A Scottish woman is one of only a handful of people in the world known to have a rare genetic mutation that causes her to barely feel any pain, geneticists found.
75-year-old Jo Cameron didn’t realize she was different until she underwent hand surgery at 65. She had an operation to remove a small bone from her thumb after it had become deformed by arthritis. Her doctor warned her that she may feel pain following the surgery, but she assured him no painkillers were necessary.
Her anaesthetist, Dr. Devjit Srivastava, sent her to pain geneticists at University College London (UCL) and Oxford University for some testing in 2013.
After six years of research, they found gene mutations which meant that she did not feel pain like most people.
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Cameron has “seen stress and has seen pain and what it does,” but has never experienced the extremes of rage, dread, grief, anxiety or fear, as suffering is but an “abstract” concept, she told The New Yorker.
She didn’t even feel pain during childbirth recalling “it was just strange, but I didn’t have pain. It was quite enjoyable really.”
