Page 89 of My Dark Horse Prince

“Ten minutes, then.”

He shakes his head. “No way. You agreed to half an hour.”

Backpedaling now would be even harder, so I just reach out for him again. I expect to feel his shoulder, his bicep, or maybe his perfectly sculpted chest.

He takes my hand in his.

It reminds me of that time in the car, and my heart pulses in my chest. No. I can’t do this. “I wish you were a horse.”

And then he is, a gorgeous, breathtaking horse who’s willing to risk his own freedom for me.

But a tiny part of me wishes he was still a man.

17

I’ve wasted an entire week, because neither Charlemagne nor Kristiana will let me ride until I’ve gotten my leg brace. So here I am, sitting in a doctor’s office yet again. There isn’t much to do in doctor’s offices, but they usually have some interesting reading. Some people like to read celebrity magazines.

That’s not my thing.

With Kris and Aleks meeting with some important officials, they forgot about my appointment. That means I actually snuck away by myself today. Kris will likely be upset when she finds out—I feel like I’m in witness protection right now—but it’s nice to be free, even if it’s only for a bus ride and an hour long wait in a doctor’s office.

Usually I manage to find a medical magazine to read. Sure, they can be a little confusing sometimes, but I’ve also learned a lot. When you have a major injury, the more you know about how science and medicine work, the better you can advocate for yourself. In a country with mostly socialized medicine, that matters more than you’d think.

Today, when I pick up the newest publication of Internal Medicine Europe, one article jumps out at me. “Pain: Is it Real?”

Of course it’s real.

Right?

It has to be.

I’ve dealt with pain intimately for years, so I know just how real it is. So many human decisions are made because of pain, either as a direct response to it, or out of the fear of causing more. Inexplicably, people see capitulating to it as a sign of weakness—a flaw. But it’s also the primary motivating force for most humans.

This article asks some interesting questions, and answers them with even more shocking examples. It shares quite a few case studies, but two really stand out. They both involve construction workers who were making use of nail guns. It’s a tool that dramatically reduces the amount of work and time required for building a new structure, but they’re apparently pretty common causes of injury worldwide.

The first person was using a nail gun to put boards down on a floor or something. Sweaty palms plus a nail gun were a bad combo, and a nail shot right though his boot. Of course, with a lot of workers on the site, plenty of people came over to freak out with him. According to the case notes, half a dozen people accompanied him to the emergency room where he was cared for, and everyone was suitably distressed about his significant injury. Upon examination, the injured man rated his pain as a ten out of ten. I doubt many people would be inclined to disagree. After all, a nail through the foot may not be something we’ve personally experienced, but it sounds pretty painful.

The second case was a worker who was nailing drywall into wall studs. In this case, something caused the gun to slip and pivot so that it was facing toward him. I’m sure that was plenty frightening, but when the gun fired, the worker saw the nail shoot past his face. His injuries were sustained from the weight and force of the gun slamming against his jaw. It busted his lip, and he had blood in his mouth, but it wasn’t major. He took himself to the emergency room, declined any X-rays, and left the ER with an ice pack. He rated his pain as a two out of ten, most of it from a headache the blow caused, and agreed to take over-the-counter pain medication as needed.

The article then circles back to the guy who had the nail in his foot. It alternates between the two cases, because they both involve nail guns. Apparently all the screaming caused things to take a bit longer, but eventually they had to cut the boot off of his foot. The fascinating part is that, once they removed it, they discovered that the nail actually went through the space between two of his toes. He had a tiny scratch on the side of his big toe that barely even bled enough to turn part of his sock red.

That’s it.

That was the extent of his injury. A minuscule scratch a small child could easily handle without tears.

But here’s the important point.

His ten out of ten rating for the pain was, as far as anyone can tell, quite real. But that pain was caused not by the injury itself, but by his belief that there was a significant injury. Once he realized he was fine, the only pain he had was from his wounded pride. I’m sure the other guys who went in with him were not very kind, but the article believes that the pain he felt was real. Being a tough guy, he would not have wanted to blow that injury out of proportion, even when he knew it was a nail to the foot.

And now we’re back to the follow-up care for the guy who saw the nail fly past his face. He went almost a week before finally checking in with his dentist for chronic, low-level tooth pain. He was convinced that the impact from the nail gun caused some kind of trauma to the root of one of his teeth and after nearly a week of persistent irritation, his wife made him get it looked at.

Only, when the dentist took a look, he discovered that a two-and-a-half-inch nail had gone through his mouth, into his jaw, and had been lodged there for a week already. The minor pain the man had been enduring, and treating with over-the-counter pain meds, that he was still rating as a chronic one to two, was in fact caused by a nail lodged in his head.

Holy cow, right?

The guy who had nothing wrong was in terrible pain. The man who had a legitimately horrifying injury was dealing with nothing more than mild pain.

If pain is the body’s signal to the person that something is wrong, that there’s a problem, then what does this tell us?

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