Monday, September 30:
My greatest fear and the first great battle of the World Race is fast approaching: shots.
I don't know why I have an irrational fear of shots. Sure, I'm nervous about things like my carry on bag being too big and spoiled milk and going to parties where I don't know anyone, but nothing terrifies me like needles. I'd rather give a speech while getting a root canal suspended over a coffin full of spiders than get a shot. For most of my life, my crippling phobia of needles has forced me to rule out the prospect of traveling to places like… well, like the 11 countries I now intend to see. That I applied to the World Race despite this inevitability is yet another reason I believe it's God who's pulling me into this: I would not have had the guts to do that on my own.
I've wasted a lot of time in my life being scared of shots. Once I saw a psychologist for a couple weeks. That was maybe ten years ago, when I was scared of the next injection I'd receive: the dreaded tetanus booster, which would be heading for my deltoid in… two years. The therapist was nice, but she kept trying to pinpoint why I was afraid of shots. "I don't know," I'd say, "because they hurt. I'm scared of the pain." We worked on breathing exercises, which were no use, and one day she gave me an empty syringe and pulled a grapefruit out of a Tupperware bin she had under her desk. The objective was to give the grapefruit a shot. I could do that, since it wasn't me that needed the thing in my arm. I could stab a grapefruit all day. Not that I have since then. But I could.
Two years later, when it was time for that tetanus shot, I got some special numbing cream. I went to the exam room and they applied it to my left arm, and then we had to wait for it to kick in. My dad drove me down the road to Target, where we walked around for 20 minutes and he bought me an orange shirt. When it was time to drive back, I started panicking. I had to stop him from going back to the doctor, but how? HOW? I refused to get in the car, but he kept telling me to, so I did. Then I pulled out the big guns: I announced that I wouldn't buckle my seat belt, and therefore he couldn't drive back to the doctor because it was illegal. But he started the car anyway (Union Avenue Pediatrics and Target are about 20 seconds away from each other), and the whole way back, I yelled, "I'm NOT buckled! I am NOT buckled!"
Gosh, even when I began studying Ancient Greek and learned the preposition hypo, "under," and the word "hypodermic" was given as a derivative, my stomach lurched.
Over the years, there have been victories, like the first time in years I didn't kick any nurses, or when I got my blood drawn a few weeks ago and was able to thumb through a magazine in the waiting room and actually read the words. The biggest victory is that I've really gotten fed up with worrying all the time: it's pointless, tiring, and not even fun. God has definitely been diminishing my capacity to worry about things.
I have been blessed with a very concrete phobia that invites very concrete confrontations. The way to overcome a fear of shots, I've learned, is to get shots. I hate this fact. I hate having to be courageous. Courage is my least favorite virtue, because you can't have it unless you're scared.
God says we should trust him, which is nice. And we go on and on about trusting God: that's nice. I think God's response to that sentiment is, "Try me. Give it a go, trusting me, don't just talk about it. Find the one thing in your life you're not ready to let go of–your relationship, your career, your appearance, your intellect and then let go of it, and watch what happens. That's a good way to find out if trusting me works."
Easier said than done. This is Monday. That'll be on Thursday.
Friday, October 4
I'm sitting in the kitchen waiting to be able to eat. I just took my first typhoid vaccine– it's a series of four pills– and the worst part is putting breakfast off for an hour. The pills are in the fridge next to the jam I am so going to put on a bagel once the waiting is over. My arms are sore from the shots, my left more than my right, because I got another tetanus booster. My other souvenir is a little yellow booklet I'll put in my passport that lists all the shots I've got when I'm abroad (see below. Note that it is perched on a mountain of clothes and gear that is my first packing attempt for next week's training camp… stay tuned for that drama).
It was all blessedly anticlimactic. I actually haven't worried about this appointment much at all, but I figured I'd be more freaked out. Nope. Mom and I went to Passport Health yesterday morning, and I got a booklet full of all the diseases I could get. The nurse, Amy, told me to protect myself from mosquitoes and drink clean water a lot, and she made a list of the shots I need.
For your information, or if you're a future Racer who's researching, I'm getting vaccinated against Hepatitis A, Japanese encephalitis, typhoid, and maybe yellow fever- my route doesn't demand it, but it might be a good idea if the countries change or we travel through any places where it's required to enter.
Then she said, "It's time for shots!" and I kind of gave her the stink eye (Sorry, Amy). She prepared the syringes right in front of us, and usually the sight of needles makes it hard for me to even talk. But still, I felt fine, at least compared to how I usually feel, which is panicked. As she finished filling the syringes, I reached into my purse and pulled out a little box, setting it on the desk.
"Have you ever seen a Buzzy?" I asked sheepishly.
"No," she said. I opened the box and took out Buzzy. Mom got it for me, and I was skeptical about it doing any good, but now, I'd take what I could get.
"It's this little vibrating thingy that you can attach an ice pack to, and I put it on my arm when you're giving me a shot and then it, like, doesn't hurt, I think."
"Yeah, that makes sense. It would confuse the nerves. Give it a shot." (She didn't say 'give it a shot,' but it would have been funny.)
So I turned Buzzy on and held it on my left arm for 20 seconds or so, and breathed and relaxed and stared at the world map plastered on the wall–I was sitting by South America. I'm not even totally sure when the tetanus shot happened. It was just really, really easy. I got two more in my other arm, Japanese encephalitis round 1, and Hepatitis A round 1. And before you could say "I'm not buckled," it was over.
PEOPLE SCARED OF NEEDLES: I recommend Buzzy. Seriously, having all this vibrating and cold happening on my arm really distracted me from the actual shot. I'll lend you mine. Except I need it next month when I go back for more.
But other than Buzzy, I know that there were a lot of people who had been praying for me about this. Thank you. I have no doubt that God was working. Because not only were the shots easy to take, but there was also a lack of the usual anxiety before and during the appointment. The atmosphere didn't feel dangerous to me. It felt like what it was: I'm going on an amazing trip, and I'm getting ready for it, and I need a bunch of shots, and I'm not even going to kick anyone when I get them because they're not scary anymore. That's awesome.
