Twelve weeks to departure

...And I resemble a human pincushion.





So many needles are being stuck into me at the moment, my upper arms are in a perpetual state of numbness. And I hate needles. I had a terrible incident with one a couple of years ago, which left a lasting impression on me. On the last day of a weeks holiday in the carribean, I got a huge splinter of rotting wood embedded into my right heel. It was absolute agony- I limped to the hotel room and spent half an hour attempting DIY surgery, which was highly painful and achieved nothing. My Mother wandered in and saw me cutting through my own skin with a pair of nail scissors, made some caustic comment about self-harm, and examined my heel. The splinter had gone straight upwards, and there was no way of getting it out.


"Good thing you had your tetanus really." My Mother remarked, yanking my leg over my head to look at the wound in a better light. She is a nurse, and very clinical about injury. "Well, I can't do anything about it now."

A sleepless ten-hour flight later and I was hobbling into Guys hospital, exhausted and whimpering in pain. When it was my turn to be seen, I was taken aside by a large nurse and thrown onto my front on a bed. My Mother sat beside me and started filing her nails.

"Oof, this is nasty." The nurse said cheerily. You know it's bad news when they sound cheery. That means they're going to hurt you. She pulled out an evil-looking pair of pliers and started scrutinising my foot. "Okay.... I'm going to put some numbing spray on the back of your heel, which should dull the pain..."


She got out a can of what looked like Febreeze, and sprayed the back of my heel. It was very cold. Then she stuck a knife in my foot.

"Does that hurt?"

"YES."


"It keeps breaking off..." She said thoughtfully, tapping her cheek with the pliers. "I'm afraid we're going to have to give you a local anaesthetic."

A local anaesthetic.

I had never had one before, and I didn't want to start now. "Can't we- can't I- I mean- it doesn't hurt really, I can just go home and wait for it to come out-" I gabbled. She smiled at me, and produced a vicious-looking needle.

"Here we go!"

OH MY GOD. OH GOD IT HURT IT HURT- WAS THAT NEEDLE BLUNT???

The problem with a local anaesthetic is it isn't quick compared to most injections. To add to this, the skin on my heel was really tough. The nurse got a happy little gouging session, while I shrieked in pain, clutching a sterile hospital pillow. She was killing me, I was certain of it. Blinking tears out of my eyes, I turned to My Mother for comfort and support. She was rolling her eyes.

"I am never going to sit with you through childbirth." She muttered.

My foot did go completely numb and they got the splinter out, but ever since then I have been completely unable to deal with needles or anything needle-related. If faced with the prospect of an injection, I start shaking, and then- (and this is the really scary bit) I start to either cry or laugh hysterically, and often carry on laughing right the way through the whole thing. The poor nurse often leaves the room looking worse than I do. On one occasion a close friend was rushed into hospital in an ambulance, and I had volounteered to ride alongside her. The paramedics stuck a drip into her arm, and when she turned round to look at me I was cowering in the far corner of the vehicle, mumbling "sorry, I'm really not very good at this...."


Currently I'm on a course of Hepatitis B injections, and awaiting my Typhoid and Yellow Fever. I'm hoping that maybe having so many jabs in a concentrated period of time might snap me out of my pathological fear, but at this stage I'm still sitting in the chair cackling with uncontrollable laughter as the nurse warily approaches.



At least I'll never be a heroin addict.