my fear stems from the thought of the needle going through the skin and into flesh. the idea that it might hit a vein/artery and bloos spew forth is what get's me. i flush as i type this, and am a bit light headed. stupid, yes, real, yes.
Please don't clunk your head on the key board arkabee, but your story reminded me of the story of the largest needle I ever got, so don't read this, close your eyes, or have a pillow ready. For everyone else, here we go:
I have Bursitis in both my hips, have had the problem since my teens, and the pain is just something I've learned to live with, as no treatment has ever helped.
When I was 20 and working at a job that kept me on my feet for hours and hours it got really horribly painful, so I went to my doctor, who sent me to a specialist. Now my doctor didn't tell me what sort of specialist I was going to, but he also gave me no indication that I was about to be subjected to
extremely traumatic treatment. So I go to the specialist, put on the paper gown, and he comes in, starts poking at me right where it hurts, and I'm in so much pain from this poking that the paper covering on the examination table is soggy from tears, and I'm like, totally out of it. As I'm lying there, he takes out a sharpey pen and draws a
target on my left hip, exits the room. I was too out of it to figure out that this was
a sign that something bad was about to happen, so I was just lying there in pain and confused. He comes back with an assistant. He has his back to me, but I glance for a moment a needle the size of a baby's arm, and I watch him fill it with what I later found out was cortizone. I'm still to dazed to really understand that this massive needle is somehow meant for me. The assistant holds me down very firmly, and the specialist turns to me and drives the needle with extreme force into my hip in one swift movement a-la Uma Thurman in the scene in Pulp Fiction. The shock of what happened has compleatly blocks out any memory of the pain that occured. I am injected, the needle is wrenched out of my hip in a way that makes clear to me just how deeply it is lodged in my hip. The specialist says "There we go. If you find this improves the problem, call in in a few weeks for an apointment to do the other hip. " And off he goes.
Now, from a life time of dealing with pain, I have very good coping skills, and would have rather been told what was about to happen, and gone to my happy place, rather than actually seeing and fully experiencing what happened, so I ended up being pretty pissed at my family doc. for sending me in unwarned. Also, it didn't improve anything. I never went back, but I do remember thinking that if I could handle this I could handle anything.
Needless to say, I'm not afraid of the pain of getting a tatoo, but of its permanace, which is why I've waited until now to get one. I've wanted the same tatoo since I was sixteen. For metaphorical reasons, I'm planning on getting a spider on my ankle, but I have to go outside my area as there are few fine-line tatoo artists here and their work isn't the greatest.
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Topic: Tattoo You (Read 15838 times)