Women who feel NO PAIN giving birth
For some, it’s an agony they never want to repeat. But a new study shows that for one in 100 mothers, having a baby is anything but hard labour…
FOR many women, the experience of childbirth leaves a scar deep in their minds. Tales of 32 hours in screaming agony and desperate pleas for an epidural, with all thoughts of a natural birth abandoned, are all too common.
So when Jo Cameron was first pregnant aged 30, she fully intended to take any pain relief on offer. Except that this labour, and her second one years later, passed without her needing so much as a sniff of gas and air, never mind any stronger form of pain relief. ‘I had sensations,’ says Jo. ‘I could feel my body stretching. I can only describe it as the feeling you get when you put your fingers in your mouth to stretch it into a funny face as a child.
‘But there was no pain. I thought it was completely normal. I just thought this was “me” and that other women simply had worse symptoms.’ Many mother will tell you childbirth without pain isn’t ‘normal’. Yet, miraculously, for Jo it was. Pain is not part of her world. The mother of two, now 72, has never had a headache. She didn’t realise she had broken her arm for three days, only discovered she’d suffered an enormous flesh-tearing burn hours after spilling boiling coffee on herself and happily continued her walks in the Scottish mountains on an arthritic hip bone that had all but disintegrated. ‘I regularly burn and cut myself badly and I don’t know I’m doing it,’ she says.
Her seemingly superhuman ability is down to a complex genetic condition of which Jo, it was revealed in the British Journal of Anaesthesia, is the first known carrier. She has a mutation in the FAAH gene, which picks up pain signals from injury, and a partial deletion of a previously unidentified sister gene called FAAH- OUT, which is believed to help switch on the FAAH gene.
As such, she is a medical phenomenon,
uniquely protected from pain. But it appears Jo is not entirely alone. Researchers at Cambridge university have found that roughly one in 100 women have another genetic quirk that means they have no pain during childbirth.
described as a ‘ natural epidural’, this variation in a gene called KCnG4 seems to make it more difficult for pain signals to pass to the brain, meaning the bearers have a higher pain threshold.
However, though they could bear more pain than you or I — being able to withstand tests such as touching a hot metal block or plunging their hands into ice cold water — these women did still experience it.
Jo can only imagine what these sensations might be like.
Astonishingly, until six years ago, Jo — a retired teacher who is married to Jim, 73, a retired headmaster — had no idea her impermeable pain threshold was a medical condition, assuming she was accident-prone and lucky. It was only after an anaesthetist at her local hospital became bewildered that she could cope with an agonising operation to fix an arthritic thumb without so much as a paracetamol, that she was referred for tests. When doctors at The Molecular nociception Group at university College london, which focuses on genetic approaches to understanding the biology of pain and touch, told her she had a never- seen-before gene deletion, everything slotted into place. ‘ My first reaction was that I wasn’t stupid or clumsy,’ she says. ‘There was a reason for it.’
Twenty people have since come forward to report similar conditions, and Jo hopes her case will help doctors develop new treatments for people suffering from chronic pain.
Jo, who lives in the village of Whitebridge, scotland, with Jim, has two children from her first marriage — Jeremy, 43, and Amy, 30.
Throughout her childhood, Jo was covered in cuts and bruises from accidents her brain never registered, so she couldn’t learn not to repeat them. ‘I assumed I was clumsy but very fit, which was why I didn’t get aches and pains,’ she says.
she was eight when she broke her arm roller- skating. ‘I carried on and didn’t say anything,’ recalls Jo. ‘Three days later, Mum said my arm was a funny shape. My Gp said I’d broken it.’
It sounds incredible that no one thought to question Jo’s extreme resilience. ‘ Mum accepted it — she was quite pragmatic,’ she says. ‘ she’d ask if I wanted medicine; I’d say no and she’d leave it.’
surely her midwife at least was surprised that her patient appeared so unflummoxed by labour? ‘When you don’t complain, no one is going to ask you why, are they?’ says Jo. neither was sleep deprivation in early motherhood an issue — Jo’s condition means she never gets tired or sleeps for longer than six hours.
The biggest test to her unassailable optimism came when her first husband died when their daughter was only one.
The tragedy would have destroyed many women, but Jo’s emotional resilience gave her the strength to carry on.
‘I was very sad, but practical,’ she recalls. ‘I don’t suddenly go hysterical. I’m very even.’
Jim, whom she married in 1994, has a ‘ normal’ pain threshold. ‘ He gets man flu,’ she says. ‘He’ll stub his toe and say “ow!”’
Three years ago, after Jo’s car overturned twice and plunged into a ditch, it was a badly bruised Jo who comforted the man whose vehicle had crashed into hers. ‘I was so calm. people couldn’t understand why I wasn’t angry.’
of course, without pain to act as a precursor, more serious illness can remain undetected, as Jo discovered at the age of 65, when an arthritic hip disintegrated without her realising anything was wrong.
‘My daughter said I was walking in a funny way and my left hip would click, but I ignored it,’ says Jo, who went to her Gp three times to report her condition, and was told each time to come back when it was painful — which, of course, it never was. It was only on her fourth visit in 2013 that she was referred to hospital, where an Xray found her hip bone was ‘as bad as it gets’ and she was given a hip replacement. ‘ I’d begun to think there was something seriously wrong with me,’ she says. ‘But when they said they’d found this deletion that had never been found before, my husband said straight away that it explains everything.’
Jo’s family were then all tested for the gene mutation. Her mother, who died two years ago aged 100, tested negative, as did her daughter, but her son has the deletion in the FAAH-OUT gene, but not the mutation in the FAAH. ‘ He feels less pain,’ says Jo.
Although the increased risk of injury and undetected illness doesn’t concern her, she admits that her worried family now watch her ‘like a hawk’.
Although she may get no warning when her time is up, she doesn’t fear death.
‘everyone has to go at some stage,’ she says, adding: ‘ My philosophy is to be happy until something bad happens and don’t worry about anything.’
Here, two other women tell their stories.
‘ I had no pain but thought it was completely normal...’