Heads up: this is the opening piece of a series about my experience starting GLP-1 medication. If that’s a triggering topic, please feel free to skip. I’m not telling anyone what to do with their body. I just need to process this, and I figure someone out there is more scared than I am and could use the company.

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I remember this one time my mom took me to get a blood draw. I was terrified. Shaking. I was so little and the phlebotomist hovered over me with a needle that was so big. I almost fainted with them just coming near me. My mom scooped me out of the medical seat, sat down, put me in her lap and held on. I did faint. But I fainted onto my mom.

Soft safe space for a blood draw for a teenager.

Oh. Did you think I meant when I was wee? No. I have other medically related needle stories from my childhood, but this particular time I’m thinking of was probably the last time my mother took me to get blood work. I was maybe 14 or 15.

My immediate reaction to getting a blood draw has become less immediately intense but no less debilitating. I am completely personally offended on a spiritual level when someone takes my blood. At least that’s the story my body tells. I don’t faint on the spot anymore, but over the following several hours all of the energy and joy in my body will drain away until I’m basically one of the gelflings that has had their essence drained by the Skeksis in The Dark Crystal.

Reminder: THAT WAS A CHILDREN’S MOVIE.

Once I’m forced to lie down from the exhaustion of having lost my precious precious blood my muscles will start to stiffen up like I had just done the hardest workout of my life. And then the cement feeling sets in.

This super fun reaction is to having something removed from my body. Imagine how my body feels when you inject it with something. Though, at least in that case my body is reacting to an intruder. Seriously, my body doesn’t like intruders. It tried to kill both me and my daughter while I was pregnant.

If you think I’m intense you should meet my nervous system.

All of that is just to say that I really really don’t like needles, because my body reacts at 11 to them. Okay. 10 to draws, 11 to injections.

So no one was more surprised than me when my doctor told me the medication she wanted me to go on would be half as effective, twice as expensive, and have worse side effects if I insisted on the pill version — that I agreed to injections.

There are so many things to deal with here. Paths.

What medication is it? Why are you taking it? Are you really going to be able to inject yourself? Make Rick do it. Why are you on it? How can you do that to yourself? What if you don’t love ice cream anymore? What do you mean you’re afraid of needles, you have how many tattoos? What about that time during the pandemic when you tried to pierce your own ears and were able to poke the needle in but completely unable to push it through without closing your eyes and squeaking and you had to make your daughter come in and finish it for you?

All good things to those who wait.

Each one of those is surely going to get its own piece. I intend to write about this. I intend to babble and obsess and share.

Today I just need to tell you the headline.

I’ve agreed to try GLP-1s.

Second puberty has really fucked me up, and I won’t stay quiet about it like I did first puberty

For context I have a suite of chronic illnesses that lead to a symphony of chronic flares. I’m not even sure I’m human some days. I could be a mutant and we just don’t know it yet because we haven’t unlocked that part of my genetic code. Trust me, I’ve been bitten by spiders many times, and I react spectacularly with swelling, itching, and pain. So that wasn’t the path.

Maybe it’s GLP-1s.

More than a month has gone by since my doctor and I had the first conversation about it. I start next week. I’m somewhere floating in sheer terror and even worse, hope.