Pain is Underrated
Like you, I hate needles. Because this condition, if not genetic, is a rational response to a stick in the arm, my wife and I bribe our children when it’s time for their shots. This stratagem, however, has its limits: long-term thinking takes decades to mature, and anyway I don’t really like what Starbucks has to offer. One time the choice almost came to forcibly holding one of our kids down, or skipping a vaccination, both awful options. But I’ve never fainted or anything. I once told a phlebotomist that I had a problem with needles, and this triggered some rehearsed protocol, where I was offered a reclined position and a muffin. But none of that was going to make a difference. I couldn’t look while the blood was being drawn, but not looking was worse: a chance for my imagination to conjure unreal horrors.
In college I was on a medication that required regular blood tests. Over that time the human ability to learn made some adjustment in me. I also developed a technique: while on my right side the needle slid into my arm, on the left I would bite one of my fingers. By focusing on the pain I could control, I was distracted from the pain I could not. I’m well-trained now, I believe, to fool a lie detector test.
During the prep for the semi-regular upper endoscopies I must endure, an IV is inserted into the back of my hand, and taped firmly into place. It stays there throughout the procedure. No control is available to combat this long-term insult, and other strategies are needed to subdue the mounting anxiety, except I do not really have any. When the time comes, the doctor drips an anesthetic through the thin tube, and I feel the cold moving up my veins.
This new medication I’m on, though, it must be injected at home once a week. People with severe allergies carry epipens, which, when needed, are to be jammed into one’s thigh, through one’s pants if necessary. Bad as that sounds, it’s over in a flash, and provides and opportunity to work Pulp Fiction references into your small talk. My drug’s instructions carefully instruct you to count to five while holding the needle in, which is misleading, because the counting is to start only after the injection mechanism has done its work. That work is slow enough that you can change your mind about not watching, and still see the stuff go in. I asked the doctor what he says to patients who struggle to do this to themselves, and he said, unhelpfully, that anyone else in the household could do it to me instead. The second week, my wife came running down the stairs asking “ARE YOU OKAY?” “Yes, I’m fine, it just hurts,” I said. I had been screaming. But the drug is a miracle, it really is. All the symptoms have just melted away. The gym rats say that pain is weakness leaving the body, but for cases like this I think there must be a better slogan.
See also: On not seeing well.