My fun-tribute to the super funny description of the hyper-needle-sensitive category of patients (that we doctors often encounter) from the zany-n-zingy pen of Jug Suraiya, the fun-Dhanwantari of Indian Humour literature whom I have admired for a long time. A prior reading of Jug’s super-cool offering “Don’t needle us” (as it appeared in Jugular Vein/Juggelbandhi on the Times Of India Blogs, May 10, 2012; available online at the click of your mouse here on the http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/jugglebandhi/entry/don-t-needle-us ) highly recommended in order to fully understand the following:
Hyper-funnies like us don’t need a jab!
Their only concern with jabs entails making provisions of them, with their penchant for penjabs, to all the fun-trypanophiles of the world at the expense of their trypanophobe compatriots. Jug Suraiyas of the world, have heart! Your annual ordeal needs not be the atrocity you so fun-dementally make it out to be.
Also, congratulations! You have had all the trypanosomes in existence, including the most famous one of them, Trypanosoma gambiense (the causative agent of ‘African sleeping sickness’ spread through the inject-bite of its insect vector tsetse fly to the mammalian hosts such as humans) wake up from deep slumber in their African abodes (at a time when New Delhi had woken up to a breakfast of your fun-jab shrieks) and take notice. And so awestruck were they with your fun tribute to the cause of things trypano (or ‘Trypanocausia’, the new syndrome I just nomenclatured), they decided to spend rest of the day rejoicing and spare humanity from their stinging jabs (they famously perform) for a full circle of the clock now that their biological clocks were upset because of their untimely arousal!
And science, we would like to proudly inform you dear fun-God Suraiya, hasn’t been quite as idle to the needs of trypanophobes as you believe. Unbeknown to many, it has already come up with options galore to spare humanity from the kind of annual ordeal you have so eloquently jabbed about. Why, there is a fun medical procedure such as biofeedback to obviate your requiring worrying about high cholesterol, triglycerides or blood sugar levels and, thus, even the need to endure jabs to provide blood samples!
Acupuncture, though it may have a sure cure for needle-phobia, would not be an acceptable option here for it will be a case of the ‘needle for needle’ double whammy. A Homoeopathic intervention, too, might help ameliorate the condition but would run the risk of needle(ss) prickly dermal side effects if its “similia similibus curantur” (or ‘likes are cured by likes’) approach went awry! Ayurvedic or Unani treatments for driving away the fear of the needle from the blood drawing sites (the veins on your arms) could instead cause your mouth cavity & tongue coming to dread the bitter, stinging medicinal taste!
Yet, get (needlessly) needled if you must, on the fun (to him) advice of your much needling doctor, then Dissociative Cognizance procedures such as those involving EFT or Self Hypnosis approaches could come to your rescue in order to jabtrain you for the fun of it. Or you could take recourse to reverting to one of your Multiple Personality S&M aspects that actually enjoys giving & receiving jabs of all persuasions!
And then there is Quantum Holonomic Psychodynamics which, in an out-of-this-world solution to your travails, enables you to be in touch with one of your not-so-trypanophobic spirit variant in an alternate physical universe who could gladly be persuaded to undertake a needle jab on your behalf so as to keep your combined spirits in the omniverse still resonably high. That should take the sting of the needle completely out of this world for you!
I could go on a bit longer with some more options made available by science, all of them more fun than calculating the value of pi to the 23rd decimal or figuring out Lady Gaga’s real name, if I didn’t have to worry about the Indian Medical Association seriously beginning to wonder about disowning me. Or the Omniverse Quackal Association feeling ebullient about owning me up as their next presiding chief after this Punjabi jugalbandi note to your Haryanvi penjab! This jab job, therefore, has to come to an end.
If I didn’t know better, I would have failed to conclude that your Jugular Vein rants on a truly need(li)-of-the-hour issue for so many need(less)li needle-scared nuts was a really superb jab of Neuro Linguistic (Re) Programming from the great fun-God that you are. But now that I do conclude & declare so, would you please be instrumental in letting your representative fun-Doctor’s Banal Vein views reach the TOI readership in tomorrow’s columns (of Laughter Medicine?)!
(Needless to say that my good friend Jug Suraiya, Assoc. Editor of Times of India, did not find it possible to accommodate my foregoing fun-tribute on the pages of TOI. Hence, its appearance here on my blog, instead!)