There was once a scene in an Spy TV Show called The Man from U.N.C.L.E where one of the heroes is threatened with torture unless he talks. As he is being bullied for information he warns 'You may find I have an abnormally high [pain] threshold'. You idiot! Don't tell them that! I'm not spymaster, but if you said to me, 'You're going to have to hit me pretty hard before I talk,' I'd just think, 'fair enough, I'll hit you pretty hard then. Thanks for the heads-up, doofus'.' If you're going down that route, it should be 'no, please, I bruise very easily and my eye-liner might smudge'.

My wife was once tortured by spies. No she wasn't, obviously. But she does have an abnormally high pain threshold, as we discovered years ago when she fell out of a tree and did something horrendous to her arm. It was not supposed to stick out like that. And that's saying something for my wife. She has very loose joints and can bend her arms and fingers way further back than is normal. What is worse, for a long time she did not realise this was abnormal. It was only when she was cutting my fingernails for me and decided that she wanted my arm in a more convenient position that the resulting scream of pain told her that not everyone can move their limbs the way she can. But even by these standards, her arm was weirdly out of place.

I felt sick. Partly this was a panic reaction to…. where her arm was. And partly it was panic. She just looked at her arm with detached bemusement. She could clearly see that it was wrong, but just as clearly she could feel no pain. This scared me. I had heard of people who felt no pain, and the damage they could do to themselves as a result. It may sound cool to be immune to pain, but pain is your body's way of telling you something bad is happening. With it, you flinch away from a hot surface, without it, you lean away, oblivious to the fact that your skin is being melted. Because that, quite seriously, is the sort of thing that can happen to people who do not feel pain. They get burned, scaled, electrocuted or whatever, because there was no alarm system to tell them it was happening.

The thing is, at that time, we didn't know what was wrong with Raven. We didn't know anything specific was wrong. That's the worst place to be, I think. Totally ignorant. No idea of what you're supposed to be reading up on or trying to learn about and understand. Everything is new, and scary and unexpected. And you haven't yet got a handle on the fact that you haven't got a handle on anything. You're trying to respond to all these things that happen to your loved on as if they were physiologically typical, and they aren't. And you don't know that they aren't.

So how do you respond to this if the news is as yet awaiting you? Well I do have one suggestion. Abandon, now, the notion that there is a 'normal'. There are a billion mental and physical aspects of any one person and slight tweaks or subtle differences in any one or two or three can make them totally different from others, all of whom are at least different from everyone else. Treat the world as if it is going to play by the rules, just make sure you're not surprised when it doesn't.

Articles by benjaminpmoore Archive

benjaminpmoore

01.04.13 Front Page

Back Issue Page