I believe I have a high pain threshold. I have read mentions of this in autism groups, but I don’t know how to gauge what is a high pain threshold since I can’t experience another person’s normal physical pain. The only direct reference I have received is from a doctor doing a procedure who said I have a high pain threshold.
Due to my issues with proprioception, the awareness of my body in space in relation to other objects, I bump into things a lot. Hubby will ask me about a big purple, yellow bruise and ask, “Owwww, how did you get that one?” My usual reply is, “I don’t know.” Evidently, I should have noticed at the time I hit something.
I know if something is serious because I am in pain right now. This is the story:
One of our daughters came to stay with us for a while with her cat, named “Cat.” Syracuse, our huge 20 lb+ Maine Coon cat, hates Cat with a fury. He will stop at nothing to attack her. Cat stays in our daughter’s room, but daughter left the door open last night, and the fight started. I jumped out of bed to stop the fight. I couldn’t find the water spray bottle, so I did like I usually do with Syracuse, I picked him up.
What was I thinking!?
Picking up a cat in a rage is a bad idea. He bit into my arm so hard that he tore a piece of my wrist open on the soft underside. Daughter got him out of her room with a broom. He bit into that broom and wouldn’t let go of it as daughter pulled him out.
In the bathroom some yellow fat drops were oozing out of the inch-long rip in my skin, which I was quite fascinated with. It hurt, but it should have hurt a lot. Hubby cleaned it up and pulled the skin together with band-aids. I wanted to look at the cut.
Today it hurts like hell. I thought at the time I should have gotten stitches, but I don’t think that is the problem. It’s swelling and getting red on the whole bottom side of my wrist, and the veins leading to the cut are throbbing, so I suppose I have an infection.
After I’m done writing, hubby is going remove the band-aids, clean the area, and put hydrogen peroxide on it to kill some infection. It’s quite fascinating to watch hydrogen peroxide foam up on a cut. Maybe you think I’m morbid for being interested in big cuts and hydrogen peroxide, but I get fascinated with the littlest things. I have seen this as a regular thing in children, but perhaps the autistic ones don’t want to be robbed of their fascination by a band-aid.
Knowing that I sometimes don’t feel pain that I should prompts me to be more aware of even a twinge of pain somewhere because it could be something a little more wrong. That does not mean living as a hypochondriac, as you can tell because I didn’t go get stitches, but it means that I have to be more aware.
I must mention that Syracuse is the cuddliest cat, so much so, that I call him “my baby.”
