The Nurse Who Can Feel Your Pain

Megan Pohlmann has a rare neurological condition: when someone cuts themselves, she feels it; when a patient has a headache, her head throbs, too. What would life be like with a superpower like that?

- Maureen Seaberg

One night while working the late shift, Megan Pohlmann walked into the intensive care unit at St. Louis Children’s Hospital in Missouri. One baby was very sick and unable to sleep. As Pohlmann stood by his crib, trying to calm him, her head started throbbing so hard she found herself wanting to bang it against the wall to stop the pressure. “Wow,” she recalls saying to herself, “I wonder if this baby’s head hurts. And, if so, why? Because his diagnosis has nothing to do with headaches.”

Pohlmann told the doctors she thought the baby had a severe headache. Upon investigation, they found he was experiencing a littleknown side effect of his medication. They took him offthe drug, and when she saw the child again the following night, he was calm and cooing. He was, she recalls, “a different baby”.

Pohlmann is a skilled paediatric nurse. But there’s another reason she can decipher her patients’ pain: she feels it too. The 30-year-old has a rare neurological condition called mirrortouch synaesthesia, or MTS, which enables her to have a virtual mind meld with those around her. It’s an empathy so profound she can read a room when she walks into it, feel the emotions of strangers before they speak and even suffer the physical pain of another person’s injury.

“For me, if I see you, I know you,” Pohlmann says. And although that connection is most intense with those she has a close relationship with, it’s always there, whether she’s passing worried shoppers in a mall or standing in line with stressed-out travellers at an airport. “Just walking around every day I feel strangers hurting, and I feel it thoroughly and completely,”