Unveiling the Mystery of Phantom Pains

I can’t put into words the feeling I got when our family’s close friend, Mike Kyte, who had lost his arm. I don’t know how one would be able to continue their regular lives, without a limb that he used to use every day of his life. Even after he got back from the hospital, I remember Mike telling me that his arm still hurt. And that sometimes he could feel his fingers in that arm. Of course I thought he was just joking with me, but he keep telling me this time after time. After learning that he was sincere about the pain, I started to get confused. At first, I thought that the pains where just in his head, I mean, how could one have pain in something that no longer even exists? So I researched his condition and I found out that there was a name for what he was experiencing: it was called Phantom Pains.

I, not knowing what this was, became interested in the subject. I

wanted to know how it was possible that someone, like this family friend, could have pain in a limb that he no longer has. I asked my mom about it, and she told me that it was a pain you get in a body part that you no longer have. After she told me this, I wanted to know how it was possible that you could have a pain in a body part that you did not even have. So I decided to do a little research of my own to further answer my questions.
I researched the topic more, and found out that phantom pains are a pain that feels like it is coming from a body part that is no longer there. Doctors once believed that this post-amputation phenomenon was a psychological problem, but experts now recognize that these real sensations originate in the spinal cord and brain.
In order to explore this topic further I decided to talk to someone my dad knew, Mike Kyte, who had lost his arm last summer due to a log splitting accident. When I asked him if he knew what phantom pains were and if he experienced them, he told me yes. He said that although he had just lost his arm he was experiencing these pains. When explaining it to me he mentioned that it was more of a feeling instead of a pain.
I asked him if there was any particular time or activity he was doing that made these pains flare up.

He said that they mainly happen when he is doing something with his other hand. He told me that he would get the feeling that he would feel like the fingers in the hand that he had lost was grabbing something when he was working. I asked him if anyone had given him any ideas of treatments or medication that he could take to extinguish the pain. He told me that the only thing that anyone has mentioned was acupuncture. To get the pains to go away, for him, all he as to do is rub the remaining part of his arm for a while and the pains will go away after about five minutes.

Mike also has a prosthetic arm that allows him to do some of the things that he used to do when he had his arm. I asked if having the prosthetic arm has made a difference with the phantom pain and he said yes. He told me that with the prosthetic, it now makes the pains more realistic and often now that he is using that “arm” again. At the end of my interview, he mentioned that I might want to talk to Edger Burr who had lost a

leg.
After hearing what Mike had to say, I decided that I should talk to Edger Burr, who had lost his leg due to a complication in a knee replacement. ¬¬¬¬Edger currently lives, and owns, at Tender Care Assisted Living Home. When I asked Edger if he had phantom pains, he said that he did but they were not pains but more of a feeling. I asked him to explain and he said that nothing hurt and that it was just a feeling. I asked where this feeling was, and he said that it was in the big toe of the foot that he lost.