Reply to My 10 year old wouldn't let the nurse have a finger prick at annual check up

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]TBH, I think you’re letting too long go between needle sticks. An annual flu shot is recommended for kids this age—we get COVID vax as well. And she is due for HPV. Practice makes perfect.[/quote]

Sorry, OP, but you're a bad parent if you don't get your child a flu and Covid shot every year. There is all the data you need out there to prove that humans are healthier in the short and long term if they get all their vaccines. Don't be a MAHA moron. Please trust the science.

If she has needle-phobia, you need to proactively deal with that, and either with or without a psychologist working in phobias, build up her tolerance with exposure therapy. The goal is a flu shot on Nov 1st, for example. Buy a ton of little disinfecting pads on Amazon. Every day after school, when she's having a snack she likes, rub a spot on her upper arm with a little disinfecting wipe, and touch the spot with a soft blunt pencil point (do that on the finger too). Gradually you sharpen it more and more until it's really pointy. In a few months, tell her that this is what a needle feels like. It doesn't, actually, because people can't feel the needle going in, what they mostly feel is pressure at the contact point, and the needle moving into the muscle during intramuscular injections like the flu shot. But you can't replicate that, so you make do with the "idea" of how it could feel. If you want, you can give her Tylenol 20 minutes before - it's not going to do much in terms of pain relief, since there isn't objectively any pain to speak of, but if you show her you are taking medically oriented actions, it might have a placebo effect. She will feel heard and supported.

A key point is to relax the arm muscles. Tension will bruise the muscle during the injection. So when you're using the disinfecting wipe, tell her to relax her neck, lower her shoulders and relax her arms to a resting position. You can massage and manipulate those areas with your hands to teach her how tense and relaxed feels and how she can go from one to the other. During the actual shot, she can rest her forearm on the armrest if she wants, but not flex the upper arm muscle. It will help if she doesn't look, and if you can distract her with conversation about a treat while the nurse is injecting.

When my kid was a toddler and preschooler, we literally needed a team to hold him down for the bloodwork he needed to get. He tolerated shots. As a young ten, he grew out of it and became fine with everything.[/quote]

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