Blood Test

Had the blood test yesterday.

Was I big and brave about it? Was I heck...?

I was very surprised by how restrained I was on the way there. Normally I start shaking like a leaf when I know I am on my way to a needle, but this time I retained my calm until I was actually in the nurse's cell.

Then the cold sweats started...

I shamefacedly admitted my phobia to the nurse, who suggested that I lie down on the bed thingie rather than try to have it done sitting in the chair. It's easier not to look like that.

So, like the incredibly brave little soldier I am, I lay on the couch, bravely holding out my paw. Until she tied the strap thingie on to make the vein stand up, that is, whereupon my brave little arm disappeared under my yellow, trembling body like a rat down a hole.

This happened two or three times before she had even had a chance to pick up the syringe. Then she started to play dirty...

"Shall I go and get the other nurses to hold you down?" says she.

Ouch, Pride versus Phobia. A battle of the titans.

I could just picture it. A shouted summons across a crowded waiting room "Girls - can you come and help me hold down this patient. He's too scared to have his blood test..." A squadron of nurses troop in, sounds of screams and struggling ensue, then the door opens and the queue of waiting patients, ready to be sympathetic to the sobbing ten-year-old who has been subdued, are flabbergasted to see a hulking forty-two year old six-footer slink shame-facedly out of the torture chamber.

It wasn't much of a contest, actually. Pride won with a knock-down and submission in pretty short order. Lie down, paw out, other arm over eyes, think of England...

But nurses always have a way of getting revenge….

“You are sure that you won’t move, aren’t you? Because if you move at the wrong moment, it could be really serious…”

Oh great, thanks a bundle. That is bound to relax one….

So there I am, lying so rigid that a fakir would have no problem suspending me between two stools at head and foot, arm pressed so hard on my eyes that I am seeing stars and then it happens – the tiniest, most pathetic little spark of pain in the history of medicine.

So, that hardly hurt at all. Don’t know what I was worrying about. It was all fine…

Was it bollocks! It mattered not one jot that the pain was insignificant. I was still lying there stiff as a board whilst she faffed around.

I suppose it took, what, less than 10 seconds from start top finish, and it felt like had it taken three seconds longer then I have gone into physiological melt-down.

I wouldn’t, of course. When it comes down to it, one copes when one has to, and one endures what one has to when one has to – but phobias are weird things. They are incomprehensible to those who are lucky enough not to suffer from any.

My fear of needles is utterly inexplicable. If I get a splinter or a thorn in me, I am quite happy to dig it out with a needle. The pain, which is usually much longer and greater than an injection, bothers me not one jot.

But, injections? Injections which I know aren’t going to hurt that much. They scare the shit out of me.

Go figure…

(At present, I am not even entertaining the worries over what happens if this blood test does reveal diabetes. I can lose sleep over that if and when it happens…)