SGNP said the other day while trying to calm Betty, "It's time to bring out the Big Guns." To which I rejoindered, "So we can shoot the baby with them? It might make her stop crying."
Baby Betty is two months old and 8.2 pounds. She is super small and crazy cute.
What happens when your baby is two months old is this: They give her five shots all at one single doctor visit. And you have to watch and help hold her down so she doesn't kick while the needle is in her thigh.
What happens when I hold my baby down while she is getting shots is this: I cry and cry and cry. And so does the baby. The truly heartbreaking part is the look of absolute shock when the needle goes in. All five times. Shock, horror, pain, wailing, crying. Betty's sobbing. I'm sobbing. After the shots are done, I pick up Betty and hold her and we cry together and Dad hugs us both. We sit down and I nurse her a little bit. She was crying so hard that for the first time in her little life she's doing that little kid "Hu-hu-huuuh" thing when they've been crying so hard they can't quite get their breath.
It was terrible.
On a lighter note, we've passed over some sort of hump in our lives together. We've settled in. She's is really happy and likes to spend most of her time napping or looking around and playing. She likes to talk to us and look at our faces and imitate and play with her hands. The greater part of her crying now is more conversational than it was before. She "Waah"s but slowly and varies her pitch and mixes it with other sounds. She isn't crying and screaming and that kind of thing very much at all these days. She is the best thing ever. Ever. Ever. Ever.
Posted by jlp716 at April 18, 2006 04:46 PMYay, you guys!
This probably explains why trypanophobia (fear of hypodermic needles) is so common, affecting roughly 10% of the population.
I can still recall with excruciatingly vivid detail going to the county health clinic at the age of six or seven, and being given a battery of innoculations over a three or four month period. To this day, I still hyperventilate, become agitated and anxious - to the point of nearly passing out - whenever I have to get a shot or have blood drawn.
Strangely, however, tattoo needles don't bother me in the least.
Posted by: COMTE at April 19, 2006 10:13 AM"This probably explains why trypanophobia (fear of hypodermic needles) is so common, affecting roughly 10% of the population"
And here was me assuming people are probably afraid of needles because they make the leap from, "Oh look, a needle," to, "Someone's about to stab me with a sharp piece of metal." I think the impulse to avoid being stabbed is sort of fundamental. I tend to worry more about people who AREN'T afraid of being stabbed. Those people, it seems to me, do not love themselves enough to love others, and may be prone to bouts of random sociopathic violence when their anemic imagination fails to remind them that a gun is actually a tool for inflicting holes in other people.
Posted by: Joshua at April 20, 2006 04:27 AMWhen I first asked my doctor about this condition, he mentioned that in about half of the cases, people will indeed overreact to seeing or touching any kind of sharp metal object, as you suggest. But for the other 50% of us, the reaction is very specific to hypodermic syringes. People in this group tend to associate them with a past negative experience, such as a previous medical procedure, and won't necessarily exhibit the same sort of extreme shock reflex when presented with other similarly sharp objects, such as a scalpel or kitchen knife.
As you say, anyone being THREATENED with a sharp metal object SHOULD exhibit an appropriate response, but in the case of those of us with this condition, our response to the stimuli is way out of proportion to the actual threat level it represents.
Posted by: COMTE at April 20, 2006 12:38 PMSame thing with the dentist. If some dude you didn't know came at you with a hooked needle-like tool and said, "I'm going to fuck around in your mouth with this for a while," fear is the natural option.
Posted by: sgnp at April 20, 2006 12:39 PMWhen I was a kid, I have a vivid memory of being shown some very lurid anti-drug propaganda about heroin. It made needles seem creepy and wrong for a long time after. I'm sure it was well-intentioned, but I'm not sure that the anticipated effect was to make me dread antibiotics injections.
Whereas my dentist back then had a thing against anaesthetics, so that fear was based on very reasonable inferences about what I was likely to experience once I sat down in his Chair of Pain.
Posted by: flamingbanjo at April 20, 2006 02:05 PMhm, The Job's house manager was just bragging about how he undergoes dental surgery w/out anaesthetic. i thought it was just that he was german, but maybe it is actually fear of needles...
Posted by: raej at April 21, 2006 12:04 PMI've always thought the fear of needles was related to preverbal experiences with them. I'm not afraid of needles. I'm also not particularly afraid of being stabbed in a general sort of way. I'm sure if the occasion arose where it seemed likely I would be stabbed I would probably be fairly anxious about it.
Posted by: JtotheP at April 22, 2006 05:28 PM