Today I was talking with one of my patients who is in her seventies. She was very preoccupied with death. She was having anticipatory anxiety of the thought of dying. “Will it hurt?” she wondered. I honestly don’t know. As far as I am concerned, I have not been dead yet. But this made me think of what I’ve experienced in the past. As far as we know, everyone on this Earth has been born, and for sure, we will all die someday. I’ve never seen a corpse in pain. However, I’ve seen hundreds of people that are alive in pain. This made me think of the miracle of birth. Think about this for a second. Fetuses feel pain intrauterine. This has been proven by sonogram studies. Pinch a fetus intrauterine, and it will react to pain. Then imagine an eight pound baby coming through the birth canal. The cervix can dilate up to ten centimeters. Go get a ruler and see how small ten centimeters is. Can you visualize all the squeezing this baby has to go through to poke its head out to the World? Once it does get out, the baby starts screaming his heart out. People surrounding the baby are full of joy, but have you ever thought how the baby feels? I bet if you started pinching the baby, he would react to pain. After thinking about this for awhile, I thought that no one I know ever remembers the day they were born or recalls any pain associated with this. Some can argue that the under developed brain of the baby cannot make an association of the feeling of pain since it has not felt pain before. Most of our emotions are learned throughout our lives. Pain must have been the first one!
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