I'm thinking a lot about circumcision lately because, it's really awful, and we used to do it on infants without anesthesia, and still do sometimes. I think we should outlaw it, and you should be given the name and address of the person who circumcized you, and also you should be allowed to sue them or kill them.

But also not even item 1000 under most concerning things. We have a genocide going on. Several, actually. The world is dying. We're not prepared for the next pandemic and we're bringing polio and measles back. Fascism is rising worldwide. Etc. It feels silly to become a single-issue anti-circumcision crusader.

Anyways,

I've been catching up on my vaccinations and it's been really hard, since I've always experienced excruciating pain from needles. It's really bad, but I just figured doctors were lying when they'd say you'd experience "a little pinch".

Then today I learned that there was one (1) study that saw a high correlation between circumcision as an infant and pain experienced during vaccination at 4 and 6 months old.

It would make sense, the infant brain is still forming the building blocks that will later become episodic memory, and the pain from circumcision without anesthesia has to be traumatizing and must domineer absolutely the infant's brain for awhile. That's gotta fuck your whole relationship to pain up, maybe forever. But it's also just one study and it observed for months, not years.

But, even with those caveats in mind, it's still in the back of my head every time I get my needles. I have all these tricks to force myself to accept the needle but it hurts so bad. This obviously has to hurt more for me than it does for other people.

There's other literature out there talking about infant circumcision and experienced pain as an adult, but a lot of it is clearly typeset in Microsoft Word. Maybe medical is different than computer science, but that's a sign you can just ignore a publication. So, I'm not placing too much weight in the scant science out there.

But it does make me wonder. Did that traumatic experience change how I respond to sharp objects on my skin for the rest of my life? I won't really ever know.

I have more shots to get and I'm really dreading it. I'm still going to, but man, it sucks. 🐴