How to Rate Your Pain on a Scale of 1 to 10

Tell someone at the healthcare facility that you are in pain and they always need a number. “How bad is the pain on a scale of one to 10,” they ask, “where there is no pain, and 10 is the worst pain you can imagine?”

I think 10 is akin to a Civil War soldier who had a limb amputated with a rusty saw. A friend of mine says that she always imagined theprincess bride’s pain machine . A deuce was a great pain for her. Unbearable pain, once after the operation, she was given a C. This is not how the balance should work.

(On the other hand, people working in the healthcare industry have a lot of stories of patients claiming their pain is 10 points even when they are sitting comfortably in the waiting room or walking without limping on their injured leg. Should work too.)

It turns out that the scale is not meant to represent all human experience, real and fictional, but to the spectrum of pain that the average person might reasonably experience. I rated the birth, without a doubt, the worst I have ever experienced, as “maybe eight” as I requested an epidural. Later, the doctor, who knew that I had a child, asked: “How does it hurt, from one to ten? Ten is labor. ” Oh .

How to calibrate your personal pain scale

If you’re lucky, you’ll end up in a hospital room with a poster of faces for each level of pain . In two, the face is still smiling. At six, he begins to frown. By eight, he looks rather depressed. The face is crying at 10.

There are many such pain scales that provide you with some guidelines to help you. Take a look now because they rarely show up when you need them. Here are some tips:

  • 1 to 3 – mild pain . If you called it annoying, you are in this territory.
  • 4-6 – moderate pain . It hurts, but you can probably get distracted or ignore it, at least for a while.
  • 7+ – severe pain . You cannot ignore this. It interferes with walking, sleeping, or living normally.

If you’re having trouble getting your position on the scale, you can ask! A physical therapist once told me that I can try running despite the injury, but stop if the pain is around six or seven. How much does it hurt? I have asked. “If you need to change your gait,” she said. “If you’re limping, it’s a seven.”

For those of us with an active imagination: Unbearable pain – 10 points . Childbirth – 10, rusty hacksaw amputation – 10, all settings of the Princess Bride anesthetic machine – 10. Of course, some of them may be worse than others, but the pain scale does not ask you about this nuance.

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