Pain

I was wondering what I could draw today, in a very limited amount of time, while I was trying to get a roll out of the toaster oven. I ended up burning my finger because I wasn't paying attention. So I thought I'd use the opportunity for a teaching moment about pain. We have two types of nerves that carry pain from the site of the lesion to our brain. The first is called A delta. It is large and heavily myelinated (myelin is a fatty coating around the nerve that allows signals to travel very fast). The second type is C fiber which is smaller and unmyelinated.

This is why when you have a cut or burn you feel a sudden pain right where it happened (A delta fiber), then over the next few days you feel sore or achy in the general area (C fiber). It is also why, when you hurt yourself, you're able to have the thought "Oh great, now this is really going to hurt" before it really does. Because the C fiber pain hasn't arrived in your brain yet.