“On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being no pain and 10 being the most pain you can imagine, how do you feel right now?” Medical people ask you this question, sometimes including a smiley face chartso you can point to the correct face.
I was wondering if anybody ever says 9 or 10. I recently had surgery and was in amazing pain for quite a while as I recovered. The nurses asked me how I felt on a scale of 1 to 10 and I said 8.
But I probably over-thought the issue. If 10 is the worst pain I can imagine, then it must be just short of pain so intense it would make me faint and be unconscious, at which point I couldn’t feel any pain anymore. So I figure a 10 means pain that causes me to howl uncontrollably as loudly as my lungs will allow.
A 9 would be pain nearly that intense, but I’d be able to have the self-control to keep from howling. I’d probably yelp frequently. Actually, this is already closer to the 8 I said I felt after surgery.
What about you? Have you ever answered anything higher than 8? How would you recognize ‘the worst pain you can imagine’?
The worst pain I’ve ever felt was an intestinal cramp that hit me out of nowhere my sophomore year of high school. It started out as just a persistent pain in my abdomen, and it steadily grew worse until i asked to see the school nurse. It just kept getting worse by the hour, until they finally called my mother to come and bring me home. My mom asked the secretary how I looked, and the secretary looked at me and said I was hunched over and holding my side. At this point I was seeing a red haze wherever I looked; I couldn’t howl, because I could barely expand my lungs enough to breathe. I’d say this was an 8.5 or a 9.
The best part? It took my mother 20 minutes to arrive, so I went to the lobby and laid down on the floor, and the the pain went away almost completely! My mother arrived all panicky and took me to the hospital. they did X-rays and found my large intestine was stuffed with Twinkies I’d eaten the night before from end to end, although they weren’t sure if this was the cause. Ah, high school
Last year when I shattered my kneecap in a car accident I was both to rate my pain on a scale of 1-10 where 10 is the worst pain imaginable and to rate my pain on a scale of 1-10 where 10 is the worst pain I’ve ever felt. Same hospital, it depended on whoever was asking me at the time. Different rooms even had different charts saying each (and in one case both side-by-side). You can the the problem there. And for some bizarre reason the nurses I had (all female) were less sympathetic than the doctors I saw (all male). What was up with that? 
I’ve never said higher than 8, but people do say 9 and 10 all the time.
Kidney stone. 11. On a scale of 1-10. Women who have had both children and kidney stones said the stones are worse than childbirth – and they never call or write when they move away, either.
I do believe I have hit a solid 9 a time or two. Most of them involving the destruction of a key part of my ligature. The loss of my left ACL had me crying in public, and the trashing of my left ankle a few months ago left me sobbing and cursing in the presence of my wife. Neither is an experience I would want to repeat, to say the least.
I thought that the pain scale was to tell the medical professionals more about your tolerance to pain than about the level of pain you are in. I mean, in the sense of “How much pain are you in relative to other pain you have been in?” That makes more sense than asking about what kind of a pain a person can imagine.
I have a really good imagination, but I don’t care a speck about what kind of pain I might be able to drum up in my mind when compared with the actual, physical pain I am experiencing at the moment.
9 was the highest I gave, and that for tooth pain. I know that I was in more intense, albeit intermittent, pain during labor, but people don’t necessarily ask you the pain scale when you’re swearing like a sailor and clearly in tremendous pain.
Anyhow, with the tooth, I somehow thought that claiming to be at level 10 would be met with skepticism. I would, however, have paid someone 50 bucks to just yank the fucking tooth out if I thought that the pain would end there. Telling the dentist that made more of an impression than the pain scale, I think.
The worst pain I ever had in my life was a scratched cornea. If you open the eye, it hurts in an excruciating way yet paradoxically it hurts even worse when you close it the way you had it before. I had to go to the eye doctor every day for a week and then every other day for a week to have it treated. You have to lay very still for all that time and, believe it or not, noise also feels like someone is dripping acid in your eye as well. I went psycho a few times trying to get people to be quiet and was almost literally willing to kill them to shut the fuck up now and forever. Light is even worse and you have to avoid it like the plague when you get up the courage to walk around. It is a simple injury yet the most painful one I know. Also use goggles when dealing with building materials that might hit your eye.
Rating: 9.5 and I have had lots of injuries that were considered serious.
I generally always report a 9 or 10 so they don’t fuck around with wimpy stuff and give me something that’ll actually treat the pain. Childbirth was a 10 and catching a fish hook in my eye was a solid 9.5.
I’m sure I’ve felt at least a 9 before. Once I had a week of headaches so intense as to be unimaginable. Not like a migraine (which I’ve had) where the pain is throbbing. It was more like there were knives being jammed through my eyesockets in to my brain constantly. it was literally blinding. Oddly, taking a machete between the eyes didn’t hurt a bit. Hooray for shock. Heh, thinking about it, I’ve been in some incredible pain, and then had what look like massive injuries that don’t hurt a bit. Lots of those stories.
When my stomach perforated 2005 it was the worst pain I could imagine. If there had been a switch I could hit to stop the pain but it meant that I would never wake up again, I would have hit the switch in a heart beat. I cried and begged god to take me home.
The morphine shots they gave me never even touched the pain. Eventually they gave me something that took me out of my head. It is hard to explain the feeling. I knew it still hurt, I could still feel the pain, but it was almost like it was happening to someone else - but no, not really. I could feel the pain but didn’t care. That isn’t quite it either.
I hope to never ever feel another 10 again. Two weeks ago I was operated on and the attending nurse afterwards couldn’t get my pain pump to work right. None-the-less, that pain was nothing like I had in 05.
And on an emerging theme, when I had a twisted intestine, it went up to ten. I had three morphine shots, each one twice the dose of the previous, and they didn’t touch it until they knocked me out. I’d rather be slammed repeatedly in the balls than experience that again.
Amen to that! I know exactly what you’re talking about. There is nothing you can do about it either, until you get to the eye doctor and he gives you that blessed numbing cream (or drops!) If you’ve never had a scratched cornea, there’s no way to convey the unnatural pain and mental anguish that accompanies it (although, that’s probably true with just about any injury or childbirth)
Worst pain I can remember was having part of my fingernail removed without any anesthetic. I have no idea what it would be on a pain scale. Not as bad as sitting in a shellhole without legs, I suppose. Worse than a sore throat.
I’m usually asked to use the scale to describe my headaches, but the effort of trying to accurately calibrate the pain used to nudge a 5.6 migraine up to a 7.3. I just won’t do it anymore. I think I posted this before – here’s my handy simplified scale:
- No Pain
- migraine (can function)
- migraine (can’t function) :barfy curled up in a dark room smilie:
Works for me.
I’ve had a scratched cornea, Shagnasty, but mine must not have been as bad as yours. The eye hurt like a sumbitch, but I didn’t have a problem with noise.
While I was waiting for surgery for my broken hip, the nurses had to put me in a sling to weigh me. The bones rubbing together had me whining like a baby – probably an 8. And couldn’t they have taken my word for it? How much difference would 10 pounds make to an anesthetist anyway?
Backstory-right tib/fib surgically reassembled with plate and seven titanium screws during trauma work in June 2000. Two of the screws passed completely through the bone end and into the soft tissue on the medial aspect (think inside) of the leg, and I elected to have them removed in an outpatient procedure a year later.
I’ve had impacted wisdom teeth removed under local anesthesia, so I voted for local. The nurse argued with me, but the doc said it was my call.
A two inch incision, he fitted the hex tool into the screw head, and then began to crank it out. Mother of Jesus-if pain had a color, this was blue/white. I had no idea the degree of innervation which bones possess. Repeat for the other two screws, and we were done.
I don’t like absolutes, so I’d give that a 9, as it was close to the crushed two fingers of my left hand, and I’m betting there’s an even higher level of pain out there.
When the dentist drilled my tooth without novacaine. He didn’t believe in it for small cavities (if there was a cavity; I have my doubts now).
Luckily I’ve missed out on episodes of major pain. Probably the worst two events that I can recall were the removal of my wisdom teeth and a bee sting.
Omigod! You guys are killing me! Yow!
Any medical professionals out there? Do people often answer 9 or 10? Or do they usually hold 9 and 10 in reserve, in case they could possibly feel something worse?
Cyn, OB/GYN RN
She rates her pain at a 10. While talking on her cell phone and eating a bag of potato chips. Yup. 10.
Pain is what the patient says it is. I medicate according to her verbal requests for pain medication within the perscribed time frame. If she doesn’t seem to understand 0-10, I say 10 is a truck still parked on her abdomen while the baby’s coming. I also say I medicate at 4 or more—uncontrolled pain is detrimental to healing.
I rarely argue that their pain is really a 10, although I may point out it could be worse. Bad enough to make her pause in eating those potato chips she asked for. :rolleyes: