Ten days earlier, I’d been optimising my hormones for my hair. That was the whole project — collagen, hair, the dermatology of it. Then the picture changed, and the protocol I actually needed was a different one entirely, reworked in a hurry a day or two before I first walked into a clinic. None of this had been the careful, months-long plan I’d have chosen. It was a rush job, start to finish.
Which makes what I’d said earlier funnier than it should have been. When the AI I was working with had raised a mild concern about the self-injection part, I’d been breezy about it.
Don’t worry. I’m a dermatologist.
I have given thousands of injections. I know needle gauge and angle and depth and the exact feel of tissue resistance the way a pianist knows the keys. This was going to be completely straightforward.
A week or two later, at home, it was time to do one myself. I set everything up with the efficiency of someone who’s done it hundreds of times. Drew up the dose. Swapped the blunt drawing needle for the sharp one. Swabbed my thigh. Primed the needle.
And then — nothing. The needle about a centimetre from my leg, my hand perfectly steady, my brain perfectly clear on exactly what needed to happen. And a full, complete stop. A paralysis with no clinical explanation except that this was me and not a patient, and apparently that changed everything.
I tried again. Same result.
My wife, watching from the bed, suggested I do her injection first — get back into the rhythm. I swabbed her leg, in went the needle, a few seconds of steady pressure, done. Smooth, precise, no drama at all.
Don’t worry. I’m a dermatologist.
Back to my own leg. Nothing. I felt exactly like the man in that film who can’t make his hand write a lie — the pen hovering uselessly while his body refuses the instruction. The hand that could hit a target to the millimetre, defeated by five centimetres of my own skin.
So my wife picked up my phone and put on our music — the playlist we use when I do her injections, the one that means we’ve done this before, it’s fine. And somewhere between one beat and the next, the needle went in.
Then something I wasn’t prepared for: I felt it from both sides at once. For thousands of injections I’d known tissue only from the outside, through the syringe. Now I was the clinician and the patient in the same moment. Epidermis, dermis, muscle — inside and outside together, for the first time.
I was hyperventilating slightly. And my wife, in her best deadpan, said: is it supposed to be coming out the other side?
For about one nanosecond I believed her completely. Her face gave it away a fraction too late to stop a dermatologist briefly, genuinely believing she’d gone clean through her own leg. And the hyperventilating broke into laughing.
The injection was done — the first one I’d ever given myself. A protocol thrown together in a handful of days, finally real, finally in my own body. And what she couldn’t see, after all of it, was the smile on my face.
