Alicornutopia

...pain’s kind of an abstraction now. When I go to the hospital these days, I have to exaggerate what pain I’m feeling, because I realized after a few times that they were asking if it hurt, and my definition of hurt and pain is not theirs anymore. I can see clearly, and I can think about things, and I call that not being hurt, even with a hole in my arm or a knife cut that needs stitches.

I’d call it a superpower, if I didn’t make an effort to remember how I got it, and how truly useless it is, and how dangerous. But I have it.

Link is here. Yes, I'm aware that this is a petty reaction to someone who's experienced an unreasonable amount of pain in his life, but it's what I immediately thought after reading.

Wow. I didn't know you could acquire effective pain asymbolia within medically achievable levels of discomfort. I made that up and covered my tracks by putting it in a different species with a nonexistent condition.

Huh.

That's some combination of awesome and terrible, but it's certainly a thing. I occasionally have kidney stones myself, and I can certainly attest that it completely remodels your pain processing. It's, like... I had a pain scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being unbearable incapacitating pain, like from a migraine. Then, I had a kidney stone, and experienced a new 10. Later, I realized that the old 10 didn't really deserve more than a 5. After experiencing that kind of pain, the new 5 isn't nearly as relevant, and is actually something that can be worked through; any lesser pains than that are even less relevant. Almost any 'normal' pain I now run into is a minor irritation, instead of something that urgently demands my attention; an itch I'd like to scratch instead of something that actually hurts. I can still notice lesser pains, and they're still somewhat unpleasant, but they simply don't affect me as much as they would have before I had kidney stones.