When you bring an infant to the doctors to the doctors and they need to get one of the many shots it takes to keep them healthy and protect them from disease, it is a given that they are going to cry. Needles have that effect on young children due to the pain and the fact that they have no idea what is going on or why a strange doctor or nurse is hurting them.

Most children grow out of this fear by the time they are maybe seven or eight — they understand that needles are normal and have become comfortable enough with their doctor to trust that they will not hurt them. Although needles are never enjoyable or desirable, they normally become tolerable by this age.

I can say with certainty that I did not reach that stage until a few years ago, maybe even until last year. I swear I was still in the double digits when I would cry as soon as the doctor mentioned the idea of getting a shot, and I had to be bribed by my mom with a treat after just to get me through it.

I absolutely hated needles and got lightheaded at the thought of them, and would have to be hugged by my mom as a way of holding me down. As little as looking at a needle was enough to make me feel sick, and actually needing an immunization was a nightmare for me.

This became a problem when I complained to my parents multiple times a day about my terrible allergies — I often struggled with a runny and stuffy nose, sneezing, and itchy eyes that made me absolutely miserable. Anyone who has allergies knows how hard it is to be positive when you feel like you cannot breathe out of your nose or see properly out of your itchy eyes.

Although I dreaded anything involving needles, I agreed to get a skin allergy test that involved pricking the skin with allergens and waiting for a small reaction, and my results showed that I was allergic to essentially every single thing they tested me for. The only way to improve my symptoms was to begin immunotherapy, which requires weekly injections with the goal of desensitizing your immune system to the allergens and then slowly being weaned off of them.

For the first few years, I dealt with getting the frequent shots and learned to be calm when it came to needles, but could not go without holding someone's hand. So I sort of got over my fear and anxiety associated with needles, but not entirely. That is, until last summer, I was finally brave enough to go to the allergist by myself and receive the shots without any assistance or hand-holding.

Since having the courage to endure these shots by myself, I truly learned to cope with my medical-related anxiety and have grown so much. Between then and today, I have now not only gotten my allergy shots, but I got blood work for the first time. My experience with needles proves that even if something causes you anxiety, you can overcome it with time and patience.