The other day I was trying to get to our local transfer station (a nice way of saying "dump") and had to connect my utility trailer to my van to haul away this garbage. The trailer was extremely full - I hadn't make a "transfer run" since November. It had stuff from my recent family room renovation, Christmas wrapping and boxes, old pool equipment, a dead body, general trash, among other things. The sucker was HEAVY. So I ended up pinching my thumb while connecting the trailer to my hitch. It hurt quite a bit, but it looked like I was just going to have a bruised nail on the thumb. Onward! To the transfer station!
A couple hours later my thumb was just screaming! Throbbing in pain and starting to swell pretty good. A few hours after that the nail was mostly black and the thumb looked like I had taken a hammer to it. I knew it would probably be ok in a day or two, but I was amazed at the pain that a little pinch caused. I couldn't even sleep because my brain kept focusing on the throbbing.
So why am I telling you this? Because after this little episode I can't even image what a REAL injury must feel like... I mean, I'm no He-Man but I think I handle pain pretty well. (By the way, what ever happened to He-Man? When does his comeback start? Care Bears came back strong. Cabbage Patch Kids staged a revival. GI Joe has a movie coming out this summer! What about He-Man? What about that diabolical Skeletor? Don't even get me started...). When someone gets into a car accident and get real injuries does their body just absorb the pain? My theory is that the body can only deal with x-amount of pain at one time. If you have a whole bunch all at once it get aggregated into "pain" and you deal with that level of pain. When you have only one injury your brain focuses on that pain and it is perceived as greater than it really is... What do you think? I'm pretty sure that I just invented that theory. It is based on real life experience, not some pansy laboratory experiment. Anyway, my thumb feels better today, and I'm gonna use my theory to justify how much it hurt the last two days so you all don't think I'm a total wuss.
By the way, I was leafing through a science book and came across Lou Gehrig's disease. I read up on it... man, that is one crazy illness. I think we've all heard of Lou Gehrig's disease, also known as Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), but do you REALLY know what it does? It is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. Motor neurons reach from the brain to the spinal cord and from the spinal cord to the muscles throughout the body. The progressive degeneration of the motor neurons in ALS eventually leads to their death. When the motor neurons die, the ability of the brain to initiate and control muscle movement is lost. With voluntary muscle action progressively affected, patients in the later stages of the disease may become totally paralyzed.
The end game is that the muscles the KEEP YOU ALIVE stop responding to the brain and you literally stop breathing because the lungs stop responding. That, my friends, must be the worst way to die. I can't imagine it. Survival rate is 3 - 5 years. Can yo imagine knowing that in 3 - 5 years your body is just going to stop working?? Sorry to be a downer, but I thought it was interesting to understand exactly what Lou Gehrig's disease actually is since it is so well known in the world - yet most people don't know what it actually is...
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