As we age, one of the most common changes other than a sudden fondness for seltzer is that one day, we wake up and everything fucking hurts. It rarely matters exactly how your body breaks or what disorders are coaxed out of your DNA. Eventually time leaves most of us with random body aches, wondering “did I box a particularly ornery kangaroo in my sleep?”
Unless you’re born completely unable to feel pain. Which is, oddly, far worse.
Today’s Moment of Science… CIPA.
Pain is a useful and necessary sensation, and not just in your standard issue BDSM dungeon. There’s a range of sensations the various types of sensory nerves send to the brain to interpret. Everything from a warm fuzzy cat to their itsy, adorable, razor sharp claws are interpreted seemingly instantaneously with no conscious effort.
Imagine not being able to feel that the cat is warm, or worse, sharp.
Congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (CIPA) is a disorder in which patients experience a profound lack of response to painful stimuli and inability to sweat. A hereditary, recessive, mutant gene causes the body to produce pain receptors that are about as useful as Kyrsten Sinema.
The ability to perceive most sensory information is unaffected by the disorder. Hand someone with CIPA an object and they can describe the feel of its weight, texture, etc. CIPA patients can generally taste and smell normally, but their inability to feel pain extends to capsaicin. I know some people without CIPA who pretend they have this ability while they’re eating hot wings and crying.
As a chronic pain patient, my first thought upon hearing about this was “where do I sign up?” However, my second thought after reading up on the disorder was “keep the fucktangular radioactive spider doling this evil out away from me.”
A life with no pain doesn’t just mean my arthritic hip would stop bothering me. It’s a terrifying experience of not having any internal gauge of if something is wrong with your body. You find out about things like minor, easily treatable illnesses and injuries after they’ve become major problems.
Parents often first think their baby with the disorder is just a super happy baby, as there is no Earthly discomfort that makes them wail. Then some children with CIPA won’t eat because one of many things that doesn’t cause them pain is hunger. Some start chewing through their tongue and lips while teething. It’s not unheard of for parents to remove the child’s baby teeth in these situations. This obviously has major drawbacks, which are likely weighed against the drawbacks of an accidental self face-ectomy. Frequent high fevers from not being able to sweat can cause febrile seizures. This inability to regulate body temperature reportedly causes 20% of CIPA patients to die by the age of three.
Classified as a rare disorder, there have only been about 300 documented cases worldwide. There is no cure, and treatment involves attempting to manage an impossibly difficult, yet pain free life.
This has been your Moment of Science, grateful for this nagging head pain for the first (and last) time in my existence.
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