I am a Standard Pain Scale™ drop out. As a migraineur I am supposed to keep a daily log - the usual 1-10 deal. But I had to simplify it. One day, clutching my 5.75 head and wondering if, in fact, I was dealing with a 6, I realized that obsessing over the minutiae had bumped it up to a 7.
So my new scale is as follows:
0 - no headache
1 - headache, can function
2 - headache, can’t function
Works for me.
You know, I had an interesting experience with my last bout of kidney stones, in regards to the doc thinking I was drug seeking. I had been dealing with the stones for a couple of days at home, because they hit over the weekend; then, on Monday, I went to see my regular urologist. I told him “I have at least one stone, but I don’t want to be hospitalized unless there’s sign of infection, could you give me a scrip for some pain and nausea meds so I can just go home?”
“Well, you don’t look like you’re in enough pain to have a stone”, he says.
“That’s cuz I swallowed two hydrocodone before I came here” I answered.
“Where did you get them?” (he was alarmed)
“You prescribed them for me last time I had a stone”
“That was a year ago”
“I know”
“Well, I’m not writing you a scrip til you go have an x-ray and I see some stones”
So, I went and had the x-ray, and it showed four stones. When I returned to his office, he told me he had orignally thought I was drug seeking. That doesn’t even make sense! If I was a junkie, would I have owned year-old hydrocodone??
Our hospital only has a 1-5 scale. Should I feel shorted?
It also has those pumps that shoot a little jolt of morphine into your IV when you press the button. They work great for me.
As an aside, I recently discovered that morphine works great for arthritis. I had been worried that getting up after surgery would be complicated by my bad knees, since I had to stop taking my vioxx two weeks before surgery and they were getting wonky. But the morphine beat the vioxx hollow.
I’ve been in some pretty nasty pain before, including a kidney stone and kidney infection combination, and waking up feeling completely unsedated after hernia surgery. But I don’t think I’ve ever considered myself at 10. Even when I woke up after the hernia surgery and was begging for drugs, I’d still call that 8 or 9. The kidney infection, which had me writhing and vomiting so much that I was sent immediately back in the emergency room, was a 8. Normal Crohn’s disease pain is from 3 to 6. 10 would be “My intestines are hanging out between my legs” or “My arm’s been chopped off.”