I fainted the first time and now I dread Thursdays

Started 26 March 2026 · 8 replies · 363 hearts · read 4.6k times

SaffHastings, UK · 26 March 2026

4 months ago

Hastings. Sea, sketching, small steady weeks — and one very undignified Thursday in February that I am still carrying around.

First injection. Sitting at the kitchen table, did it fine, no pain, felt rather pleased with myself for about twenty seconds, and then the room went a long way away and I woke up on the floor with the chair on its side and my cat looking at me from the doorway with real disdain.

I rang the out-of-hours line and they were very calm and asked good questions and concluded that I had fainted, which people do, and that it was almost certainly nothing to do with the medicine itself and a great deal to do with a needle and an empty stomach and standing up too fast. My GP agreed at the follow-up. Nobody was worried. I did have a bruise on my hip for a fortnight.

Since then I have done it three more times, sitting on the floor with my back against the radiator, which works and which I have not told anybody about because it looks so strange. And every Thursday now has a shadow on it from about lunchtime. I am not frightened of fainting exactly — I am frightened of the moment before, that swimmy feeling, and the not knowing whether it is coming.

I would like to know if anybody has come out the other side of this, and whether the shadow on the day goes. Also whether the floor is a permanent arrangement or something I will grow out of.

121

EsiFacilitatorToronto, Canada

Saff, the floor is not strange. The floor is the single most sensible thing in this post and plenty of people here do it, and a fair number of nurses recommend it for exactly this reason: you cannot fall off the floor.

Fainting with needles is common, it has a mechanism that is well understood, and it happens to people who are not remotely frightened as well as to people who are. What tends to help — and this is the standard advice that people who faint at blood donation get — is not doing it on an empty stomach, being sat or lying down, having something to drink beforehand, and not leaping up afterwards. Your out-of-hours line and your GP both covered this, which is good, and I would keep doing all of it.

On the shadow: for most people it fades with repetition, and the fading is faster if the injections keep being boring. Three uneventful ones on the radiator floor is three pieces of evidence. Somewhere around eight or ten, most people find the Thursday goes quiet.

49me too 10

BarnabyWinchester, UK

Cathedral chorister, Winchester, and a lifelong fainter — blood tests, a school vaccination in 1994, and once, memorably, during a wedding I was singing at.

What I have learned over thirty years: the swimmy feeling is the useful bit, not the enemy. It is a warning and it gives you five or six seconds. If you are already on the floor with your back against something, those seconds are all you need.

I have never grown out of it. I have entirely stopped minding, which turns out to be just as good.

53me too 8

GaelanInverurie, UK

Farm vet, and I faint. Genuinely. I can do anything to an animal and I have gone down twice having blood taken from my own arm.

The nurse at my surgery has me lie flat on the couch now, before she starts, every time, without discussion. She does not treat it as a problem to solve, just a thing about me she plans around. That attitude was worth more than any technique.

46me too 6

OndineLausanne, CH

Lausanne, lake swimmer. The shadow on the day is the part I recognise. Mine was Tuesdays and it lasted about four months, and what shifted it was moving the injection to the beginning of the day rather than having it hanging over the whole of it.

Not possible for everyone. Was the difference for me between a shadowed day and a shadowed twenty minutes.

38me too 9

BlySheffield, UK

Nonbinary, thirty-one, cautious optimist, Sheffield. I do mine on the bathroom floor with the door open and the bath mat under me and I have never once considered that odd until I read your post.

You are not the only person on a floor. There is a whole quiet population of us.

44me too 11

TiernanOmagh, NI

Omagh. Quiet, watchful, occasionally hilarious — and I am obliged to point out that your cat’s disdain is the funniest detail on this website.

More usefully: I keep a glass of squash next to me and drink half of it before and half after, which a nurse suggested, and I have not had the swimmy feeling since.

41me too 5

GillyWorcester, UK

Nurse, Worcester, terrible at taking own advice. Everything Esi said is what I would say at work, and I will add the one thing patients never believe: we would much rather you told us you faint than have you standing up bravely in front of us.

If you ever have it done by somebody else — bloods, a vaccination — say the word first. It changes the whole set-up and nobody thinks anything of it.

47me too 7

SaffHastings, UK

A whole quiet population on the floor. That has cheered me up more than anything else this month.

Squash next to me, moving it to the morning, and I am going to stop treating the radiator as a temporary arrangement and put a cushion there. Thursday number five tomorrow.

45me too 4