Pain is A four letter word
In the hospital they always ask “On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the worst pain you can imagine, what would you rate your pain right now?” What are they talking about? Pain is relative!
I mean what do you compare it to? A “10″ to me probably isn’t a “10″ to someone else. If I say it’s a “10″ and there is someone in the next room with terminal cancer, what kind of a whimp does that make me? What if I say mine is a “5″ and it really is a “10″ and I don’t know it or visa versa? To someone like me … this kind of a question causes mental torture and put me right over the edge.
One way to measure it is to ask myself, “Could it be worse?” Well, of course it could be worse if it hasn’t already knocked me out or killed me … so if it gets worse then it wasn’t really a “10″ after all, was it? That’s really frustrating.
I have learned that the more I experience and successfully overcome, the higher my threshold for enduring becomes, so anyone asking the above stupid question would have to also take into account where I am in my life and what I am comparing it to. When my husband went to Vietnam … that definitely felt like a “10″, but if it was already a “10″ when he first left, what would it have been if he had been injured, or captured, or killed?
When a bigger pain comes along things change their order and perspective. The old values change and the new pain takes precedence. Once we have something to compare to we can rate pain according to our experience … but that doesn’t tell us where we are compared to anybody else. (All relatives aren’t a pain, but pain is definitely all relative.)
I just unexpectedly lost a brother, which to me rates a “10″, but my sister-in-law lost her husband and that makes my “10″ rather pale in comparison to hers. Her “10″ would decidedly be more painful than mine, but mine is still a “10″ to me.
Okay, so that’s emotional pain, but what about physical pain? I wish I could collect a dime for every time I’ve moaned, “This is the worst (fill in the blank)I’ve ever had”. What a ridiculous statement. How can there be so many worst pains? It could be anything from a sore throat to a tooth ache to a kidney stone and it still feels like a “10″ at its worst. When it’s gone and I am rational and rested, I can admit (if only to myself) that I may have over reacted … that it was bearable … I didn’t die or pass out cold from it. I also know that even my worst pains don’t compare to some of the worst pains I’ve seen other people go through.
For crying out loud, how the heck could anybody give an honest answer? The darn question just drives me nuts. But then, any kind of questionaire drives me nuts if the answer isn’t black or white. There are too many variables in grey. “Do they mean every day or right this minute, do I compare this to my normal or everyone else’s normal, or do they mean tired or do they mean really exhausted, or the answer obviously isn’t any one of the 5 choices listed so do I just choose the middle one or do I leave it blank?
Pain is a four letter word and that’s all there is to it.
Technorati Tags: Pain Threshold, Pain Comparison
I don’t like that question either, but hadn’t given it much thought. I recall some of the most physical pain I’ve been in was when I had an infected tooth that required a root canal. Those 4 or 5 hours were some of the most painful in my life.