Either famously or infamously, I was struck by a car while crossing the street at a pedestrian crossing at 7:44am on the 28th of January. Having performed the experiment of car versus pedestrian, where the former is doing 40km/h and the latter is probably doing about 6km/h at right angles to it, I can tell you from personal experience that the car wins. As the loser of this experiment, my reward was a broken tibia and fibula and a broken humerus, as well as a visit to the hospital to have some hardware installed to reset and repair my broken bones. The x-rays of said hardware look really cool but I can not recommend performing the experiment under any circumstances.
All the while, the people who have been concerned about my welfare, have quite graciously asked me about the pain that I might be suffering. Within the hospital itself, I found that the opiates which they wanted to give me for pain management made me nauseous and the other pain killing drugs have a very marked tendency to make one's poop tend towards the direction of 1 on the Bristol Stool Scale. Neither of these things are particularly pleasurable and to be honest, I would rather know about the existence of pain and bear it, than not.
Doing surgery on a person is a bit like doing maintenance on a motor car with the added complication that the engine is still running and if it happens to stop, it stops permanently. In the case of having new hardware installed in my arm, surgeons installed a canula in an artery (which is unusual) for the purposes of measuring my blood pressure in real time. I quietly think that that is both amazing and terrifying at the same time.
Afterwards, the nurses and doctors were concerned about the resultant bruises that would form around both the site of the initial injury caused by impact by a motor car, the injury caused by slicing open my flesh in order to perform surgery, and the bruises which would result for having multiple cannulae installed.
Contrary to popular belief, people do not have five senses. In addition to sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing, we also have a sense of balance, heat, relative position of where our own body is and depending on the scheme used, lots more. There are at least 13 senses and one list that I read counted 27. One of the many senses which we have is a sense of pain.
I am not by any measure recommending that experiencing pain is something to be savoured for fun. Pain is mostly unpleasant. What I am saying though is that pain is a useful thing to know about because pain is a little bit like the human body's own set of warning lamps. Pain as a system, is useful to help try and let the user of the human body know that something if left untreated, may be the source of future damage.
Of themselves, bones do not have any nerves and as such, bones do not have the necessary equipment to inform you about pain. The pain information system, is carried by nerves; usually located in conjunction with muscles and tendons.
I want to know about pain. I want to know specific information about my pain. Motor manufacturers will install sensors and diagnostic tools so that if a system goes wrong or fails, then this is reported back to the computers and or the mechanics whose job it is to repair it. A human body which is an electrobiomechanical series of systems which are both lived in an operated by a ghost (I do not understand how a human soul attaches to a body at all), reports back to the human brain; which then has to make sense of the information being reported back to it. In the case of pain, this is like having a series of check lamps and warning lights that indicate that something has gone awry. Of course, the reporting of pain itself can go awry and there are cases of people who report pain where there shouldn't be. The human brain is a malleable and plastic sort of thing though and is capable of amazing feats of neuroplasticity.
Yet again I come to the fundamental notion that the centre of the observable universe is located about 19mm from behind someone's corneas. The thing about pain though, is that it isn't subject to being centred. Pain is curious because it demands to be felt. Pain seems to built using a series of override codes that make it more important than heat, cold, sound, smell etc. Pain has that rather annoying ability to yell into one's mind at far louder level than is sensible.
What I find crazy making is that as a human body is a self-reporting system and pain reports only to the owner of said human body, there is no sensible way to measure it. Doctors and nurses will ask what kind of pain that a patient feels on a scale of 1-10 but that assumes that the patient is able to invent and articulate any sensible notion of how pain maps to such a scale in the first place. Unlike blood pressure, blood sugar, heart rate, and various levels of useful chemicals and minerals, there is no empirical measure for pain.
I have a reasonably high tolerance of pain and I suspect that that is because I have a reasonably strong degree of impulse control. If something is itchy or hurty, my base assumption is that it probably should be left alone because as repeatedly proven, I am exceptionally good at breaking things. I would rather feel pain and be cautioned by my own internal systems that something could be wrong, than to cover it up and do myself more damage.
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