Aron Ralston was hiking in a remote canyon in the Western United States when tragedy struck. A 454-kg boulder pinned him in a 1-m-wide space for 5 days, eventually leaving him no choice but to amputate his own arm with a pocketknife. He then applied a tourniquet, rappelled down the canyon, and hiked out to safety. Ralston has written a memoir about his ordeal, appropriately called Between a Rock and Hard Place—this was turned into the 2010 movie 127 Hours. Ralston’s story, and others like it, illustrate that the extent of an injury is not perfectly correlated with the amount of pain felt. Although self-amputation is undoubtedly excruciating, luckily in this case it was not debilitating.