Someone I know has a #blood/injury type #phobia—the kind that causes full-on #fainting, not just stress/fear.
I'm trying to help them get through a blood test. (The phobia is so severe that just *discussing* the topic can cause a faint.) If anyone has advice, *especially* from direct experience of this, I'd be grateful.
Looking to address both the fear and the faint response.
(Before offering advice, remember to check the full thread!)
For people who have never seen a faint like this, it can look pretty scary, and might seem like a seizure. The most dangerous part is just the risk of the person hitting their head if they don't get safely to the ground in time. But they should recover from the faint in a minute or so.
The most unpleasant part is the loss of bowel and bladder control during the faint. Also there's often disorientation, etc.
Very different from the media portrayal.
My late wife had a possibly milder version of this. Most blood testing places were sympathetic to this and would provide a place to lay down, would do the blood draw while lying down, and would have a glass of orange juice or other high sugar drink for when she recovered from the faint.
She never lost bladder/bowel control, though.
Good luck!
Yes. I would go with her, together we would explain to the staff that she would likely faint and things would go better if she were horizontal. Then I would be there to hold her glass of OJ and catch her if she was unsteady when she got up.
Looking at some of the other replies: we never treated it as a fear, just as a fact. "If you stick a needle in me, I'm going to pass out." So then we just planned for what to do when she passed out.
Speaking as someone who pokes people professionally, I'll echo the folks who've suggested to let the techs know that fainting is going to happen. We're trained to deal with this, and anyone worth their salt will be happy to accommodate.
There are two parallel things at play here, most likely. First is the autonomic vaso-vagal reaction, which anyone can get, but is much more likely in some people. Anxiety will make it more likely, and one could ask one's doc for something to help with that. But there is also the fear associated with it, that has built up over the years, that one can try to break. Keeping things calm, looking away, having a distractor (a light fingernail scratch near the site, for example) are all things that can help.
But really, the main thing is to try to reduce the degree of re-traumatization with every poke, to try to break, or at least weaken, the association. I know that it may not be feasible for many people, but trauma-focused therapies (like EMDR) can be very useful for breaking these kinds of associations.
Good luck, and I hope that it goes well!
@cthulku @wanderinghermit Thank you! So this supports the idea that there's a vicious cycle here, yeah? The syncope increases anxiety (because it's weird and freaky) and the anxiety increases chance of syncope.
I'll look into distractors, and their doctor might also prescribe something for anxiety.
That's my take on it, yeah. Kind of a sensitization reaction, that is reinforced every time a blood draw is needed. If a person is prone to anxiety, it seems to ratchet up even faster.
I've seen similar cycles with young kids, albeit not with fainting per se; that does sound like an extreme case, but perhaps a difference of degree, not kind. About 1/3 are just "yeah, this is normal, right?" when they're getting poked and prodded constantly, because it's all they've known. They still don't like it, but they recover quickly. The other 2/3 are fighting for what they assume is their life, because they're that terrified of getting poked. It's a very hard cycle to break.
Also: medical folk can often forget how invasive venipuncture is. There's a good reason why we don't have natural ports to the circulatory system, and the body really aims to keep it that way. I really try to approach anxious people with a lot of care and sympathy because of that.
@b_cavello In the case of this type of phobia, though, it really seems to be some kind of deep-seated thing that isn't so much based in fear as it is in like... a basic neurological response to injury. It can happen even if the person feels OK.
It may have evolved as a way of surviving attacks. Playing dead, essentially. Maybe limiting blood loss, too.
So it feels like there's not a lot of room for CBT or similar therapies. :-/
@b_cavello That's a really interesting point, that the fear may in fact come later. Both people I know who have this issue had it start fairly young, so it's a little hard to get good information on the exact origins of it, but... yeah, I wonder how much the fear and the fainting reinforce each other, forming a vicious cycle.
Maybe attacking the cycle itself is more important than working on just one part of it.
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Wandering Hermit
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