How can anyone wish pain for anyone?

Some 60 years ago they said that women don’t suffer because they can cry over the pain, or the cause of their pain. They said that men suffer because they don’t cry.

Some men suffer more than others. There are men who do cry. Yet they continue to suffer.

Le mal humain has made me suffer ever since I can remember. When the Allies celebrated victory, I went into the shell. I was unable to muster courage and strength to express disgust at the manner in which man made others suffer. War was the cause of misery and pain. Little did it matter who was right, who wrong. There was pain on both sides. With them, I suffered.

During my posting, many years later, at a US army kasserne in Munich, Germany for “Ferienarbeit,” the journalist in me led me to Dachau. Within hours I needed medical attention. Then followed several days of motherly care given by a senior hospital matron. The body’s system could not retain even the smallest morsel of food forced on me. I went into ascetic silence.

Why, I asked, why does man cause so much pain.

The visuals in Dachau haunt me to this day.


MARCH 2007, over 40 years after my deep Dachau angst, I chanced upon a weekend feature about a family in Bird Cove, Newfoundland in Canada’s Globe and Mail. Carolyn Abraham had the story of two of Verna Mahar’s three sons, most of all the eldest, Owen.

“From the time Owen was a baby he was a roughhouser -- banging his head against walls and table corners without a whimper. When he was a toddler he'd bite his fingers to the bone unless she made him wear mittens indoors. His lips she could do nothing about: Owen chewed them happily until they bled.”

Verna was perplexed.

"My husband and I didn't understand it. He didn't cry for nothing. We couldn't understand why he wasn't feeling."

"Didn't it hurt?" she'd ask the growing boy.

"No," Owen would say.

"Well why not?"

"I don't know, Ma."

The Globe and Mail report had a picture in which Owen Mahar held up a family photo of himself as a toddler. In the photo he wore mittens to protect him from chewing his fingers.

Verna and Tom Mahar, of Bird Cove, Newfoundland, have three children, and two of them have inherited two defective genes that cause the very rare condition called Congenital Indifference to Pain, or CIP.

Not until Owen was 3 -- the year he broke a bone in his foot and kept right on walking -- did the family receive an explanation. Doctors told them their son had a rare and storied disorder -- a genetic condition that prevents the ability to perceive pain. He is normal in every other way, able to distinguish hot from cold and pat from pinprick; only the sensation of pain does not register.

Owen registered no pain. For me, reading about Owen was painful.

Carolyn Abraham’s report though had a consoling side to it: Only 15 worldwide were known to be affected by congenital indifference to pain, or CIP, including Owen, now 20, and his brother Joshua. These patients have suffered without suffering -- double hip dislocations, lower-limb amputations, corneal abrasions, burns, stabs, gashes, head trauma and mutilating tongue-biting. A Swiss woman has experienced painless childbirth; one U.S. patient was able to undergo a cystoscopy, a painful exploratory bladder procedure, without anesthetic.

Researchers have discovered that primarily one gene has such a profound effect. James Henry, a renowned neurophysiologist who has studied pain for 30 years (not involved in this particular discovery) , said the unexpected importance of this single gene marks a "monumental turning point in our understanding of pain."

Scientists hope for the 20 to 30 per cent of the world's population who suffer chronic pain, "the discovery of this single gene may be a miracle if it can be translated into a new therapy."

Many disorders result in pain insensitivities, including leprosy and other conditions that leave patients unable to sweat or even sense when they have go to the bathroom. But an indifference to pain alone is much rarer.

There are only six or seven people left in Bird Cove who, like Owen Mahar, are in their 20s.

"I would have been gone long ago as well if I could go," Owen said. But he can't stand much longer than a few minutes and he can't sleep. And now, it's Owen who has a wish. "I wish I didn't feel pain any more."

Over the years, the mutant gene has meant he can feel pain.

And over all these years I have cried for those in pain. I wish there was no pain.

I wish there is no pain for Owens everywhere,
for those caught in ethnic violence in Africa,
in the long battles in Middle East,
in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan,
in America-ravaged Iraq,
and now in China-persecuted Tibet.

Just Nobody Now
justnobodynow@gmail.com