I have this thing where I start to imagine fingernails being ripped off which is sometimes strong enough to make me phyiscally flinch and shake my arm, like a nervous tic and then clench my fists to protect my fingernails from the thought.
The same goes for toenails. I sometimes see bare feet in tv and imagine them catching them on something hard while lying or kneeling down. I have to shake the thought from my head.
The thought of fingernails on a blackboard is almost too bad to type about. It’s torture!
Flesh wounds don’t bother me in the slightest. Even deep wounds I don’t mind seeing/thinking about it, But bone breaks do it, especially joint breaks where the break has caused the joint to go the wrong way. Eughh!
With me it’s veins. I can gash myself deeply enough to see the muscle striations and it’s just sorta interesting, besides the pain of course. It isn’t traumatic though.
But even the thought of veins, arteries or anyother blood tubing gives me the willies: light-headed, stomach rolling, the whole queasy shebang. I’ll do almost anything to avoid blood tests that require a needle stuck into a vein. They can jab my fingers as much as they want, but having a vein stuck…::gags::
It may because I’m a “hard stick”, as one frustrated medical type once put it. It usually takes a couple of tries in each arm before they nail it. During one prolonged hospital stay they had to put IVs in the back of my hands. I was in a state of frozen hysteria until they finally got those bastards out.
Heck, I even hate the sight of body builders with those ropy purple veins bulging out of their skin.
Eyes. Anything to do with eyes. I nearly vomited after reading a rather graphic scene in a book where a prison guard burns out the eye of a prisoner with a red hot poker. :eek:
And those throat things, where they cut into someone’s neck so they can breathe? :eek: They’ve shown Terri Schaivo on TV several times, and she has a hole in her throat. I have to keep rubbing my neck when I see something like that.
Like ivylass, it’s eyes for me. The thought of an eyeball being pulled out, popping out on it’s own or having something shoved in there is a complete and total nightmare.
I can’t watch someone being cut. Stabbing is pretty bad, but it’s the slicing I can’t handle. Whether by a doctor with a scalpel or a murderer slicing someone’s throat - I can’t watch it.
I have the same thing! Sort of. I don’t often imagine them being ripped off but if I hear about it I have to clench my fingers and toes as if to keep mine from coming off and sometimes I just get this creepy feeling where they feel funny to me like they are falling off and I have to clench them or push on my cuticles to push them back on. And fingernails on the blackboard are the worse. Love the movie Jaws but can’t even watch that scene, people being eaten by a shark that’s fine but no fingernails on the blackboard.
Well, at least I know I am not alone in my weirdness.
Last summer, I cut off a piece of my finger with a bread knife. I clapped a kitchen towel around my hand, called my best friend–who was out of town–to ask what to do. I was calm as a cucumber. Between us, we figured out that there was no one, and I would have to drive myself to the emergency room. I got there, announced my problem, and filled out all of the paperwork. Then the receptionist said the word “stitches.” I fainted, right then, right there. I had had no problem with the injury–it was the thought of stitches. I’d never had them before. They had to pick me up and carry me into the examination room. My blood pressure was 60/40 for a while.
The whole two weeks my finger was sewn up, I never cleaned it or changed the bandages myself (people returned to town the next day, thankfully, and some of them are used to stitches). I simply couldn’t bear to look at it.
I hate shaving my legs/armpits because I’m scared I’ll spaz out and slice either my eyeball or my nipple with the razor. I keep up with the shaving, certainly, but I do not like it one bit.
I think it’s pretty common to think about what’s the worst thing that could happen to you. For me, it’s getting my hands chopped off at the wrists. :shudder:
I’ve seen assisted with eyeballs being harvested for donation, performed wound debridement, and watched halo traction applied without batting an eye but the thought of dismemberment makes my stomach flop.
I concur about the fingernails. And for me there’s also an involuntary reaction to thinking about/observing someone fall and hit his or her tailbone. I get a shiver and, um, [TMI]my testicles retreat into ‘protect us’ mode[/TMI]. It’s funny that for some reason I’ve got such a strong reaction to relatively non-cataclismic things, while the idea of broken bones and such doesn’t seem to phase me.
For a masochistic use of this squeemishness watch Loyd’s Lunchbox one of the animations from the Spike and Mike’s sick and twisted animation festival. Especially the mistaken use of a nale file to remove bits of dirt from under your finget nails animation.
Broken bones where the bone pierces the skin and is visible creeps me out.
What a timely thread. I was out running yesterday morning and somewhere along the way managed to tear half of one of my toenails off. I was so doped up on adrenaline and endorphines I didn’t even notice until I got back and saw the blood stains in my sock. Go endorphines, yay!
I have some issues like that too! There are things that skeeve me out so much I’m not even going to tell you about it, but sometimes I get those horrible visuals that are just stuck on a loop in my head, and I plunge myself into whatever’s available to just break the pattern for a while so it can go away again.
Good to know I’m not crazy all by myself.
Seeing autopsies or surgery on TV doesn’t bother me. I’ve witnessed ghastly wounds on others in real life, and just went into auto-pilot with the first aid. I even dug a gigantic wooden broken-off splinter out of my finger with nothing more than a razor blade, tweezers, and Anbesol. (OK, and a string of expletives.)
But the one morbid fear I have is of getting my teeth knocked out. Specifically, doing a face-plant on cement, ripping my lips up, and losing several teeth. I think I could deal with it happening to someone else, it’s just my teeth that would skeeve me out.
I also have this recurring visual every time I open a can, that of running my fingers or my tongue around the sharp inside opening, accidentally of course, and just getting shredded. Weird. My dog should know the mental anguish I endure just to keep him fed.
I also have recurring nightmares of my teeth shattering and falling out. They are very realistic, though. However, they happen so often that many times while dreaming I will remember that I dream this a lot and realize I’m dreaming.
Except once I was eating a chocolate chip cookie and one of my back molar shattered and crumbled out of my mouth. I was seriously confused for a while because I really thought I was awake, or having a particularly boring dream. I finally determined I was indeed awake. What had happened was an old filling had deteriorated and allowed decay in the cracks. My tooth had further decayed and since the filling was so large to begon with when I bit on the chocolate chip (it was a rather large chocolate chip) it was the right moment for the tooth, filling, and all to explode in protest to it’s neglect.
That back molar is now almost all filling, or rather I have a tooth wall on my back filling. I am always a little thoughtful when eating chocolate chip cookies now.
