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Originally Posted by ANOther
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I can watch videos of surgeries and "gross stuff" (except burns) without a qualm, and yet I am very squeamish and have even passed out or come very close at the sight of relatively minor injuries, when the injured person was myself or someone I love (or maybe it's just "in person" as I've never seen anyone I didn't know injured).
When I was 19, I once made myself look at my little sister's bitten tongue (lots of blood, she was 3), because I wanted to be a nurse and wanted to get over my blood phobia. The bad news was my sister had to get three stitches in her tongue. The good news was she stopped crying when she saw me pass out. Most of the time, fainting IS NOT like in the movies. When you "come to" you're not ready to go about your day as usual. It feels like you've run a marathon or something, and you're exhausted and nauseous for quite some time, and "coming to" sort of feels like someone is holding your head under water as you're trying to resurface. I ended up sleeping for two hours after fainting (my parents said they were going to call the doctor if I had slept any longer).
I used to get very squeamish whenever i had to have blood drawn (I'd actually have to lie down so they could take the blood without risking me falling down). Then a phlebotomist hit a nerve while taking blood and asked if she could leave it in, because the blood was flowing (Stupid me, I said yes... because it was so hard to get blood from me I would have been willing to cut off a finger to get the process over with).
I went into a full vasovagal reaction. Hubby said it looked like a seizure. And the sensation of being "held under" was even worse. It felt to me like I was never going to be able to fully "wake up," though in reality it probably only took a few minutes. I felt wiped out for the rest of the day. Really strange.
The nerve was actually damaged in the incident, and my forearm felt like it was on fire, for about eight weeks as the nerve healed.
On the plus side, I've lost my squeamishness for blood being drawn. I guess because I've already experienced just about the worst that can happen, I've lost my fear.