Pain or Pleasure?

When is pain not pain?

Everyone knows about pain that hurts--Almost all pain hurts, and sometimes horribly. I am no stranger to that, but in addition to your "standard" pain, I sometimes get pains that feel strangely good.

How is this possible?

How can it be pain if it feels good? Pain should feel good or it wouldn't be pain, right? I spent a long time puzzling over this yesterday at work, and I still have trouble relating it in words. People have trouble with units of measure when it comes to right or wrong, black or white, pain or pleasure, and many other similar opposites. Without one, we would find it impossible to accurately describe or measure the other.

So how is it that I have pains that border on pleasure?

They're always the same kind of pain--A kind of dull throb deep inside--Possibly bone deep. I almost always get them in my feet or legs when I get them, but sometimes hands. I don't know when I first noticed these things, but I do remember getting them when I worked at a desk job at Boeing. If they were at the "right" intensity, the aches felt strangely relaxing. If the intensity was just slightly increased, it gave me "restless leg" where no matter what I did I couldn't get comfortable and couldn't stop shuffling myself around. When that happened, it was very, very irritating. The throbbing ache was very random and had no correlation with heartbeat or anything. I think those events back then usually signaled the onset of another herpes breakout as I recall. Those breakouts usually manifested themselves in quite a variety of ways before they actually happened. The internal dull throb was one of them.

Here's the closest I can get to setting up a scenario that people may have experienced in their past: You hit your hand (not finger) with a hammer, hard enough that it really hurts. Everything stops--You drop you tool of destruction and hold onto your injured hand with a grimace on your face. After a few seconds, the pain subsides, and there is a small window where the pain actually becomes a warm feeling that sort of floods the area. You sigh and pick up the hammer and resume your work, left with a throbbing reminder to be more careful. It's that short-lived area between "warmness" and throbbing that I'm talking about. I've had the same thing happen when I bang my knee real hard or something similar. While cussing with a grimace on your face and rubbing the injured knee, the warm/dull throb transition occurs and feels strangely good for a short time.
The feeling I've just described is what I'm experiencing now, only it lasts and lasts. Remember I talked a few days ago about popping my left ankle going down the stairs? All day yesterday while I was at work (I was standing or leaning all day, running the press) it was happening. There were just a few times where it throbbed slightly past the "pleasure point" and made me jump or shuffle my weight, but for the most part it was nonstop all day. Even now as I write, it's sending its happy little throbbing feeling to the receptors in my unusual brain.

Hey, maybe my receptor is off and needs to be calibrated! Well to tell you the truth, I don't want it to be calibrated. It affords me enough of an input to tell me to favor my ankle, but yet it gives me a sort of reward for putting up with it.

Is that twisted or what?