Being numb...

photo taken from here.

Being numb… That is literally thick-skinned… Not feeling when one is hurt and has got a wound or even is bleeding…

A man cross-cutting firewood in a crosscutting machine, suddenly realising he has hurt himself in the machine. Worried going into the house with bleed dripping on the floor all his way in.

This was not the first time something like this happened. But was it maybe the last?

The first sign of a metastasis in the brain, a metastasis from malign melanoma… Located in the parts steering the right hand, arm, leg… Affecting the fine motor movements, so he later (when the metastasis had progressed further) started dropping the spoon when he ate breakfast, the glass (almost) when he drank milk or juice to lunch. When this happened he got very upset and got an outburst of self-blame:

“I'll kill myself!!!”

All around got horrified and felt pain?

The man which in his 84^th year still chopped firewood, cut the grass (an enormous lawn)… Always the physically strong one, being able to work hard, carrying heavy things, despite his work he earned his and a big family’s living on had been far from these things… On the contrary.

Not the one that had been freezing either ever. Not understanding why (some) in his environment was freezing, was cold…

Incapable of imaging how it was for others, with a chilly house, not so warm showering-water in the morning (and this wasn’t because the economy was bad, not because they couldn’t afford warming the house sooner in the morning or in the evening when it was bedtime, or warming water), when some were fairly tired and even more frozen. Even if his oldest daughter who could and still can walk on cold floor barefoot, and walks barefoot out as much as she can, was frozen… Oh, poor her, wasn’t it? (ironically and sarcastically).

From where that numbness?? Was he born like that? Or how had he become like that?

Are some born more thick-skinned than others?

Later his oldest daughter (for instance) was drawn to people with thick skins? Not always the most sensitive!? Some of them a bit “clumsy” even? With not so much fingerspitzgefühle? Why was that?

But she didn’t show much of this to the outer world? Or very little? One couldn’t see it on her? Healthy looking, smiling, often glad, patient, glittering eyes?

Some evening thoughts triggered by something else I wrote this morning somewhere else…

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I searched information at the net about these things (small children and their sensitivity to pain, found for instance this. And it stood a lot about pain and stress... Came to think about the Swedish researcher Kerstin Uvnäs Moberg and her findings (read here and here for instance) on oxytocin. See her book ”Lugn och beröring - oxytocinets läkande verkan i kroppen” (Natur och Kultur) which I have in my bookcase and have read.

See Bosch on touch...