Needle Phobia

2021-05-20T18:33:20Z

The Wikipedia defines it as:

Fear of needles, known in medical literature as needle phobia, is the extreme fear of medical procedures involving injections or hypodermic needles.

I have a mild case of it and after getting the AstraZenica vaccine in Germany last week, I kind of remembered many details which I'd like to write down in this article.

When I was very little, I'm not sure about the exact age but it must have been 3 or 4 years old, I was sick and needed to get medicine with help of a needle fairly often. How it worked was that a nurse came by our flat, in my mind several times a week, and would give me an injection with medicine into my little butt.

I still remember how much I hated this woman, I hated her with my whole body. My mom told me that little me would throw all the worst words which I knew back then at this poor woman. I also remember that I tried to hide every time she knocked on the door, but to no avail, the flat was pretty small and I probably was really bad at hiding.

What came back into my mind when I got the covid-19 vaccine last week, that it was probably not the needle itself which hurt so much, because when getting the vaccine the nurse was so good at it that I didn't realize when she did it because I didn't feel anything. But instead my arm started hurting a lot and was red and hot and inflamed for several days afterwards.

I think that was what I experienced as a little boy back then, the after effects of the needle. And it was so traumatic that to this day, and I'm 42 years old now, my butt cheek gets super tense when I think about needles, I almost get a cramp and it starts hurting. It's actually so bad that I really wanted to become a blood donor so I got all the tests, etc. but then the last couple of years when friends would ask me to go with them when they gave blood, I would always find an excuse why I couldn't go. And this even though I feel obligated to donate blood, because someone else's blood saved my life when I was one year old and got a blood infection and needed to get replaced all of my blood.

Anyway, now one week after the vaccine it's not inflamed anymore. But because I'm traveling so much, I'm trying to figure out how and where to get my second shot.