I am going to write about some thoughts on pain for the next little bit. Consider three settings:
1) As a little kid, you run and inevitably, fall and hurt yourself. You run crying to your Mum or Dad, and they give you a kiss, brush your knees off, or whichever part was hurt, and tell you that you are fine. What do you do afterwards? You turn around and take off running again, forgetting all about the pain. Your Dad told you that you are fine. And so you are.
2) One of my kids comes home with a sprained ankle. She is limping, reluctant to weight bear on the affected foot. However, she wants badly to play soccer that evening. I tape the ankle up to provide stability and I tell her it should be safe. She comes home after soccer and when asked how her ankle was, she shrugs and says, "It was fine; it was safe."
3) Remember Bethany Hamilton, the surfer whose arm got bitten off by a shark? When interviewed later about the incident, she reported that she felt no pain, adding that if she had, she probably would not have done as well as she had. Now, how many of us have had paper cuts and have felt incredible pain?
Think about these for awhile. I will also leave you with this (I may well use this as a segue to my next blog): the amount of pain felt is not necessarily proportional to the extent of tissue damage.
1) As a little kid, you run and inevitably, fall and hurt yourself. You run crying to your Mum or Dad, and they give you a kiss, brush your knees off, or whichever part was hurt, and tell you that you are fine. What do you do afterwards? You turn around and take off running again, forgetting all about the pain. Your Dad told you that you are fine. And so you are.
2) One of my kids comes home with a sprained ankle. She is limping, reluctant to weight bear on the affected foot. However, she wants badly to play soccer that evening. I tape the ankle up to provide stability and I tell her it should be safe. She comes home after soccer and when asked how her ankle was, she shrugs and says, "It was fine; it was safe."
3) Remember Bethany Hamilton, the surfer whose arm got bitten off by a shark? When interviewed later about the incident, she reported that she felt no pain, adding that if she had, she probably would not have done as well as she had. Now, how many of us have had paper cuts and have felt incredible pain?
Think about these for awhile. I will also leave you with this (I may well use this as a segue to my next blog): the amount of pain felt is not necessarily proportional to the extent of tissue damage.
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