PAIN IS THERE FOR A REASON

On today’s episode of Grey’s Anatomy, there was one particular case that stood out to me.

The patient was a 12 year old girl who believed she had superpowers because she couldn’t feel pain. She went around carelessly because, whether she stumbled, got punched in the stomach, or even put her hands in boiling water, she wouldn’t feel a thing.

But here’s the crazy part: even though she couldn’t feel the pain, her body still registered the damage.

She would even tell people to punch her in the stomach because, well, what could possibly go wrong? At one point, someone beat her with a baseball bat, and because she didn’t feel any pain, everyone assumed she was fine.

She wasn’t.

She had internal bleeding and was close to dying. They only discovered it because they took her for an X ray despite the fact that she insisted she was okay.

And that got me thinking about pain.

Dearest reader, without pain, we might never truly understand the extent of our wounds. Pain may be frustrating, uncomfortable, and sometimes downright unbearable, but perhaps it has a purpose.

We all wish we could be like that little girl sometimes. To not feel the heartbreak, to not feel disappointment, to not feel rejection, to simply switch everything off and say, “I’m fine.”

But what if not feeling the pain doesn’t mean there is no damage? What if, like her body, our hearts can be hurting even when we have become too numb to notice?

So, are you really okay?

Or have you numbed the pain for so long that you’d need an X ray to see how deep the wound has become?

In the words of Augustus Waters, “Pain demands to be felt.”

And maybe that’s not such a bad thing after all.

P.S: The inability to feel physical pain is a real medical condition. It’s called congenital insensitivity to pain.

@favvy_Okwans🖤.