When I was asked this in a hospital, for a brief moment I thought about answering like the xkcd. But decided it was better not to
There is a board game called Wavelength where you play on teams and try to get your teammates to guess where a randomly placed dial lies on a spectrum. The game is really about guessing what your teammates will think the two extremes are because everyone has different ways of thinking. For example, on a spectrum of cold to hot, you could think of it from like ice to fire or from absolute zero to the Planck temperature. It’s very interesting and I think it’s good to play because it shows that people’s perceptions differ even on pretty basic things.
Once a paramedic asked me to rate my pain, and I asked if I should use a linear or log scale. He said I could use whichever one I want, so now I always use a log scale
Good idea, this actually makes more sense!
Japanese radiation guy. All pain pales in comparison to his death.
well, that was something I didn’t need to research and now kinda wish I hadn’t.
I used to be so honest about this. My lung collapsed, repeatedly and they had to carve up my insides and glue it to my ribcage with scar tissue after having a drain tube sucking out my thorax into a bloodbox for 10 days, so like, I have a threshold for “10” that is a bit higher than other folks, and I tried to explain that (this meme is about me apparently) and generally got zero drugs. Now they ask and I say “10” and they give me drugs. Lesson learned.
I’ve broken an arm, neck, and a leg. I’ve had gall stones (actually worse that the others). I had kidney stones and was being constantly asked my pain level and was just on my phone and calmly said ‘seven’ and they didn’t believe me, until they got the CT results of the three 7-9mm stones lodged my ureters. The nurse was confused and I had to explain to the doc on call they needed to remember that things are all relative. Once they saw my BP edging toward stroke level, they brought out the meds.
It is complicated to be honest in medicine, isn’t it.
I’ve luckily only had some broken bones, and there were not that bad. Like, sure, it sucked, but I could limp home with a broken arm, and even after surgery, I could leave the bed and go to the toilet with only non-opiate painkillers. I’d imagine “ten” is “one step from being unable to speak coherent words”, so quite a bit higher.
What is the rating scale though? Surely it’s subjective to how the pain feels to you?
There’s some attempt to try and make it genuine, and there are guidelines around it to support that (e.g. 1 = barely noticeable, 3,4 = distracting, 5,6 = unignorable, 7,8 = prevents normal activities, 9 = prevents conversation)
But in practice you’re going to get about one in every dozen patients who engages with this scale in good faith and you’re going to get a number between 8-11 from everyone else.
I’ve never been able to properly conceptualise converting the pain I’m feeling into a 1-10 scale.
It just doesn’t make sense to me
Kidney stone is a ten, getting stabbed in the arm is about a 7, broken tailbone at about an 8, stubbed toe at about a 5. Papercut at a 2. Single punch or slap at a 1. Getting branded was about a 3 for like 15 seconds then it dropped down to a 1.
Its all objective of course but thats pretty much my scale
Edit: depression induced phantom pain at an 6, maybe a 7. Kinda feels like what i would imagine a heart attack to feel like
Getting branded?
Its a long story lol. Wanted to show off for a woman, happened to mention i have nerve damage and cant feel certain types of pain. Funnily enough, that does not extend to thermal pain but whatevs. She branded me, and then we never saw each other again XD super cool brand though.
Just in case, branding here refers to using a red hot piece of metal to burn an imprint onto skin
Are you, by chance, a cow or horse?
How would you even be able to say “10” then?
I would have thought a 10 would be “Kill me, right now. I am in so much pain I would much rather be dead than spend another minute like this” and anything below that depends on where the pain is, like if it’s your arm I would consider a 9 to be “This hurts so much you can get out the hacksaw and chop off my arm because at least then the pain will be gone”.
So… Not so much “How much does it hurt?” as “How far are you willing to go to stop it hurting?”
I used to know someone who would regularly rate headaches/migraines as a 10 when I asked them how bad it was, and like, no, it’s clearly not a 10, because you’re standing up talking to me. A 10 is beyond curled up in the fetal position unable to open your eyes through the pain. I get that you are used to these headaches, and can overcome a lot of the pain - but that’s still not a fucking 10, that’s like a 6 or 7 at most. Lying about it means I can’t accurately judge how to help you.
I’ve had tension headaches where I’ve spent hours on the shower floor in the middle of the night and I’d still rate them at most an 8 for the very worst ones where I couldn’t get up
I was worried I had testicular torsion but didn’t think my pain was high enough for it, but there’s only so many times you can read stuff like “getting it addressed within X hours has Y% chance of saving the testicle” before you came lol. (It was actually a UTI or something.) The doc told me that it’s a 10, “well, more like an 11.”
