>>>Keep that in mind the next time you're seriously burned.
>>Good thing I also have a freakishly high pain threshhold.
>>"Fuck, that nail went through my foot... This is going to suck."

I'm familiar with the high pain threshold; the odd thing is that while big hurts don't really bother me (except for occasional spurts of pain to remind me that I am, in fact, still injured), very minor hurts, like paper cuts or hangnails, are what bother the hell out of me. A paper cut on the wrong part of my finger makes typing excruciating; last week, I cracked one of my finger nails, and the sensation of the edge of it poking into the side of my finger was agony. (The one exception to this rule are the cuts and burns I get from cooking; I rarely even noticed that there's been any damage until I find the healing wound a couple of days later and remember a knife skidding into my finger.) Yet I remember that when I split the skin on the back of my head open at the age of nine and bled a pint or two all over myself and and my mother, it felt like a minor bang on the noggin; the main reason I wound up freaking out was just seeing that much blood pouring out of my body. (Wounds on the scalp don't clot, normally, so the bleeding took a long time to stop.) The stitches didn't bother me at all, and the whole incident (aside from leaving a very small bald spot on the back of my head due to the scar) annoyed me the most because it meant that I couldn't go swimming for the next six weeks, which was most of the summer. A rather nasty burn on my forearm in high school (still have a visible scar) just made me swear a bit. A rather nasty ingrown toenail that resulted in infection and, ultimately, surgery, was a minor inconvenience; I barely noticed any pain during the entire ordeal, yet my father's then-wife (an RN) told me I should have been capable of a shambling stagger at best from pain. (The only time the pain from that kept me down was immediately after the surgery, when the wrappings -- which made my toe look remarkably like Fred Flinstone's -- put an inordinate amount of pressure on what was left of my toenail. Once the dressing was off, I was fine.)

On the heightened senses, I can relate, except for crappy vision (myopia and astigmatism, except that I have abnormally good night vision with or without corrective lenses); I've seriously considered LASIK and similar procedures, as wearing corrective lenses is a pain in the ass (glasses fog up and slip around on you; contacts get can get grungy, get lost, and sometimes force you to stop what you're doing to go clean something out of your eyes), and if effective cybernetic eyes hit the market I'd be first in line. While I'm not directly cognizant of the sound, I can tell when a dog whistle is being blown, as it sets my teeth on edge; I can hear computer monitors from across a busy room; I can feel (though not read) ink on paper; I can discern individual spices in many different foods. (And I'm not really partial to spicy food; personally, I find spicy heat obscures the flavor.)

-- Sean --

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