Needles and a Hero

Sorry for my long, unexpected absence, especially since the blog was in it’s infant days. It still is, in fact. So to make up for it, a more personal post…

The thing that was hardest on me as a kid was probably the needles. I hate needles, can’t remember a time when I didn’t. Something about a sharp object penetrating the skin… To me it just seems wrong, even if necessary. Even today I’ll sometimes tear up when I have to get a shot or have my blood drawn, and when I was little I would just flat out bawl. Anyway, when I was younger, in my pre-diagnosis days, coming in contact with needles was a pretty common occurrence for me. Around the age of four or five, I was having blood drawn at least once a week for various blood tests as doctors were trying to figure me out (or at least that’s the way I remember it. I recognize the fact that this might not be realistic possibility depending on the amount of blood that was taken during every session and that the recollections of four year olds aren’t too reliable around fifteen years later, but bear with me). They were ruling things out left and right, but that didn’t quite seem to slow down the rate at which they were testing. All of this was torcher for me, the girl who hated needles. I just wished they would stop whatever it was they were doing and leave me alone so I would be band aid and needle free for an extended period of time. The only pleasant thing that came from this was the bonding time I had with my mom. She knew exactly how much I hated needles, so every time I had to go get my blood drawn, afterwards she would take me to the little gift shop that was a few doors down and buy me a stuffed animal to help me calm down and stop crying. Needless to say her money wasn’t only going towards doctor bills. Even with the gift shop overcharging for TY beanie babies and the fact that there was no real reason for me to be quickly gathering a collection of over one hundred stuffed animals (not all from after shot sessions, but a fair amount of them), she would still always buy me one to make me feel better. I still have every single one of those beanie babies at home, and during those rough times and whenever I’m sick or have to have a shot or something of the sort, I always think back to those stuffed animals and how much my mom cared for me then and always.

This is the Father's Day HERO Bear. I have one just like it at home, and I cuddled it for years. Probably my most loved stuffed animal from my childhood.