2:20pm August 9, 2014

➸ Pain scales really are very individual.

tiarachel:

youneedacat:

They always ask you to rate your pain on a scale of zero to ten. Zero is no pain, and ten is the worst pain you can imagine and/or the worst pain you’ve ever had.

When I was in the ER with aseptic meningitis, I rated my pain an eight. And the nurse was like, “Are you sure…

Yep. I hate the pain scale thing. I’ve been in pain most of my (adult) life, & anything short of wanting to bash my head into the tile floors to kill the migraine is still ‘walking around deal with it’ levels (also, I always want to know if they mean the scale to be linear or logarithmic, cause majorly different there). (Logarithmic makes more sense to me, but hey.) And different kinds of pain interfere more/less with functioning, so I’m never sure how to deal with ‘hurts so much I can’t move, but I can still think and I’m not nauseous, so that’s not so bad.’

I always imagined logarithmic too, maybe because I’m used to the Richter scale, coming from California.

It makes more sense for me for six to be a vaster territory than five, seven even vaster than six, eight even vaster than seven, and so forth.  So then I start giving numbers like “6.75” and really confusing them.

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