Oh another one. If we leave the house, even just for an hour, and leave a kitchen light on for the fur babies, the light will short out and the house will burn down.
Friday OT - Don’t Tell Me Not To Be Afraid
- Thread starter Angie
- Start date
Oh, you youngsters! Give it a few decades. Of course, I need the course to graduate.
When I worked in radiology, I’d have to start an iv (since I also did CT) and sometimes did blood draws for labs we needed for CT. My personal rule was I’d never poke a patient more than twice. I decided anything after 2x and the patient’s confidence in me was gone. I’d find someone in our department that I knew was very good at starting an iv or see if someone from the ER could do it. I also had a few patients tell me that I had only one chance. And if a patient said they didn’t like needles…usually I’d suggest they lie down and I’d get someone else in the room with me. Sometimes talking with them helped.
But I also had an experience when I was 4 that traumatized me. It took a nurse 4 times to get a blood draw. Next blood draw was at age 7. It took my Dad, the doctor and two nurses to hold me down. For a couple years after, my parents would bribe me. By age 14, I’d had enough that I could watch.
As a patient, remember you have rights. My Dad has horrible veins and has learned to tell them this and let them know that they will need to make sure whoever starts an iv or draws blood MUST be good because he will not be a pincushion.
But it would crack me up when someone with tattoos said they didn’t like needles.
Thought of another one... garbage disposals.
Don't mind them generally, although something about the noise bothers me. But if I have to reach into there to get something... I will get under the sink and unplug the thing, absolutely WILL NOT risk putting my hand into that thing if plugged in. And anytime you see that in a horror movie, I just get the heebie jeebies something fierce, can't hardly watch.
Don't mind them generally, although something about the noise bothers me. But if I have to reach into there to get something... I will get under the sink and unplug the thing, absolutely WILL NOT risk putting my hand into that thing if plugged in. And anytime you see that in a horror movie, I just get the heebie jeebies something fierce, can't hardly watch.
I'm irrationally afraid of missing any/all of my flights. I'm a 2 to 3-hours early to the airport to sit in the gate kind of person. I did happen to meet my wife on a complete chance encounter when we were seated side-by-side on a flight from Los Angeles to Denver - I've wondered if I wasn't "predestined" with this fear to ensure I would not miss that fateful flight.
Ouch.
Had a pretty strong fear of needles pre-kids but turns out they poke you a **** ton when you are pregnant. Learned pretty quickly to look away and dig fingernails into the palm on my other hand, bite inside of cheek - basically cause pain somewhere else on the body to drag attention to that vs hyper focused and waiting for the needle.
I swear to god that just looking at these photos I am having a panic attack. JFC, these should have been under a spoiler alert label!!
Mine (other than caves/tight places) is dogs. I have never had a bad experience with a dog and I grew up with dogs on the farm. But now, I get super anxious if I am around them at all - doesn't matter if they are a little yipper or some giant breed - I can barely breathe if I am within 20 feet of a dog. No other animal does this to me and it really didn't start till roughly 20 years ago when I was in my 30's.
Same here. The worst one for me was a bridge across the Mississippi as I was driving through Mississippi. This was a monstrous bridge. We were driving across the Mississippi Delta, so it was very flat all around us and we could see for 10 miles in all directions. So about 10 miles out, we start seeing this megastructure on the horizon that just keeps getting bigger and bigger as we get closer. An already high level of bridge anxiety ratchets up even more the closer we get until by the time we get to the bridge, I just want to turn around and go the other way. The support structure that we were seeing from so far away had to be 200 feet tall. It was massive and intimidating just to drive underneath something that huge.
I had a nurse once who told me I was tensing up my arm before she gave me a shot. She was patient and waited until I had relaxed my arm to give me my shot which seemed to really help.
So now I will tense up my arm and then release it before getting a shot and it seems to help.
It probably won’t work for people who have a phobia for needles, but it could be useful for others
About the only time I remember having any kind of bridge anxiety was, I believe, in South Carolina. I don't remember what city, but we were kind of following the coastline south. I don't think it was particularly high, but the angle you were driving up it at the apex was such that at one point you could not see the next section as it changed from an upward slope to downward. It almost felt like you were going to be driving off into the water before you finally got almost to it and saw it continued down.
And this discussion of bridge fears always reminds me of a true story. I was maybe a lad of 10 or so and driving across the old Muscatine high bridge to Illinois (it actually did collapse a couple times!) It made noise as you were driving because of the planking. And to top it off there was a bend part way across where they had to slightly realign it because of footing issues when it was built. So I'm riding across the bridge with my father driving and I mention how, Dad, I get kind of nervous when you're driving across this rickety old bridge. He replies, "Just do what I do, close your eyes."
