So I had this idea for a short story and it goes a little something like this: I am in a fiction writing workshop and we were recently given an assignment to write a story about someone who doesn't have one of the five senses (i.e. hearing, seeing, etc). I was thinking about doing a story about "touch" where a soldier loses an arm and has to deal with the consquences of that. I was thinking if it just happened that the whole "phantom limb" effect could come into play but then a friend of mine pointed out that technically he can still "touch" just without an arm. I'm not asking if you think I should write this or not, just asking if you think the story is plausible for the assignment. I have a back-up but I don't want to do what everyone else might do in class.
Phantom pain is certainly an issue, but it sounds like the assignment wants someone who absolutely cannot {fill in one of five senses here.} Phantom pains are related to touch, but don't mean a person has lost their sense of touch. If you want to do touch for your assignment, I'd write about someone who had a nerve injury of some kind and actually cannot feel anything.
Just to add to what Mal said, the issue in a soldier (or anyone else) losing an arm is not the loss of the sense of touch, but the loss of functionality.
There is, I believe, a condition where people can't feel pain. They can hurt themselves quite badly (burns, scalds, abrasions etc) because they don't feel pain. You could try that, perhaps.
Yip, losing an arm seems to drift away from the focus of the exercise. I think you should choose a sense, not a body part. To be different, touch seems like the most obscure sense to lose. Your character could have a localized stroke in the sensory cortex of the brain losing all skin sensation. I've never seen anyone with that pattern, but in theory it's possible, and that's all you need in fiction. Could be very interesting exploring a character with global numbness....
