Martin Wagner
T. Hollis-Gines
ENG 101
4 September 2015
Relations to Another Human Being in Retrospect (Narrative)
An infant can cry as loud as 117 decibels, which is only 3 decibels lower than a jackhammer or a jet plane. One may assume that the sound of an infant crying, especially for a teenager like me sounds like the most annoying thing on the planet. Who wouldn’t think a baby was annoying when his/her cry can compete with a jackhammer? I was 14 when my nephew was born and I disliked him. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t dislike him as a person, I just disliked the crying, the defecating, and the constant attention he required. There was just something about him that I didn’t understand. Why did everyone think he was so cute? What about his ugly little feet entranced my mom and my sister? As a lifeless blob of unmovable, cooing flesh there was a little person minus the personality. All he did was sit there and look around like a boring piece of meat that was just boring. Like seriously boring.
I didn’t know this until I wrote this narrative but Dolorimetry “is a method of measuring intensity of pain perception in degrees ranging from unpleasant to unbearable by using heat applied to the skin as a gauge” (Merriam-Webster). My sister and I were talking at dinner one night and the subject of getting kicked in the balls and childbirth pain was brought up. I said that the pain of getting kicked in the junk is pretty bad but the pain happens all at once while my sister counters that childbirth is painful and happens over a long period of time which means that it is way more painful. It is a debatable possibility. There is still the simple fact that everyone feels pain differently, and what may hurt one person may not hurt another. But scientists try using dolorimetry to measure people’s pain thresholds.
My sister, Danielle, had her baby prematurely. I asked her how early and she told me, 7 weeks. Why do people talk about babies in weeks when...