I found this via Alas, A Blog:
The Girl Who Feels No Pain, an article about a real-life “Alien Jane“, the three-year-old Gabby Gingras.
Ide Cyan
Oh my. Life will always have to be so conscious, so hyper-vigilant for these people. They’ll have to develop systems to watch Gabby, to check the environment, anticipate the hazards that are invisible to her because she can’t process the warning language of pain. They will have to read the mind of the whole world.
Nicola and I talked a lot about this over beer last night. I believe that humans are potentially limitless in spirit, in toughness, and in the capacity for joy in the face of adversity, but I wouldn’t wish this on anyone. I felt particularly sorry that there are no resources for these folks, that they have to do all the work of discovery as well as implementation. I hope they have loving and imaginative people around them to help: it’s the sort of thing that takes imagination, not treacly pity or platitudes. One thing that astonished both of us about this report is the sentence, “There is no cure, nor will she outgrow it.” If I told someone my child had a condition for which there was no cure, and they said, stupidly, “Well, maybe she’ll outgrow it,” I think I would put their head through a wall.
The world is often stranger than fiction, and harder too.
Staying alive must be a real challenge to people insensitive to physical pain. It’s one of my arguments against our society’s readiness to provide people with painkillers and stuff that numbs the side effects of illness. In the case of allergies and such, fine. But when people take pills to shut down their body’s reaction to the common cold, etc. I often tell them, “Your body was trying to defend itself by increasing its temperature, making your nose run, and whatever else, but you went and messed that up because you didn’t want t o be uncomfortable. Wow.” It’s like anesthetizing one’s feet and walking on broken glass, thinking it’s okay just because you can’t feel it.
I have a friend who is anosmic. She often has to go to the hospital with food poisoning because the lack of smell and a good sense of taste make it almost impossible for her to discern whether the thing she’s about to cook and/or eat is okay or rotting away. Gas leaks are common in Mexico, so she has also been about to die due to that a few times. I can only imagine how hard it must be to navigate the world without something as helpful as a sense of pain.