Pain is there for a reason

I was watching "Grey's Anatomy" last night and they had a little girl on the show who had a disorder by which her body did not experience pain. I was thinking at first, "How nice would that be!?"

Since the girl couldn't feel pain, she thought she had super powers and would challenge people to hurt her. One little boy socked her in the stomach 50 times, once with a baseball bat. A bit freaked out by that story, the doctor runs a series of tests on her and finds that she has an incredible amount of internal bleeding.

They rush her into surgery and in all the frantic rush, the doctor utters a typically deep and piercing line, "She thought it was a super power to not feel anything, but pain is there for a reason."

Since then, that line has played over and over in my mind. "Pain is there for a reason." Pain, literally speaking, is the body's way of allerting the mind that something is wrong. Generally, it's so that we can take some sort of corrective action in efforts to not only fix the problem but to prevent it from becoming worse.

I think the same is true for emotional pain. Why do certain things hurt us so badly? Maybe it's our hearts way of allerting the mind to a deeper problem; something is wrong deep down inside and it needs to be dealt with. Emotional internal bleeding.

The initial symptoms are easy, but the diagnosis more difficult. Sometimes we have to put ourselves under the microscope and ex-ray the most hidden parts of who we are. Surgery is probably inevitable and recovery may prove to be the most challenging.

You could chose to live with the pain; decide that surgery and the complications that could arise (all the "what ifs") is just too great a risk. Or you can work through all that comes with tomorrow and resolve to live beyond the pain. You can't ignore the pain forever; eventually you are forced to make a decision.

It's never easy.