I’m going to write as a patient, for a moment. I’m scared of needles. I have been as long as I can remember. It might be understandable, given that the first needle I ever remember getting was an arterial blood gas at my wrist. I wasn’t even school-age, and I had pneumonia, which probably didn’t help the mood. Let me say this: believe people when they tell you it hurts—my poor radial artery! When I asked my mom about my fear, her most vivid memory is being called from work to pick me up in grade 6, when I was weak and ill after receiving one of my immunisations. We got four in total over the school year, two of which were on one day. I don’t think I’ve ever been as miserable as I was that afternoon; I remember sitting on the floor, my head between my knees, feeling as poorly as I looked. Adding insult to injury, of course (almost literally) was my keen awareness that I still had to get a second shot.

If you’re not scared of needles or the sight of blood (or of a handful of other unusual things), you won’t know the unique sensation of your autonomic nervous system playing cruel tricks on your hemodynamics. The response, unlike, say, my mom’s fear of bats, is vagal rather than sympathetic. My blood pressure plummets, my stomach pulls its equivalent of a prank fire alarm, and I turn even whiter than I usually am. I don’t panic, I cry. Things are slowly changing. While I’m still averse to being poked (as my needing to be ambushed for my flu shot this year demonstrates), I’m now capable of watching needles be given and even of giving them myself—two weeks of IV-starting on Anesthesia helped that—without too much fuss. My first real step was when I let a classmate draw blood from me during phlebotomy practice. Everyone else had left, and I trusted him not to judge me by my demented ANS. My second was on Psychiatry, when an agoraphobic patient issued me a challenge: he would walk through the crowded mall to the test centre to have his valproic acid level measured if I would accompany him and watch the blood draw. But I have yet to get a shot of my own without feeling like I’m imploding.

My point (hah!—couldn’t resist) is that fear isn’t rational. As a medical trainee, I of all people should know that needles aren’t cruel or even (excepting arterial sampling) that painful. But I’m still scared. Whenever I’m tempted to cock an eyebrow at a reticent patient, I remember that I had to have a nursing student—younger than me—hold my hand when I got my flu shot in October.

I am a History student and tea-drinker in my final year of clerkship at the University of Saskatchewan. Once free to roam the professional world, I hope to teach and to work in palliative and hospice medicine