From my memories of the Arch linux labs in college, no there isn’t…

… genuinely I’ve never been offered (even had to google EMLA)

But now that you mention it, I’ve never had this particular issue from novicaine at the dentist. And they always use a topical.

Next time I need a shot/blood, I’ll see if they’re willing to try that! Since it really does seem to be about the poke itself, something that changes the feeling might be exactly what works.

I hope being able to plan ahead for the occasional jab makes it not much of a real issue in your life.

Basically that. I schedule a day off if I need a jab for any reason, and work from home anyway when I’m miserable the next several days.

Does it happen for accidental/“natural” pokes? You mentioned the splinter thing, but if you had a thorn, cactus needle, or even a piece of glass stuck in your skin and pulled it out, would you do alright?

All of those are fine. And unlike a lot of people with my issue, blood doesn’t bother me in the least. Once in a great while I’ve gotten a mild version of that from an insect bite, but the feeling is just completely different.

Oddly, I think if a needle hurt more and did some tearing, it wouldn’t bother me so much.

But you’re asking some really thought-provoking questions. I have a lot of food-related texture issues and while this is COMPLETELY different, I’m suddenly wondering if it’s a little more similar than I thought. I do believe there’s a psychological component to it; I haven’t been able to test, but if I were surprised with a needle jab outside of a medical setting, I have no idea if it would happen to me or not.

What I did discover is that my blood pressure doesn’t rise and my heartbeat doesn’t go up in “prep”. I don’t seem to have a stress-rise effect for it to be stress-plummet related. I’m not asking anyone to surprise me with a shot, but I really do wonder what would happen.

Honestly, I wouldn’t trade it for the medical conditions of some of my family and friends. It sucks, and makes me hate doctors, but it won’t kill me.

I mean, I’d take this over diabetes and/or asthma shrug

Yeah, exactly. And I agree that there’s separate categories for skill, dedication, and niceness. Some folks are damn good but lazy and don’t care, others make up for being “only ok” by trying really hard and caring a lot, and some are just friendly when they screw up. It’s nice to have more than 1 of those 3 at a time. Someone in my family went to a weight loss doctor and asked me to come along. She was the friendliest doctor I’d ever seen… and the appointment finished with “I’m really lost. I don’t think there’s anything else we can try right now. You’re doing everything right”. Don’t know WHAT that was in the spectrum of skill and dedication. Maybe it’s true, maybe she was just giving up. But from what I’ve seen/heard, it’s definitely better than “well try harder, eat less, and workout more” that heavier patients hear from doctors who don’t even ask what they’re eating or what their workout regimen looks like.

I don’t have to deal with a lot of that stuff you do, but I can imagine it since what little I deal with has shown me multiple sides of people (doctors too, I suppose).

Yeah. I half-mentioned it elsewhere. I was in an ER and needed to have blood drawn. I was just barely staying conscious by leaning back with an ice pack, but they needed the room so a nurse came in and said “yeah you’re fine” and lugged me from the blood-draw chair into a wheelchair. My wife wanted to hit her (lol) but it took the 2 of them to keep me from hitting the floor instead of the wheelchair because I started to black out from suddenly standing.

Some nurses are idiots.

It fucking sucks, more because a lot of providers don’t (or didn’t. They’ve been getting better) take seriously. They’d treat you like a baby or a hypochondriac, right up until you scare them half to death by WHAT YOU SAID WOULD HAPPEN happening.

The stopping-breathing thing is super-rare, so even people expecting that “complely calm-seeming patient” pass-out are shocked when that same unconscious patient starts holding their breath and shaking.

I think it’s a matter of expertise. I am stuck dealing with people who write Javascript/Typescript like it’s C# because they’re C# senior devs. It’s not world-ending until issues of speed, scale, or other “why we use best practices” raise their ugly heads. Then it is world-ending. I can only help with so many design standards when you still see everything show up in a classes-and-subclasses mindset with hard-to-catch concurrency bugs. I actually caught a developer trying to spin up a child process to wait on a socket response.

So in FinTech, I can imagine it becomes a bigger deal faster.

Yeah, I really can’t imagine. My wife (who works in the medical field) tried to help me “get used to” needles and I didn’t make a single lick of progress. With my kind of issue, it’s common that the issue gets worse and not better if you get shots more often. Something about my subconscious forming a feedback loop with my reactions to create worse reactions over time. I didn’t stop breathing from shots when the symptoms started when I was 8 or 9, just got dizzy/lightheaded and passed out.

There’s more to full sedation than just “scared of dentists”, but it’s a start. Anyone who needs substantial work can get it done in 1 day on full sedation instead of a dozen shorter sessions. yes, “needs substantial work” often relates to “scares of dentists” (or relates to “was too damn poor for dentists”)

And I’m with you on hyper-hypodermic-phobia thing. People don’t realize that “fear of needles” does not manifest as a phobia, but as an acute body response. Getting a shot ruins me for a week, and often involves a doctor’s time because my vasovagal symptoms tend to need a little more expert observation. About 1/3 of the time I stop breathing for a short time. I’ve never needed life-saving measures, but they need to make sure that’s the case (lol).

So for doctor’s offices, it could easily become savings for them because of people who have responses to needles.

Happens for blood draws as well, even small quantities. Happens if someone pokes me with a lidocaine. It’s a vasovagal reaction where my body “overreacts to certain triggers”. My blood pressure and heartrate plummet (to scary low levels. I’ve freaked out nurses on a couple of occasions). It causes me to feint in a comically dramatic way because the bloodflow to my brain gets too low. To be even more fun, I sometimes exhibit false “seizure” symptoms when I’m down, tightening up all my muscles at once and stopping breathing. During my first COVID vaccine, my breathing stopped for almost a minute, which is why 2 doctors were overseeing me when I came to. My wife explaining the situation is the only reason I didn’t end up in an ambulance. You shoulda seen the nurse, she looked as pale as I did!

In theory, this could kill me, and there are confirmed ultra-rare cases of people dying from vasovagal syncope. In practice, I’m far more likely to die of a car accident on the way home (with my wife driving me because I’m in no state to drive after that). So long as a competent medical professional is watching me, I’m basically completely safe. But absolutely miserable.

Honestly, it makes me feel like I’m some kind of drama queen. But it’s entirely made up of unconscious responses in my body.

And the weird thing is that it’s not thinking about needles. It’s my body’s reaction to the feeling of a needle entering it. That sad little “prick” feeling that is maybe a 1 out of 10 on the pain scale? I have no idea if it’s “trickable” because I have absolutely no problem digging out a splinter with a knife. I keep wanting to find out if getting a tattoo would trigger that reaction or not. I just want to get a tattoo anyway lol.

Lol, it’s true. But if we were meant to be stabbed we wouldn’t have a completely unique dangerous (occasionally it kills people) reaction to it that doesn’t resemble most phobias.

I think it depends. I went to an ER once that threw me into a wheelchair when the world was spinning post-blood-draw and dropped me off in the hall saying “You’ll be fine!”. That hospital will never get an Ultrasound injector.

When I got my first COVID vax, however, I took up 20 minutes of the time of 2 on-call doctors and a nurse because my passing out often resembles a seizure. And then I took up one of their very few “just in case” beds for close to 90 minutes. Someone else with a problem with needles waiting for a vax had to wait for the bed to open up. They’d have killed to have said ultrasound injector for people like me.

That’s weird. My heartrate and blood pressure go down before getting a shot.

Then I go down, and feel like death for a day and like I’m in rehab for a week.

Funny thing, I’m not really getting woozy talking about it (a little, but more sympathetic memory of it).

A blood draw ruins my week (not exaggerated). If I were diagnosed with diabetes I would end up dead. For me, anything that avoids a needle is worth it.

For people like me who go down for a half hour and feel like a train wreck for 8 hours when they get stabbed a little, I’ll take a 1.5min one.

If you told me I needed to run on a treadmill for an hour while the ultrasound worked, I’d STILL take it over getting stabbed a little.

Also the Rocky Horror Picture Show 2 that everyone forgets was a (pretty decent but not cult-level) thing.

From a political point of view, irreligion is religion. Telling every single person who works at a location how they are or aren’t allowed to peacably express their religious views or lack thereof is a religious action by government. By definition, not secularism.

It’s ok (-ish) to actively seek an atheist state, but it’s duplicitous to do it under the guise of secularism. The separation of Church and government (secularism) most accurately means that government “make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting its free exercise”. I hate to go all “Murica”, but the concept is secularism is often tied to that prior quote. How is telling people they can’t wear a cross or pentacle or anything in between anything but “prohibiting its free exercise”?

I’m a non-Christian who has feared for my safety around atheists before.

But I shouldn’t have a right to demand atheists act differently so I stop being scared.

I don’t have the right not to be offended. Nor do I have the right to have irrational phobias honored. Neither does anyone else.

People wearing clothes at all makes some people uncomfortable. Women not covering their hair is as bad to some people as “walking with your dick out”. People (of religions I don’t believe) being forced to remove attire makes me feel VERY uncomfortable and tyrranized. I’ve always been part of the movement to push back against dress codes and uniforms in workplaces because authorities having power of “style” is unacceptable to me.

Why do only a small number of people get a say on what everyone must do, and everyone else who feels uncomfortable or oppressed “needs to suck it up”?

If your goal is to make the fewest people uncomfortable, you let them wear their religious attire. If your goal is to make the most people uncomfortable… dicks out. If your goal is to discriminate against classes of people you don’t like, you shouldn’t be the one making decisions.