor, us kids had a serious shortage of entertainment. Pretty much all we had around the compound was goat rodeo, goat jousting, pin the tail on the goat, milk the goat, trick the goat into eating sweet potatoes, and playing hide and seek when the FBI showed up.

The only times we got to play something different was when we went down to the temple on Saturday afternoons. There, in the basement, was a collection of games for kids. Unfortunately for me, being the smallest and weakest and all, the cool games like Candyland and Jarts went first and I was more often than not left with what remained. And that was almost always Operation.

For anyone who hasn't played Operation, it's actually not much fun. In fact, it's rather stressful. I mean, you hold Cavity Sam's life in your very hands. Everything he is, everything he ever will be. What if you make a mistake and he ends up paralyzed? What if you kill him? Fear of these outcomes is what drove me to be so good at the game. To this day, I still have nightmares involving a post surgery conversation with Mrs. Cavity Sam where I have to explain to her that there was a complication with her husband's funny bone and now he won't stop buzzing.

Years later, however, my expertise with the game would prove invaluable.

Not long ago, my Nana approached me with a matter of some sensitivity; her crotchal area was itching something fierce. I asked her what she thought it was from. Like, if she wasn't moisturizing or if she had started wearing edible underwear again, the ones that weren't gluten-free.

She was hesitant to reveal the cause. After some time spent beating around the bush, and then examining around her bush, Nana came right out and said it was mostly likely from her being intimate with our next door neighbor, Mr. Wu. Again. I told her to stay away from him and his rice wine. Nana never could resist exotic pleasures, though. And now it seemed the old so and so had given her crabs because of it. And not the good kind.

Now, a normal person would have seen their primary care physician to handle such an issue. Not Nana. She could not because was dating hers. Her thinking was, as a strict vegetarian, Dr. Leo would be apprehensive about going downtown on her with such an affliction. That was a risk she just didn't want to take. And, so, it fell on me to rid her of those critters.

Naturally, my first instinct was to shave her pubes. Nana vetoed this course of action. She had shaved them back in 1997 to show solidarity for when her favorite singer, Carly Simon, got cancer (never mind that it was breast cancer, not vagina cancer). Years later, her bush had just gotten back to being respectable and she wasn't about to start from square A again.

It was then that I called on my extensive training from Operation. I lifted Nana's night dress, shone a light on it like it was doing a solo in a Broadway play, and began probing the snarled jungle with my tweezers. Wasn't long before I discovered the culprit of her m'lady: a common house flea. I surmised she got them from sharing a bed with her cats, Rumpleteazer and Skimbleshanks. Nana refused to give them Frontline or any other flea and tick medication. Someone on the TV told her it could give her cats autism. But now they had given her fleas.

Took about six hours of sifting until I was satisfied they'd all been eradicated. I am pleased to report that during the procedure, not a single gray pube was plucked. And all because of the countless hours I spent playing Operation as a kid.

/r/AskReddit Thread