I knew a girl who was afraid of being sick, in case she choked on her vomit and died. I met an old woman in hospital who was so afraid of being sick she didn’t eat for six weeks.
My father can’t stand the sight of blood. If he cuts himself, no matter how small the cut, he gets faint and agitated. Sometimes he even passes out. He doesn’t like needles either.
When you’re asked to have a needle put in your arm, they always tell you you’ll just feel a prick, that it’s nothing like a bee sting.
Needles are more intrusive than stings. The thing about being stung by bees is that you can scream. I’ve only been stung once, and certainly would scream if it happened again. But not being able to scream is worse. You can’t very well scream when they want to stick a needle in your arm.
I always thought it was stupid to be afraid of needles. I was very brave as a child and bore my vaccinations with a certain amount of bravado and curiosity. Then I fell ill with M.E., and the doctors at the hospital wanted to do every conceivable blood test they could think of. I can’t even count the number of times I was in the outpatients section of Nottingham City Hospital, waiting to have my blood sampled by these vampires, knowing it was going to leave me with a huge bruise and a weak arm. But I got through it. Just.
Then I had my brace. I was a late developer. I must have been about nineteen when my brace was fitted. My teeth had a big gap at the front, and one of my canines had failed to grow down and instead had grown sideways inside my gum. This meant they had to operate.
I don’t think I have a particularly low pain threshold, but when it comes to my teeth, I most definitely do.
The brace was very painful when it was tightened, and I would be upset for several days after. The fear kicked in after about six months to a year of wearing it. I started to panic. Every time I thought of the brace on my teeth my heart would race and I would become asthmatic.
I couldn’t take it off and that scared me. The brace left me under the thrall of a set of people who made decisions about my body utterly beyond my power.
In a Cronenbergesque set of fantasies I began to imagine myself as some kind of cyborg. Machinery taking me over from within. Sometimes I would wake from a nightmare wanting to claw at my mouth, rip out the mess of wires from my teeth. Even today I still have nightmares that I still have a brace.
The fear of needles finally surfaced. I had already developed an anxiety towards them during my teenage years with all of the blood tests I had to undergo at the hospital. Then as I had all kinds of operations to correct my teeth within a short span of time, I rapidly came to the point where the sight of a needle approaching my mouth turned my knuckles white and filled me with dread.
When I had my brace taken off, I cried with relief. I was a very bad girl and didn’t wear my retainer. And the last couple of times I’ve been to the dentist, I’ve insisted on having fillings done without an anaesthetic.
