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Nov. 1st, 2004 01:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theweaselkingFive-year-old girl is completely incapable of feeling heat, cold, or pain
In the school cafeteria, teachers put ice in 5-year-old Ashlyn's chili. If her lunch is scalding hot, she'll gulp it down anyway.
Ashlyn is among a tiny number of people in the world known to have congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis, or CIPA -- a rare genetic disorder that makes her unable to feel pain.
The untreatable disease also makes Ashlyn incapable of sensing extreme temperatures -- hot or cold -- disabling her body's ability to cool itself by sweating. Otherwise, her senses are normal.
In Patterson, a rural town of 800 people in southeast Georgia, John and Tara Blocker had no idea the disorder existed before they took Ashlyn to the doctor for a bloodshot, swollen left eye when she was 8 months old.
The doctor put drops in Ashlyn's eye to stain any particles that might be irritating it. The infant smiled and bounced in her mother's lap while the dye revealed a massive scratch across her cornea.
Ashlyn's baby teeth posed big problems. She would chew her lips bloody in her sleep, bite through her tongue while eating, and once even stuck a finger in her mouth and stripped flesh from it.
Family photos reveal a series of these self-inflicted injuries. One picture shows Ashlyn in her Christmas dress, hair neatly coifed, with a swollen lip, missing teeth, puffy eye and athletic tape wrapped around her hands to protect them. She smiles like a little boxer who won a prize bout.
In the school cafeteria, teachers put ice in 5-year-old Ashlyn's chili. If her lunch is scalding hot, she'll gulp it down anyway.
Ashlyn is among a tiny number of people in the world known to have congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis, or CIPA -- a rare genetic disorder that makes her unable to feel pain.
The untreatable disease also makes Ashlyn incapable of sensing extreme temperatures -- hot or cold -- disabling her body's ability to cool itself by sweating. Otherwise, her senses are normal.
In Patterson, a rural town of 800 people in southeast Georgia, John and Tara Blocker had no idea the disorder existed before they took Ashlyn to the doctor for a bloodshot, swollen left eye when she was 8 months old.
The doctor put drops in Ashlyn's eye to stain any particles that might be irritating it. The infant smiled and bounced in her mother's lap while the dye revealed a massive scratch across her cornea.
Ashlyn's baby teeth posed big problems. She would chew her lips bloody in her sleep, bite through her tongue while eating, and once even stuck a finger in her mouth and stripped flesh from it.
Family photos reveal a series of these self-inflicted injuries. One picture shows Ashlyn in her Christmas dress, hair neatly coifed, with a swollen lip, missing teeth, puffy eye and athletic tape wrapped around her hands to protect them. She smiles like a little boxer who won a prize bout.