Life without Pain (HSAN)

Life without pain

What would you do in order not to feel pain? It might sound like a movie or a military experiment to create a super soldier never to feel pain in the combat field in order to win a war, but in reality there is a disorder known as hereditary sensory autonomic neuropathy (HSAN). Sometimes when people feel pain they might complain or ask why do we have to feel pain? Why does are body react to pain? In reality pain is what keeps us alive and keeps you from doing reckless activities that can kill you or harm yourself. Feeling pain is just a way of life living without pain is something like a curse since you will never know a limit to control yourself.

 HSAN is a group of genetic disorders characterized by 5 different degrees of sensory loss with varying degrees of autonomic dysfunction it affects the development of sensory and autonomic nerves. The type 1 is one of the most common condition usually starts at early childhood or adulthood and is characterized by nerve abnormalities in the legs and feet, many people with this condition have tingling, weakness, and a reduced ability to feel pain and sense hot and cold. Without having this the child without supervision will be exposed to the dangerous of like and would have to be looked after since they will not be able to control themselves from causing harm to their own bodies.

 As the disorder progresses the sensory abnormalities can affect the hands, arms, shoulders, abdomen and spread to the whole body. Individual also experience muscle wasting and weakness as they get older. It also affects the body’s reflexes from protecting its self from harm as you already know when something is going to hit you in the face your body will automatically raise an arm or move one way or the other to avoid getting hit but in this case it will not and will be exposed to dangers that could be avoided.  So their bodies will not be able to distinguish pain and since it is not seeing or feeling the pain the person will be at a higher risk of causing harm to their body.

This condition is in most cases inherited by a parent which means that an affected person has one parent with the condition. This disorder will take patience from the parents so that they could support the child and help them from doing causing harm to themselves also they will need to examine the child daily to make sure they do not have any cut and blisters that could get infected and if not treated could lead to something much serious. I see this as something very sad that could happen to someone so you ng because as a child all you want to do it have fun and play around and you know while playing you will get hurt and injured but that is just a way of life you will learn from your mistake and be prepared in the future not to do the same things or avoid doing something because there will be consequences, but with this disorder I see it as stealing a child’s childhood with less life learning experiences so life without pain will be more like a curse than a cure.  

Alzheimer's Disease

Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease is a type of dementia that causes problems with memory, thinking and behavior. The symptoms usually develop slowly and get worse over time becoming severe enough to interfere with daily tasks. Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease where dementia symptoms gradually worsen over a number of years. The disease gradually progresses to more serious memory loss, confusion, depression, restlessness, hallucinations, delusions, sleeplessness and loss of appetite.  With Alzheimer’s the total brain size shrinks the tissues have progressively fewer nerve cells and connections. The most common early symptom of Alzheimer’s is difficulty remembering newly learned information.

You would have the person asking repetitive questions or carrying on the same conversations over and over. They will misplace personal items, forget events or appointments and even get lost on familiar routes. People who suffer from this lose the ability to carry on a conversation, respond to their environment and every day tasks. Their memory and alertness vary substantially from time to time, suggesting that many of their problems result from malfunctioning neurons, rather than the death of neurons but the dying or brain cells are still present. It would also affect reasoning skills and their judgment by making them perform poor decision making ability and poor understanding of safety risks so most people need to be taken care of by family member or in facilities were they will be looked over at in a daily bases.

Hemispherectomy

Hemispherectomy is the disconnecting or removing one side of the brains hemisphere from the other. It is only considered for patients which are usually children who have severe epilepsy with seizures on one side of the brain. Epilepsy is a disorder of the brain’s electrical system and abnormal electrical impulses causes brief change in movement, behavior, sensation, or awareness. The seizures may last from a couple of seconds to a few minutes depending on the condition of the person. The seizures may occurs many times during a day depending on the severity of the condition. The person will lose control of what they were doing and could be very dangerous because could fall and make things much worse.

Many people try and control this situation with medication which at times it does work but with other more severe cases the doctors could only recommend a hemispherectomy and hope that it all goes well so that the person could have a chance to live a normal life. The remaining functioning portion of the brain will take over the tasks that were previously controlled by the part of the brain that has been removed. This is describe as brain plasticity were the brain has the ability to change and adapt to the new changes that have occurred. Plasticity is defined as the brain’s capacity to shape by experience, its capacity to learn and remember and ability to reorganize and recover after injury. So once the hemispherectomy has been preform the brain will realize that there has been a change done and will do all that is need to organize it’s self so that it could function like it is supposed to.

You have to take into consideration that by doing this procedure the body will lose some functions and body movement that may never come back on the side opposite of the operation even after therapy. The results of hemispherectomy are actually quite good and patients will experience complete or nearly complete seizure control which is always a good thing to look forward for. Some people will still need to take anti-seizure medication but eventually be able to stop or reduce the dosage to a low minimum.