I DON'T FEEL PAIN AND THIS IS A CURSE!

My name is Peter,

Last month, I made the easiest five hundred dollars of my life.

There was a film crew staying at my dad’s hotel.

They shot a few scenes in the hotel restaurant.

I was watching them work with a few of the waiters.

They were trying to shoot this fight scene, but there was a problem.

The leading actor was inexperienced,

and didn’t know how to punch the other guy without hurting him

The director was showing him how to fake a punch but the guy just couldn’t get it right.

He kept throwing real punches.

The other actor was getting really angry.

After the tenth take, one of the waiters pointed to me and said, “Actually, if you get

the boss’s son to play him, your problem will be solved.”

When the director asked, “What’s so special about him?”

the waiter replied, “You’ll see it if you try him out.”

The director decided to go ahead, and shoot the scene with me.

The lead actor kept doing the same thing.

He was punching me really hard.

But for me, that wasn’t a problem at all.

You know why?

Because I don’t feel pain.

In fact, I’ve never felt pain in my life.

The guy could’ve been punching me the whole day and I wouldn’t feel a thing.

After the shoot, the director thanked me a million times and paid my actor’s fee of

five hundred dollars.

So how come all those punches didn’t hurt me?

Am I a superhero?

Of course not.

I have a genetic disorder.

It’s a kind of disease.

It’s called CIP, which is short for “Congenital Insensitivity to Pain”.

People call it the “not feeling pain disorder.”

There are about four hundred people in the world who have this condition.

I’m one of them.

I never feel physical pain or aches.

Let’s say you accidentally hit your thumb as you’re hammering a nail.

What would happen?

Obviously it would hurt a ton.

But when I do that, I feel nothing.

Because my brain doesn’t know what pain is.

And since it doesn’t know what it is, it can’t send the pain signal to my thumb.

I don’t feel pain but that doesn’t mean that my body doesn’t get hurt.

Once, I stepped on a toy car that my baby brother left lying around.

It sent me flying six feet into the air and I landed on the floor really hard.

I didn’t feel any pain but I was unable to stand up afterwards.

My dad took me to the hospital.

X-rays revealed that I had multiple fractures in both legs.

I had to stay in bed for three months with huge casts.

You might imagine that it would be really nice to never feel pain.

But don’t be jealous of me.

This is definitely not a good thing.

It’s super dangerous to live without pain.

Let me give you a few examples.

Say, you’re at a restaurant.

The waiter brings you a delicious pizza.

You immediately take a huge bite.

But the pizza is too hot because it just came out of the oven.

What do you do?

You wait until it cools down a little.

If you don’t, you’ll burn your mouth.

And that’s exactly my problem.

No matter how hot the pizza is, my mouth doesn’t hurt.

I keep eating the scalding hot pizza.

Inevitably, I get deep burns inside my mouth.

However, I don’t feel any of them.

I still end up hurting myself, I mean, my body.

As you can see, pain is actually our guardian angel.

It keeps us from hurting ourselves.

Pain is also our teacher.

It teaches us how to go about doing physical activities without hurting our bodies.

And it starts teaching us when we are children.

I’ll give you another example.

You’re riding your bike at the playground.

You don’t realize you’re going too fast, you hit something and fall off the bike.

You start crying because you hurt yourself.

This feels bad in the moment but the next day, you are so much more careful on the bike.

And who did you learn that from?

Pain, of course.

You learned how to ride a bike without hurting yourself thanks to the pain you felt.

Because there was no concept of pain in my life, I had a pretty dangerous childhood.

When I was a baby, my family had no idea I had this condition.

Since I never cried, my mom was telling her friends, “Jon is such a calm baby.

He doesn’t cry even when he falls.”

One day, my mom took me to the playground.

I climbed up the slide.

A kid pushed me from behind and I fell and landed on my head.

My mom ran to me in a panic.

She screamed, “Peter, are you OK?”

But I laughed and said, “Mom, falling is way more fun than sliding down.

Can I climb up and jump down again?”

My mom was obviously confused.

She took me to the hospital and found out that my arm was broken in two places.

When the doctors saw that I wasn’t hurting despite the fractures, they thought that wasn’t

normal and ran a series of tests on me.

Finally, they figured out that I had this insensitivity to pain.

The year I started elementary school, I had to change schools because of my condition.

My mom came to the school, and told my teacher that I had CIP.

“If peter falls down and breaks something, he wouldn’t know it.

Please keep an eye on him.”

My teacher thought it would be better if my friends knew about this as well.

Everyone was really surprised when they learned that I didn’t feel any pain.

Word spread around the whole school really quickly.

During recess, I went outside.

Older kids came up to me.

They started pinching my nose, and twisting my ears to test me.

Well, it didn’t hurt but I was still uncomfortable.

But they wouldn’t stop.

I had to change schools after that.

We didn’t make the same mistake twice.

At my new school, we didn’t tell anyone about my condition, not even the teachers.

So far, I’ve told you only about the disadvantages of having this condition.

Are there good sides to it?

Of course.

I never get headaches.

If someone steps on my foot in the crowd, it doesn’t hurt.

Even if I work out for hours, I have zero muscle pain the next day.

Once, when I was in junior high, we took a field trip to a farm.

One of the staff members was giving us a tour of the place.

When we came to the beehives, he wanted to show us a honeycomb full of honey.

But as he was taking the honeycomb out of the hive,

he dropped it and the bees got really mad.

Suddenly hundreds of bees attacked us.

Kids started running away, but the bees stung everyone anyway.

The farm suddenly looked like a battlefield.

Dozens of kids were lying on the floor and crying.

I was the only one who remained calm.

I got stung, too, but it didn’t hurt me.

My friends were really surprised.

I lied to them and said, “For some reason I didn’t get stung.”

In fact I got stung in multiple places because

I didn’t bother running away like everyone else.

I benefited from having CIP once again last year.

I was playing frisbee in the park with a girl I have a crush on.

A pit bull ran up to me from behind, and bit me on my butt.

If I had been a normal person, I would’ve been holding my butt, screaming

at the top of my lungs and embarrassing myself in front of this girl.

But when the dog bit, I felt nothing.

When the pit bull sped off and disappeared, the girl ran up me and asked, “Are you OK?

That was a really bad bite.”

I was so cool when I answered her, “No, that was nothing.

Just a nip.”

It was obviously a serious bite that would have hurt anyone else.

My crush was so impressed with me that day.

I just remembered another example.

I had an issue with my pancreas.

Doctors said I had to have emergency surgery.

I had it scheduled for the next morning.

The doctor in charge knew that I had CIP.

“We won’t give you anesthesia since you won’t be feeling pain anyway,” he said.

But the anesthesiologist had no idea about this decision.

She put the anesthesia mask on my face before I could say anything and put me to sleep.

But for some reason I woke up in the middle of the surgery.

My belly was cut open.

I looked like a total zombie.

When I made eye contact with the anesthesiologist, I smiled and said hello.

She screamed so loud that I can’t even begin to describe it.

She had a right to be scared because I’d woken up during surgery and I was all smiles, no pain.

When my doctor told her I had CIP, she calmed down and had a good laugh about it.

After that, I got to watch the rest of the surgery.

I might be the first and only person in medical history

to witness surgery being performed on them.

As I was going to the hospital for follow-up exams,

I met a woman who had the same condition as me.

According to her, having CIP has two important benefits for women.

One, they don’t feel menstrual pain.

This is a great thing because, as you know, women have to deal with menstrual pain every month.

Another advantage women with CIP have is that they give birth without feeling any pain.

According to some experts, labor pain is the most intense in the world.

Therefore, women with pain insensitivity are really lucky in that way.

So what causes this condition?

Who has it?

Unfortunately, there are no answers to these questions yet.

But scientists agree that it’s a genetic disorder.

They even identified the gene that causes it.

But since very few people in the world have this condition, pharmaceutical companies

don’t spend money to develop drugs for it.

So there’s no cure for this disorder.

I have to live with this condition all my life.

Many people with CIP don’t live very long.

As I said earlier, aches and pains are our guardian angels.

It’s really dangerous to live without them.

You are so lucky to feel them.

I hope you found my story interesting.