15th October, 2024
I was just reading up on some kind of interesting fact for me to start this post with; what I found was that apparently, 5-10% of a population has a needle-phobia. I think it’s wrong. It has to be more than that, surely, right?
My year group got the Meningococcal vaccination on Tuesday. If you’re a Kool Kat, then you read Staplers are the Crocs of Stationary and know that I don’t exactly do well with needles.
Ok, fair enough, no one actually ‘likes’ needles. But the difference between the other kids who I talked to about it and me is that to them, getting a needle was but an inconvenience to their day. Whereas I figured quite quickly that the odds of me receiving that needle if I walked into school that morning, were higher than those of me getting Meningococcal. And that’s always everyone’s first response. “At least it’s better than getting the disease”… except that to a lot of people, it’s not.
Their other automatic response is “It won’t hurt that much”. Ummmm that’s not the point. The fact is that the whole concept of a needle entering my flesh and pushing through my skin, muscle, other tissues, into my veins, and possibly missing and scraping a bone or something is really really uncomfortable. The fact that there is a foreign object inside my bloodstream, poking holes and then just being pulled out and covered with a band-aid is not one that I can convince myself is okay. It’s like stepping on an earring or a burr, except that they tell you before you get a needle, so I have time to think about everything that could go wrong and how uncomfortable I will be for those two seconds.
And people are so heartless about it. Honestly, as I said, no one ‘likes’ needles, so it’s hard to differ from ordinary citizens to people that have been obsessing over the thought for the last week. So they just do the annoying small talk thing, stick it in without warning you, stick a band-aid on it and act like it was nothing. And that’s just immunisations. Blood tests are a whole other thing. Needles in my mouth, the sensation of being numb, needles anywhere near where there are a lot of bones (like my hand, again, read the Staple Post), they’re all to cure things that were probably very possible to fix WITHOUT A NEEDLE OR FIVE!
You know, I think Epidemiologists (the people for some reason who took up the profession of stabbing people) just like it. They like stabbing people for a good cause. Because honestly, we can travel to the moon, we have boats that turn into cars, and for some reason, the banana with the vaccination in it or the patches aren’t given out?
I’m just having a winge because this was the highlight of my week. But really, people die because of the trauma caused by the fact that people don’t take needle phobias into account and then they just avoid the medical profession and system forever because they can’t just give us a bloody banana. It’s cool. Cool bananas.