Why do the reporters and camermen have to show the needle going in when they do a flu shot or other innoculation feature. They do it every friggin time not just occasionally butevery friggin time! I don’t recollect ever seeing a news piece on the
subject without seening ( if only briefly in my case) needles being pushed into flesh.
It’s time to quit showing giant needles going in baby thighs!! It’s time to pick another angle you one trick uncreative high foreheaded bastards. Try doing a news piece on innoculations without showing long needles puncturing the thin flesh of pencil sized arms of frail 90 year old senior citizens. Go on I dare you!
I get lured into these horrific scenes everytime. The reporter is droning on about how many people will die of the flu or school children needing their required shots or infants getting the injections they need for protection in early life…um kinda interesting…then BAM! Shit there it is! A fucking needle that would make frankenstein faint pushing it’s way into a little arm no bigger than my index finger. Geeeezzzzzz…
And they make sure that you get to see the agony and screaming that is the result of the shot. How about shoving that camera lens up your anus and rotating it. I bet that would be a newsy shot!
What! You say we need injections to save lives? Oh, Well ok then.
Thank you! I have a paranoid fear of needles. I can’t bear to see people get shots. I had to be restrained to receive a TB test. The heroin overdose scene in Pulp Fiction makes me faint dead away. Yet every night there’s another innoculation that is “very important for your health!”
Why can’t they just do an informative piece on what happens when you don’t get the shot? Why do they have to send me into a dizzying spiral of nausea and shakiness? Bastards.
My cat is diabetic. I have to shoot him twice a day. Somehow the news reports don’t bother me. A heroin overdose even in fiction would make my skin crawl.
Thank you! I am trying to get over my needlephobia and this kind of thing doesn’t help. At. All. I don’t need to see the needle penetrating the flesh to believe that an innoculation has been given on television.
Hell, if they want the added interest of agony after a shot all they have to do is show me the needle before they give me a shot. I’ll give them screaming, hysterics, and for added fun I’ll pass out at the end!
GAH!
SpazCat, who you’d think would be used to needles by now but isn’t
As someone who used to be terrified of needles, I can sympathize. It is totally unnecessary for them to show that, but they do it because they know that it’ll get a strong reaction out of their viewers, who’ll remember the story for a long time (and hopefully the station’s logo which is splashed all over the bottom of the screen covering everything up other than the Enormous Needle of God™ which is skewering some tiny patch of skin). That’s the same reason they had the needle scene in Pitch Black: To wig you out and make you remember it.
Thank god they switched from blood tests to DNA testing when testing for paternity at my job. The only thing that screamed louder than the mother whose child’s paternity was being questioned was the little kids who had to get stuck because of their putative padre’s peccadilloes. (Actually, their mother’s alleged wanderings, but that’s not fun and alliterative.) Anyway, these days they do a painless buccal swab, (inside the cheek) and things are much more peaceful in the horrifying halls of Family Court.
I guess no one wants to hear about the time I had an 18 1/2 inch needle inserted through my, uh, female-nether-regions to check for internal abdominal bleeding? I got to follow the discussion on whether the short needle would work, or if they needed the 21 inch needle . . .
I haven’t noticed such an occurance of televised injections here… what makes me reply anyways is this:
Do you mean you got over it? How? The Red Cross won’t let me donate anymore (too many trips to the UK, aka Mad Cow Country), but when I could the needle always made me squirm. I imagine they’ll let me do so again later, but it always makes me feel silly to need so much attention during the process. :o
I absolutely HATE getting injections. I had EIGHT healthy teeth removed here few years back because my jaw was too small to hold them all. The first four were pure hell. Its bad enough having one pulled, but getting those damned high pressure injections (to get the anesthetic down to the nerve at the root of the tooth) was horrid. The only thing that stops me from screaming and having a fit and beating on doctors and nurses is that I know that it has to be done, and that the alternative is worse. I sit (or lie) down when getting shots, and force myself to relax whilst the needle comes closer through sheer will power. It works out pretty well, but sometimes I over do it and have to “unrelax” a little to keep my sphincter from flopping open - and if the doctor takes too much time, my blood pressure will drop down to something you’d expect to measure in a tree and I have to “unrelax” again to keep from passing out.
Giving blood was no damned fun at all. I don’t give blood anymore. Some years ago, I tested positive for exposure to TB, and I don’t think it’d be fair to take the (remote) risk that someone else might get it from me (since it isn’t certain that I actually have it.) I also don’t see much point in donating blood when they’ll probably test it and dispose of it anyway.
I used to be terrified of needles. What cured me? A car wreck that put me in the hospital, and traction for 3 weeks. Every single day, multiple times, a nurse came to give me a shot. Plus IV’s and a cathetor. I have no problem with needles now. I fail to see the big deal.
When I was four, I slipped off a merry-go-round and flew twenty feet, landing on gravel which split my chin open. The next thing I remember is a doctor coming at me with a needle as long as my arm and jabbing it into me before giving me stitches. Thus begins the phobia…
When I was eleven, I was diagnosed with ITP which meant more needles. Needles for blood tests, needles for IVs, hypodermics, butterflies, big honkin’ yellow ones. I got IVs every single week for a while in 1991-1992, on top of the blood tests. You would think that I would get used to it. You would think wrong. I never got used to it. When EMLA cream first came out, the nurses at Duke made sure I got a tube of it. I would not let them touch my skin with a needle unless the skin had been numbed first.
After awhile, when my platelet count began to go up and stay up indefinitely, I began letting the phlebotomist draw blood properly from my hand/arm instead of fingersticks like I had been getting. That’s when I discovered that as long as I don’t look at the needle, I won’t panic. The needles must not be in my sight at all from the moment I walk into the room until the blood is drawn. If I see it, I’ll tense up, hyperventilate, and pass out as soon as the needle is pulled out. Even for something as simple as a TB test, I cannot look at the needle. (My current doc found this out the hard way when I almost passed out in her waiting room.) There’s twelve years of severe needlephobia (nineteen of mild if you count the stitches) to deprogram out of me. Not easy a-tall.
And that, my dear Road Rash is the big deal. Would that I could be as blasé as you about getting shots etc.
Nanoda, I got over my phobia, pretty much the same way the others did. I was deathly ill for something like a year, and the docs couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me, so they kept sending me for blood tests, CT scans, etc., etc. After a while of being sick like I was, you stop caring that you’re going jabbed with a needle, and just hope to hell that they can figure out what’s wrong with you, then you start hoping it’s the lethal injection cocktail because you’re tired of being sick and not knowing what the hell’s causing it. Now, the doc can jab me all he/she wants to, I don’t care.