I FEEL YOUR PAIN

WHEN THE MAN DIED, IT WAS AS IF ALL JOEL’S OWN ORGANS HAD COME TO A STANDSTILL

IN 2007 when Joel Salinas was at medical school in Miami, a Code Blue emergency was called in the hospital where he was in his first week of training – a cardiac arrest.

Joel arrived to find a man lying in the corridor being given chest compressions by a male nurse. Staring at the man writhing on the floor, Joel felt acute pressure in his own chest. He felt as if his body was buckling; he felt the hard lino on his back and the sensation of the tube being slid down his throat.

When the man died, it was as if all Joel’s own organs had come to a standstill. As if he had died too. He willed himself to breathe, went to the bathroom and threw up.

The expression “I feel your pain” is a saying we use casually all the time, with varying degrees of sincerity, but in the case of Joel Salinas, it’s horribly and excruciatingly apt.

The 38-year-old has a condition called mirror-touch synaesthesia – which in its simplest terms, means that he feels the physical sensation of touch while observing it occur in another person. And not just pain or discomfort – it might be the feeling of wool on the skin or glasses on the bridge of a nose, even acne on the face.

Joel is in fact a poly synesthete – which means he has multiple forms of synaesthesia. Synaesthesia