Pain Relievers

Steven Pete has broken 70 bones—and never felt a thing. Now scientists hope his freak genetic condition will help people with the opposite issue: constant agony.

- Erika Hayasaki From Wired

ON A SCALE OF ONE TO TEN, how would you rate your pain? Would you say it aches or stabs? Does it burn, or does it pinch?

Steven Pete has no idea how you feel. Sitting in a café in Longview, Washington, he tells me he cannot fathom aches or pinches, much less the searing scourge of peripheral neuropathy that keeps millions of people awake at night or hooked on pills. He was born with a rare neurological condition called congenital insensitivity to pain, and for 37 years, no matter the wound, he has hovered at or near a one on the pain scale. Because he never learned to avoid injury, which is the one thing pain is really good for, he gets hurt a lot. When I ask how many bones he has broken, he lets out a quick laugh.

“I haven’t actually done the count yet,” he says. “But probably somewhere around 70 or 80.”

A few years ago, Steven noticed that the movement in his left arm and shoulder felt off. His back felt funny too. He got an MRI. The doctor looked at the results and stared at his patient in disbelief.“You’ve got three fractured vertebrae.” It Pam was turned out that Steven had broken his back eight months earlier while inner-tubing down a snowy hill.

Throughout his body today, Steven feels “a weird radiating sensation,” as he describes it, an overall discomfort but not quite pain as you and I know it. He and others born with his condition have been compared to superheroes; he even owns a framed sketch of a character in full body armor, with the words “Painless Pete.” But Steven knows better. If he could feel pain, he says, he would probably be constrained to a bed.