Fear Fest: Needles!

OCTOBER 15th, Needles

“Ah, pierce me 100 times with your needles fine and I will thank you 100 times, Saint Morphine, you who Aeseulapus has made a God.”
-Jules Verne

If you guys are anything like me, you hate pricks. However, there are people out there that are so inherently needles that hey actually faint when they see them. Trypanophobia is the fear of medical procedures, specifically ones that involve injections.

I’m not afraid of needles, but I will admit they do suck. I was born in the early 80’s. So when I was a child, there was no great concern for children’s supposed rights then. You people who are out there and under 20, you’ve been fucking coddled. My pediatrician’s bedside manner sucked when it came to injections. First she would pull out this comically large needle and fill it with a mysterious green liquid that I later would find out was food coloring. She would then instruct me to look at a particular spot in the room away from where I was getting the shot and switch the needle. The pain wasn’t bad, nothing I couldn’t handle as a street wise, 5-year-old with a can do attitude and a penchant for gum drops. When I looked back, I saw that the giant needle was empty. Later I would deduce that she had two needles. The idea was to get you to look at the big needle, but make if feel like a small one so that you wouldn’t fear them. Well, in my case it worked.

However, what I didn’t appreciate was the doctor drawing a smiley face on my arm where I was just shot. It was the ultimate degradation. Not only did you prove that you could dominate me, you have to go so far as to brand me as one of yours? Even as a small child I wondered if all doctors moonlighted as tattoo artist. Sometimes I would see a tattoo and wonder what medical procedure that person had. Fortunately I grew up in the time that I did. If I saw an athlete like Josh Hamilton or Dennis Rodman I would have freaked out and ran, thinking they were Frankenstein’s monster.

I may have digressed a little. You now know a little more about me and how I think. If you have surmised that these are the thoughts of a crazy person, you’re pretty much on the nose. Here’s another secret. I’m crazy because I’m sane. The norm has flipped. The way I stay ahead of the game is I know I’m crazy, so I can turn it off. I can blend in.

Anyway, back to whatever it was I was talking about. Oh yes, needles. Needles just look angry. If we look at most medical equipment, they are all scary. A doctor is just a carpenter that works on people. If you look at their tools, they are the same in principle. Seriously, you have a razor blade and a scalpel, a nail gun and stitches, a soldering iron and a cauterizer. Hell they both use staples. Then we come to the needle, a doctor’s caulking gun.

Hatred of doctors and medical procedures play on two of humanities oldest fears; the fear of trust and the fear of change. We have a hard time trusting people. Allowing someone to stab you or cut you open and root around inside you is a big leap that a lot of us have trouble making. Accepting that something is wrong with you, and you need a doctor admits that something must change. It’s the act of simply going to the doctor that activates a sort of submission feeling in us. Plus there is the whole uncomfortable situation if the doctor has to handle our no-no parts.

THE ANSWER: For some people the fear of needles will never go away. It’s an automatic reaction that cannot be conquered. Like most of the fears we’ve covered, this one can be squashed at a young age. Choosing a pediatrician your child trusts is very important. You don’t want some maniacal tattoo artist wannabe shoving shit into your kid while they fuck with his young mind.