"She’d been told that childbirth was going to be painful. But as the hours wore on, nothing bothered her — even without an epidural.
“I could feel that my body was changing, but it didn’t hurt me,” recalled the woman, Jo Cameron, who is now 71. She likened it to “a tickle.” Later, she would tell prospective mothers, “Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as people say it is.”
It was only recently — more than four decades later — that she learned her friends were not exaggerating.
Rather, there was something different about the way her body experienced pain: For the most part, it didn’t."
...
Eventually he found what he was looking for on a gene the scientists call FAAH-OUT. All of us have this gene. But in Ms. Cameron’s, “the patient has a deletion that removes the front of the gene,” he said. Additional blood work confirmed this hypothesis, he said.
Ms. Cameron said she had been shocked by the interest in her case. Until her conversation with Dr. Srivastava, pain was not something she thought about. Perhaps it helped that even though she burned and cut herself quite often, her injuries rarely left scars — something else that scientists believe is connected to the mutation."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/health/woman-pain-anxiety.html
“I could feel that my body was changing, but it didn’t hurt me,” recalled the woman, Jo Cameron, who is now 71. She likened it to “a tickle.” Later, she would tell prospective mothers, “Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as people say it is.”
It was only recently — more than four decades later — that she learned her friends were not exaggerating.
Rather, there was something different about the way her body experienced pain: For the most part, it didn’t."
...
Eventually he found what he was looking for on a gene the scientists call FAAH-OUT. All of us have this gene. But in Ms. Cameron’s, “the patient has a deletion that removes the front of the gene,” he said. Additional blood work confirmed this hypothesis, he said.
Ms. Cameron said she had been shocked by the interest in her case. Until her conversation with Dr. Srivastava, pain was not something she thought about. Perhaps it helped that even though she burned and cut herself quite often, her injuries rarely left scars — something else that scientists believe is connected to the mutation."
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/health/woman-pain-anxiety.html