Growing up with an aunt who was born without a limb, was scary to say the least as a child. I was always afraid that when she held one of my baby sisters she would drop them because in my eyes I just couldn't imagine how a person functions without an arm. As I got older I began to wonder what it must feel like to be missing a piece of yourself when you never had it in the first place. And what was worse having had it and then losing one of your limbs. When i found out later that there was such a thing as a phantom limb it almost seemed unbelievable, how can a person whos lost a limb, or never had one to begin with feel something thats supposed to be gone. I find it interesting that before doctors really new where phantom pain was coming from they would cut off more of the limb to see if the pain would go away; it just shows how far we've come from hacking off to tricking the mind into believing that the limb isn't missing.
Before it was though that the sensation or pain came from the stump of amputated limb, when in actuality the pain was coming from only the relevant portion of the somatosensory cortex recognizing and becoming responsive to other inputs. In which case the feeling of the "limb" is actually coming from different parts of your body such as the face. The more I get into the reading for my physiological psychology class the more I feel grateful that i'm healthy and that my body is in one piece.
It must be hard for a person who has lost a piece of their body to feel the phantom limb. Having to face the fact that a piece of you is missing and that you will never get it back has to be really hard, but feeling it after is is already gone has to make things even harder. If this was me, I might feel as if the piece of me missing was still there or might one day be there again which of course would not be true but it would be hard to accept.
ReplyDeleteI remember hearing somewhere, that phantom limb was a result of poor surgery or the accident causing the loss of the limb, leaving the nerves at the end of the limb damaged, hence causing the sensation of having pain on the missing limb, but it has always intrigued me, how we, people can still feel a limb that is gone.
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