In 1984 on the street in Santa Cruz, California a man asked me if I had much pain. Unlike many of the visitors to these boards I didn't, and told him so. But right about then I began to feel more pain in areas of my body below my normal sensation level, a line just above my nipples down. Agnostic as I describe myself, I'm also (more or less ironically) superstitious enough to associate the question and answer and the subsequent change.

Soon after LOVE NOTE ends, I developed epididymitis. The epididymis is (more or less--I have a layman's grasp and suspect it inexact) a long stringy tube through which sperm is carred from the prostate to the urethra. (Its analogs in a woman are Fallopian tubes.) For an able-bodied man it must be at times excruciating to have epididymitis. Remarkably, it was at times excruciating for me too. I treated it with Cipro for a month, but was told that the epididymis is tightly wound and that antibiotics have trouble penetrating it to work on the villainous (from my point of view) bacteria. The result of my Cipro use was that many of my bladder organisms became Cipro-resistant. My epididymitis continued. (I digress, but I'll finish the digression parenthetically, then get back to my topic, feeling. My urologist mentioned that an epidydimectomy could be done but that it might not work and he wouldn't do it. I went to another doc who also thought it might and was worth a try. He removed the affected epididymis, my left, and the pain stopped. Both urologists had agreed that my urethral catheter might make it more difficult to keep my remaining epididymis infection-free and, after having had a urethral catheter for nearly 26 years, I have since used a supra-pubic one. ((I hoped abandoning the urethral catheter might let me ejaculate; it didn't.)) I have also continued to have increased bladder/bowel/penis pain ((distinguishing them is iffy for a guy like me)), not of the intensity I had in the throes of epididymitis but significant--though with for the most part negligible diminution of my quality of life.)

Now, back to my story and question. As I was playing in those LOVE NOTE years, I was gratified at the over-all increase in what I felt, and wondered whether I was establishing new sensation-pathways. Our brains are created with tremendous potential for redundancy. When a part of the brain that usually governs an activity is damaged, often a different part can take over and function as well or nearly as well as did the affected part. Does the body have similar redundancy? My central nervous system blocked by my SCI, was my autonomic system "learning" to let me feel? And, too, was I, in increasing my genital sensitivity to pleasure, perhaps also increasing its sensitivity to pain?

I don't know. Does anyone? Has one or more of you noticed that you've come to acquire sensitivity you'd been told you wouldn't that you think might be attributable to your having established alternate pathways?

V1NC3 - "I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU MEAN"