Anyone seen Evil Captor around lately?
Funny enough, I just finished my reread of Girl With Dragon Tattoo trilogy. There’s a character with congenital analgesia and you’re right, it is dangerous. Pain is your body’s way of telling you something is wrong and to deal with it NOW. Not having that can be life threatening.
There are children who are born with a condition called congenital insensitivity to pain. Possibly your boyfriend was one of these? AIUI, little kids tend to chew their fingers off and bite through their tongue, and of course don’t report all sorts of other severe injuries that would send a normal kid screaming to Mommy.
As it happens, several years ago a friend of mine underwent a procedure to remove a build-up of scar tissue at the juncture of his esophagus and stomach. This was to be done with a scope and tools inserted orally, and required him to be conscious for the whole procedure. They did indeed give him a drug that prevented transfer of information from short-term memory to long-term memory. After administering the drug, the doctor engaged my friend in a conversation during which he (the doctor) repeatedly broached the same subject; when my friend stopped noticing that the doctor was repeating himself, the doctor knew that the drug had taken effect and he could begin the procedure. Don’t know if my friend’s wife was in there with him, or whether it was just the doctors reporting afterwards, but apparently my friend was truly miserable during the procedure - and to this day he doesn’t remember a goddam thing about it.
I’m so terrified of the concept of severe pain I’m pretty sure I would rather just live ten fewer years and never feel any.
Edit: While we’re on the subject, why is it pain is disproportionate to the actual threat? You know how much it hurts to stub your toe? Is that level of pain for a stubbed toe really biologically necessary? I think not. registers complaint with nature
I read a fascinating book years ago called Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants[sup]1[/sup] by a Christian missionary doctor who did a lot of work with leprosy patients, who frequently lose the ability to sense pain in areas where the bacterium lives – mostly the cool parts of the body like the extremities, eyes, face, and so forth.
Some of the book was a bit preachy, but a lot of it was interested in the sorts of stuff Spice Weasel was just talking about: why pain hurts so much and why we can’t turn it off. The author described how people who no longer felt pain in their hands or feet were shockingly prone to injury, to the point where even the bones were breaking down from repeated small injury that was never allowed to heal, and they would start going blind because their corneas would start accumulating damage.
The author (and the other doctors working with him) even tried various methods to bring pain sensation back to people who had lost it, like special gloves that would deliver a shock to a still-pain-sensitive area of the body if there was too much pressure applied to it. There was a story of how they watched a guy trying to use a wrench on a difficult bolt, who triggered the painful shock by pushing too hard on the wrench. So he disabled the gloves and kept at it. Even knowing he was doing himself injury, he was more concerned with finishing what he was doing than he was about damaging himself, as long as he couldn’t actually feel it. They reportedly saw this kind of thing a lot.
Freaky stuff. I’ll definitely go along with that complaint against nature, though – even if it’s dangerous to turn pain off, we should at least be able to turn it off in emergency situations, or terminal illnesses, or when a phantom limb experiences phantom pain.
[sup]1[/sup]I think the book was later reprinted as The Gift of Pain.
Considering that such minor injuries were once (in the days before antibiotics and immunizations and shelter from predation) far more likely to be fatal, yes, a major level of pain is appropriate. If you’re a caveman who’s insensitive to pain, you’re more likely to damage your hardware than another caveman who is sensitive to pain.
Stub your toe, can’t run for a few days? Hope you ate plenty of boar beforehand, cuz you’re gonna get real hungry while you can’t walk. The pain is to remind you not to do that again if you can possibly avoid it.
Likewise with cuts - even minor ones -which can lead to debilitating/fatal infections.
We do turn pain off in emergencies that require prompt action, in fight-or-flight adrenaline mode we largely ignore pain.
I think that you have probably already explained why we don’t have conscious control over pain in your story about lepers. Despite our best intentions, we would likely misuse the control and damage ourselves. And, unfortunately for us, in evolutionary terms there is probably no significant fitness advantage to a long slow comfortable death over a long slow painful death.
Well, that all makes sense.
I don’t have to like it, though.
I’ve had to go under anesthesia numerous times for surgery, and I basically had this experience, although not quite as bad as you’re describing. I had an appendectomy, and when I woke up in the recovery room, it seemed to me like every other general anesthesia experience I’ve had – just a moment of discontinuity, like time skipped from one instant to the next, even though hours had gone by and I’d been sliced open in the meantime. Oh, and I had a catheter, which was a little uncomfortable, until they removed it, when it became a red-hot poker that they were sliding around in my urethra for about [del]a thousand years[/del] 20 seconds.
Then, about an hour after undergoing that horribly painful experience and being moved to a different room, I started to get a little dizzy, and my wife and grandmother started commenting on how pale I looked. There was an elderly patient across the hall who suddenly got violent and also started pooping everywhere, though, so all the hospital employees were busy trying to get her sedated and cleaned up for a bit, and I kept getting worse, and by the time they came to check on me, my stomach was painfully rigid and my blood pressure had dropped dangerously low, and they said “Uh oh, internal bleeding, we need to get you back to the OR immediately,” and they rushed me back in. As they were rolling the bed along, I begged them not to do that whole “catheter” thing again, and the nurse said “We actually have to get that back in real soon … but if you want, I can try to wait until the anesthesia starts to kick in so at least you won’t remember it.”
I had a brief internal debate about whether that was sufficient, but I figured it was better than nothing, so I agreed. Then I had the time-skip thing happen and woke up in recovery again, but with a foot-long scar this time and a week-long hospital stay ahead of me instead of a single night. Later, I thanked the nurse for waiting until I was knocked out to re-insert the catheter, and she said “You weren’t knocked out. You kept screaming and fighting and yelling for us to stop, and then you’d pass out and it would be easy for a few seconds until you woke back up and started fighting us again.”
After hearing her description of the scene, I was sure glad that I got to time-skip over that part, although I did feel sorry for that poor guy it happened to. But not too sorry, since that bastard disappeared and stuck me with having to suffer through the catheter removal, again.
I’m telling you, it’s the stuff of nightmares.
Sorry you had to go through that!
Very good point. I was more thinking of “emergency” like the broken leg that Lewis suffered in Deliverance, or, in real life, that whole Aron Ralston incident where his arm got crushed and trapped by a boulder and he eventually had to cut it off to escape. A situation where it isn’t an immediate fight-or-flight thing, and there’s been plenty of time for adrenaline to wear off, and for agonizing pain to set in, but if you don’t do something (which will likely vastly increase the pain), you’re going to die.
Thanks, Spice Weasel.
Also, your comment about it being the stuff of nightmares just reminded me of something – after that surgery, I started feeling pain in dreams, which I never did before. So … literally the stuff of nightmares. Heh.
It seems to me that, if I’m not forming memories of an event, I’m not experiencing it. “Experience” or “consciousness” is just a name for the process of forming memories.
Maybe. Memory and traumatic memory in particular are fascinating concepts to me. We know that traumatic memory is processed differently than typical/narrative memory because there is a whole chemical cocktail of difference between the formation of adrenaline-soaked nightmare-fueled memories and your everyday stuff.
We also know that extreme pain or bodily trauma result in permanent short-term memory loss in the most severe cases – like someone who is nearly burned alive or seriously injured in a car accident generally has no memory either of the incident or week or months after it. Then there’s the obvious stuff like head trauma, stroke and seizures.
I remember a conversation here years ago about whether or not ‘‘repressed memories’’ are a thing. I’m a skeptic of any kind of traumatic memory suddenly resurfacing, but not necessarily of the idea that people can forget terrible stuff. With my own traumatic memories, there is stuff I remember very clearly and have always remembered, there is stuff that is fuzzy/blurry vague and then there is one giant gaping hole where there shouldn’t be one. I remember everything, in detail, leading up to the event, I remember everything, in detail, of the aftermath, but I don’t recall the event itself, though based on the context I can easily guess what happened in the most general sense.
Nothing affects me as powerfully as this thing I don’t remember. I don’t even like talking about it because I’ll fall into this rabbit hole of fixation, but whereas I lack narrative memory the emotional and physical memory is alive and well. I can be there again, in seconds, feeling the way I felt, even though I don’t remember a damned thing.
Years ago while I was discussing this and expressing skepticism of the repressed memory concept, one poster linked to a research study in which they managed through hypnosis to repress unpleasant memories – but here’s the kicker – even though the subjects had no memory of their trauma, they were still affected by it.
Now that’s just the brain without powerful anesthetic drugs. Goodness knows what happens when you throw drugs into the mix. But memory is not nearly as straightforward and simple a concept as people make it out to be.
A friend of mine at work once told me of how it was done to her when she was a five year old girl in Moscow—two burly nurses held her down while the doctor ripped out her tonsils with no anesthetic.
:eek:
That’s basically how I felt too – if I wasn’t forming the memory, it didn’t happen to me. It happened to… I don’t know, a temporary me that died when those immediate experiences were lost and not recorded? Or maybe it happened to nobody at all? Wouldn’t that mean that people who essentially stop forming long-term memory, like Patient H.M., aren’t ever conscious?
Jeez, this (and Spice Weasel’s account in post 34) reminds me of one of the reasons I found Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to be a fascinating but frightening book – there’s a lot of disturbing stuff about the implications of memory erasing/modification magic.
When my son was 2 1/2 we realized he was having sleep apnea due to adenoids. We confirmed and set up the surgery. When it was time for it, they had me carry him in and put him on the table.
Then they gave me the mask and told me to put it over his mouth and nose. Okay? I thought they knew something I didn’t, so I did.
My 2 1/2 year old son looks at me as I do this with a “But…you’re Daddy!!” look of terror on his face but after 3 breaths was out.
I was freaked but at least he was set - and he’d never remember, right?
They wheel him out 45 minutes later and we sat in the recovery room with him. He wakes up, hoarse and upset, looks at me and says “does Daddy still love [WordSon]?”
I wanted to fucking kill the doctors. We laugh about it now, but I was traumatized for a couple of weeks.
Ahhh, H.M.! Brains are so freaking weird.
On the subject of short-term memory loss, I had a rather eventful day in March where I had three grand-mals, and I experienced the post-seizure state called postictal confusion. One minute I’m typing away at my desk, the next I’m waking up on the floor nauseated as hell, surrounded by people who were effectively strangers. For about a full half hour, I didn’t know who I was, where I was, or what was going on.
''What year is it?"
“…Don’t know.”
“Who’s the President?”
“…No idea.”
“Can you tell me where you are?”
“Nope.”
Yet for some reason I remembered where my husband worked! Couldn’t have told you his name, and that’s double weird because I had a hard time remembering where he worked on a normal day.
It’s a really messed up feeling, but I imagine it’s the closest I have ever come to whatever people with dementia must face on a daily basis. Was I not a real person in those moments, even when I didn’t know where I was? Surely I was forming new memories because some people told me I had a seizure and then I was loaded into an ambulance and I understood that entire basic concept. I even remembered that it had happened once before. I had some form of narrative memory for those 30 minutes. Was I a different person?
Nope, I was effectively the same person. The first thing I did when I woke up was apologize for inconveniencing everyone. I had no idea who I was but my basic personality remained in tact.
Brains, man.
Meant to add, I don’t remember much of the entire month that followed or the entire month that preceded the event. According to my husband I was completely out of it for weeks afterward.
But for some reason after the third seizure (later that same day) my postictal state was not nearly as severe. It happened in my husband’s presence, I said, ''What happened?" He said, ''You had another seizure." and I was like, ‘‘You’re fucking joking.’’ ‘‘No, I wouldn’t joke about something like that. Come on, let’s get you to the hospital.’’
So I remember pretty clearly the experience of postictal confusion but I don’t remember what happened, generally, in the weeks following. That seems counterintuitive to me.
Wow, bizarre. That sounds almost like the inverse of what general anesthesia or an alcohol-induced blackout causes (though I’ve never experienced blackout drinking, so I’m just assuming there). It also sounds very similar to something experienced by the main character Quantum Night, the newest book from Canadian science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer, but that … okay, wait, no spoilers. Oh, but his third-to-newest book, Triggers, is all about memories specifically, and is quite interesting. Okay, hijack over.
I assume that eventually your memories started being laid down normally again?