By Debbie Olujobi

A little girl called Ashley is on television suffering from a serious condition. She is covered in bruises and her parents have to examine her daily to be sure she is not hurt. She seems to enjoy biting and scratching herself till she bleeds and is prone to jumping off high things.

Ashley seems really happy except for the fact that she is always injuring herself, and her parents   live in constant fear that she will come to serious harm with fatal consequences. She does not and never ever feels pain; her brain receptors simply don’t get the right messages. When I heard the title of the documentary “Pain free” I had been intrigued by the possibility of a painless existence.

At the time I was not particularly enjoying the back pain and headache that I had, so I thought she had it pretty good. What could be so wrong with never having another headache or back pain? It was enough to get my attention and I sat down to watch. Within minutes, I thanked God for the gift of pain; a pain free existence is a lot more painful than you can imagine.

Pain is actually the alert to take measures to contain or prevent damage. It’s the warning we get that there is a problem and without it we could die of the smallest of ailments. Things degenerate really fast when we don’t take steps to address the problem, find out its root cause and treat it to prevent infection.

Pain is the friendliest feeling we have; it’s brutally honest and tells us we need to get up with increasing intensity. Pain is a better friend than most friends; I don’t know many friends that will do what it does to get your attention and succeed till you address the issue.

There is a good argument that joy or passion is better but pain is the conscience of both emotions and keeps us from getting into trouble because we are enjoying something. Pain is a reminder of the consequences that await us when we get carried away. By the end of the documentary I had revised my opinion on pain and did the sensible thing of taking medication for both the head and back ache.

Physical and emotional pain, play a part in our development and while we don’t always relish pain it is an inevitable check of our wellbeing. No one needs a course on pain and it starts from spankings and injections when we are little; to falls, fights and accidents as we get older. Emotional pain starts with rejection and peer pressure and later becomes heart break when we feel the gut wrenching soreness of loss. I am not quite sure whether physical pain trumps emotional pain but I don’t enjoy either.

I have been in an almost fatal car accident, had hot water poured over my legs and fallen face down the stairs before and while these were really painful they are minute when compared with the pain of the heart. A broken heart doesn’t really bleed and you can’t put a plaster like a bleeding or broken head but it can knock the best of us off our feet. It’s a sign that we’ve been hurt and need treatment.

I had a conversation with someone who tried to validate emotional abuse as some sort of love and I had immediately been reminded of the girl in the documentary. I should mention that Ashley wasn’t exempted from emotional pain and she was hurt by friends who hurt her deliberately as a joke; they treated her like a freak. I don’t believe in giving advice but I will say that pain whether emotional or physical is an alert that something is wrong.

There is no life without pain; those who love us will hurt us at one time or the other; we will hurt them; we make mistakes and no one is perfect. My grouse is with those people who inflict pain deliberately out of a need to dominate others or make themselves feel in control. I find that to be weak and lily livered.

It’s amazing to see that some people are getting used to abuse and becoming numb to pain out of habit or comfort. Psychiatrists say that people who are abused later on will become abusers because they have come to recognise pain as a currency of strength.

Maybe living life without pain receptors would be a fantasy to someone in severe pain but the fact is that without pain most of us would die or find out too late that we could have controlled damage to ourselves with minimum fuss. There is no one size fits all to pain management we just have to learn and grow from it.

Little Ashley was 9 in the documentary it was shot 3 years ago and that makes her 12 now. At least she would have been. Little Ashley died a few months after the documentary. She had walked on the hot embers of a camp fire and burned off the soles of her feet. She was alerted to the damage by the putrid smell of burning flesh.

She died later in hospital from complications of that accident. You could say she died because pain was not a friend. There was no warning or trigger that the fiery orange embers were dangerous so she had walked over them; consequence was death.

Be it physical or emotional; pain is a warning that something is wrong and needs fixing. It’s not a currency for bullies or emotional cripples to be inflicted on those who can’t defend themselves. A word to the wise; whatever is painful is not normal; it’s the alert that attention needs to be paid and change is needed.