IMAGINE not being able to feel any pain, even after suffering all manner of injuries.
This hardly believable condition is part of 31-year-old
Enock Mambo’s life.
Since childhood, he does not know how pain feels regardless
of how potentially excruciating his injuries would be.
He has had the misfortune of “suffering” broken bones
several times and once bit off his own tongue and yet felt nothing.
He only becomes aware he has been injured when he either
sees blood or feels discomfort.
In an interview with The Sunday Mail at his home in Ashdown
Park, Harare, Mambo said he has seen specialist doctors who told him he suffers
from a rare condition called congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP), which does
not have a cure yet.
“When I was around 17, my parents took me to a doctor who
said I have this rare condition of insensitivity to pain. The doctor said there
was no known treatment yet for this disorder and I was one of a few people in
the world who had it,” he said.
Doctors say CPI is an extremely unusual and dangerous
genetic disorder that condemns sufferers to the pain of not feeling pain.
But the condition also comes with unwanted consequences.
Mambo said he has had so many injuries that his body
constantly tries to heal itself, leading to fatigue and discomfort.
“It’s difficult when you don’t feel pain because you are
always going through this underlying feeling of your body trying to heal
itself. So you become fatigued a lot and you don’t feel in the best of moods,”
he said.
“For the most part, I deal with effects of all my previous
injuries — I have a bad right knee. It’s not pain I deal with; it’s extreme
discomfort. If I am lying in bed at night, my body tries to constantly heal
itself. I only get three to four hours of sleep, so all this has a
psychological effect on me.”
The worst discomfort, he said, is when it’s cold.
“It feels as if my hand is being plunged into a bucket of
ice. When I bathe, I can use extremely hot water without feeling a thing.”
He yearns to be normal.
“I no longer wish for this pain-free life.”
His mother, Ms Anastancia Mutseuka, said she realised
something was wrong with her son when he was a toddler.
“He would prick himself with needles and would never cry.
It seemed normal to him,” she said.
Dr Akim Ndebele, a general practitioner, said pain plays a
major physiological role in protecting people from danger.
“This could be one of the rare conditions that come with
insensitivity to pain called CIP. It is an incredibly rare dysfunction; only 20
cases are mentioned in the literature, but researchers assume that there are
more undocumented cases out there. It is considered a form of peripheral
neuropathy since it affects the peripheral nervous system.
“Research has shown that in most extreme cases, babies will
mutilate their tongue or fingers while teething, then comes a lot of accidents,
burns and walking on fractured limbs, which heal badly,” he said.
CIP patients, he added, should be advised on how to protect
themselves.
“When there are no warning signs, danger lurks everywhere
for such cases.”
A life without pain might sound like a dream come true, but
the reality is it feels more like a nightmare.
Worldwide, few people have the condition.
People with CIP have been recorded putting their hands in
boiling water, impaling themselves with rods, walking on hot coal and stepping
on nails without registering any pain.
Research shows that CIP was first recognised in the 1930s,
and numerous studies have since identified a genetic mutation that blocks a
person’s ability to feel pain. It is hoped that studying how CIP works could
lead to the development of a new kind of painkiller. Sunday Mail
0 comments:
Post a Comment