The fearless child who feels no pain
So they nervously watch her plunge full-tilt into a childhood deprived of natural alarms.
In the school cafeteria, teachers put ice in five-year-old Ashlyn's chilli. If her lunch is scalding hot, she'll gulp it down anyway.
In the playground, a teacher's aide watches Ashlyn from within 15 feet, keeping her off the jungle gym and giving chase when she runs. If she takes a hard fall, Ashlyn won't cry.
Ashlyn is among a tiny number of people in the world with anhidrosis, or CIPA a rare genetic disorder that makes her unable to feel pain.
"Some people would say that's a good thing. But it's not," says Tara Blocker, Ashlyn's mother at their home in Patterson, Georgia. "Pain's there for a reason. It lets your body know something's wrong and it needs to be fixed. I'd give anything for her to feel pain."
The untreatable disease also makes Ashlyn incapable of sensing extreme temperatures hot or cold meaning her body can't cool itself by sweating. Otherwise, her senses are normal.
It is not known how many people suffer from CIPA. A treatment centre in the US that specialises in CIPA and related disorders has 35 patients with the disease on file. Only 17 of them are from the US. Japan has the world's only association for CIPA patients. It has 67 members.
Ashlyn's father John and her mother were largely on their own in learning to cope with their daughter's strange indifference to injury. Many things they couldn't anticipate. Ashlyn's baby teeth posed big problems. She would chew her lips bloody in her sleep, bite through her tongue while eating, and once even stuck a finger in her mouth and stripped flesh from it.
Family photos reveal a series of these self-inflicted injuries. One picture shows Ashlyn in her Christmas dress, hair neatly coiffed, with a swollen lip, missing teeth, puffy eye and athletic tape wrapped around her hands to protect them. She smiles like a little boxer who won a prize bout.
Her first serious injury came at three, when she laid her hand on a hot pressure washer in the back garden. Ashlyn's mother found her staring at her red, blistered palm.
"It opens your eyes to things you wouldn't normally think about," said Tara Blocker. "If she sees blood, she knows to stop. There's only so much you can tell a five-year-old."
