People find my needle phobia risible. When you’ve had seven operations for breast cancer, five months of chemotherapy, and two episodes of septicaemia, all in the space of two years, let me assure you it isn’t.
For most people a needle phobia isn’t a ‘live’ issue, they don’t encounter them every day like I have to. In recent years, my anxiety has got to the point where I get an embarrassing shake, even attaching the needle to the syringe, when it’s not even going to be stuck in me.
As a result I have been rationing the number of injections I could do each day, before I imagine I might explode. When you work with elite athletes, this does not look big or clever. For a number of other reasons, I had booked myself onto a Neurolinguistic Programming course last week. This is a method of using deep relaxation, or, if the word doesn’t scare you, hypnosis, to alter belief patterns and thereby behaviour.
The co-creator of this technique is a scientist called Richard Bandler, who is a self-confessed nut-job in the nicest possible way. He is the man who cured a Jesus loonie by turning up on Good Friday with a seven foot crucifix, some nails and a hammer. After 20 minutes the bloke was insisting that he wasn’t Jesus.
Well, Richard likes to demonstrate his techniques on problems that amuse him, so I guessed that he might find my particular problem entertaining. Wednesday morning, I was summoned to the stage, and asked how I knew to be nervous around needles, as opposed to a chip.
I suggested that I knew needles could hurt, whereas chips didn’t. Richard then explained to me at great length how you could kill someone with a chip. Believe me, if anyone could kill someone with a chip, it would be him. Oh, and he also explained how to kill someone with a slice of chocolate cake.
Within seconds, he had me laughing at myself for my irrational fear, and that was before the ‘hypnotic’ part. I can’t say that I felt any more hypnotised than relaxed, but I opened my eyes to be confronted with a syringe and needle, that Richard then insisted I stuck in him, to prove that I wasn’t going to wobble. I knew he was enough of a psycho to let me do it, so I indulged my best polarity responder (ornery bitch) behaviour and refused. “Scared?” he asked.
“No,” I replied. “That’s technically assault. And I don’t know what’s in the syringe.” It hadn’t occurred to him that I could have stuck the needle in, without depressing the plunger. That battle I won.
The acid test was today. The patient needed a sub-acromial injection. She walked in and told me that she had been researching me on the internet. Whoa, that’s a good way to make your doctor feel confident! She then proceeded to tell me how anxious she was, and told all her horror stories of previous injections.
Needle-ss (hey, I can even make jokes now) to say, in the middle of this stuff, she didn’t notice I’d injected her, and I felt as confident around needles as the Tailor of Gloucester.
Maybe there is a little bit of magic out there after all.