KILLING THE PAIN WITH THE DESIRE TO ENJOY IT

Ever since I created my blog, I was seriously contemplating on choosing a topic that I would wish to cover or register my thoughts to begin with.

And I got one today… My 12 year old son got hurt by hitting himself with a sharp edge of dining table and came to me with a slightly lacerated toe of his leg, noticeably bleeding a bit. As a father, I could sense his expectations, which was to attend him immediately with any first aid or a sympathetic gesture, atleast. For unknown reasons, since my childhood days, I am habituated to either seriously pretend as if nothing happened or react bit late when it comes to a painful, bleeding injury be it of my own or for others and so thus my reaction was very casual. I had a quick look at the injury and just suggested him to peel off the injured skin and asked him to attend to that by himself but with the help of a moderate cry and fuss, he managed to get the expected attention from his mother and both of them came to me upon getting the wound, dressed up. It was so obvious that I had to explain the reason for my usual casual reaction for such events.

After making them comfortable, with an objective of preparing him to be mentally strong, I tried to enlighten my son with a little explanation about how the nervous system works to sense any pain. The explanation covered about the central nervous system, sensory nerves sending signals to the brain via the spinal cord and the process of sensing pain.

When there is an injury to the body, different sensory nerve fibers respond to different damages to tissues and send signals (associated with light touch or heavy hit on the tissues)  through the nerves into the spinal cord and eventually to your brain. The brain immediately processes the signals and sends information back to the nerves, which help to perform some basic decisions as remedial actions on its own and such decisions are our spontaneous reflexes. This complicated process happens within fractions of a second and in a view, pain is just an outcome of sense of our body like any other. With reference to different impulses given as inputs, the brain actually determines how sensations are interpreted in comparison with your past experiences and or your emotion at any given time which can change the intensity of pain. You can see by yourself how different your emotions can determine your responses to pain and is the reason why you cry at times for getting injured (say falling down from a bicycle) and laugh for same levels of injury in a different environment.

I wish to recall another context here. During the beginning hours of my last trucking camp at western ghats hills, India, we found few small sized leeches on one of the team mates which resulted in examining all others. Few team members, who originally started to check others but eventually managed to find some leeches on their own body, desperately tried to remove them, ended up with some bleeding, became suddenly hysteric and expressed  serious concerns as if they encountered a very serious life threatening problem. They also sincerely suggested to either immediately change the place or abort the camping programme itself. While the shocked members were continuing their cry, I noticed a couple of other experienced friends who were literally laughing and enjoying the whole event, played with the leeches and insisted to remain camping there, as the beginning itself was thrilling for them. It was evident for me that humans react differently and take different decisions for a common situation, highly influenced by their own emotions and experiences.

After listening to above explanation patiently, my son was looking unconvinced but certainly developed some interest on the topic. I concluded the explanation with a suggestion to sincerely try and consider pain (of an injury) like any other sense and asked him to imagine as if he had a desire to enjoy the sense of pain. After instructing him to close his eyes, I even tried to demonstrate this process by touching his injured toe, giving a strong pressure on the other leg, twisted his ears and a gentle touch on his shoulder, asked him to sense and feel the difference on each but with a desire to enjoy all in the same way with which he could overcome or kill the pain. He assured me to try for 'KILLING THE PAIN WITH THE DESIRE TO ENJOY IT'. I suggest the readers to try it by themselves…

B. Mannan
Dubai, UAE

Note: Have practiced enough before suggesting this to my son, I guess. During my childhood and adolescent days, I had torn my toenails by playing barefooted football matches on rocky roads, flung from motorbikes, several times and on one occasion, after having met an accident together, successfully rescued and took my friend for emergency medical treatment before getting myself admitted for a fractured hand...