An entry in a friends journal led me to defining my personal interpretation of the “universal pain scale”. I’m curious to hear other people’s take on this scale - how would you quantify different levels of pain?
For me, 1-3 would be “It hurts, but I only know it hurts because I’m asking myself if it hurts”
4 would pain that I am consciously aware of but
5 would be distracting pain
6 would be pain bad enough to make it hard for me to do normal activities
7 would put me in bed
8 would send me to the ER
9 and 10 would be in the ER/crying/throwing up from the pain range.
Right now, I’ve got a headache that has been in the 2-3 range, but may get to 4 before long.
Difficult question, partly because there’s no good way to establish equality between different people’s experiences.
Your pain scale seems OK, but what it takes to send you to the ER is kind of vague. A little bit of pain in my chest would be liklier to than quite a lot of pain from stubbing my bare toes.
When you have some new experience that is more painful than anything you’ve had before, do you adjust your entire scale?
What about pain that makes you pass out?
I have three “worst pain” experiences that differ in time scale. I had a huge kidney stone removed by lithotomy, and woke up in the OR while they were moving me from the table onto a gurney, and nothing has been more painful than that for the few seconds it lasted. But I also got jabbed in a spinal nerve root during a stearoid injection, and for a tenth of a second it was more painful than I imagined possible. And I had a back injury that made much of a year painful, for long stretches, over a thousand Percocets and a few morphine tablets that marginally controlled it. Each of these things was the worst but on different time scales. The way pain can wear a person down and make them more sensitive has to figure into this somehow.
There’s an official pain scale based on DOLs, a 1-10 scale I think.
And medical people will often ask me how painful something is on a 1 to 10 scale without any discussion of how to calibrate the scale. That’s like asking how much of something you want to buy, without using any unit of measure.
1 - there’s some pain, somewhere, but I don’t notice it unless someone brings it up.
2 - there’s some pain, and I know where it is, but it really doesn’t bother me.
3 - there’s pain, and I’m aware of it, but I can easily distract myself.
4 - there’s pain, it’s distracting, and it’s affecting my mood. (Time for Tylenol/Advil/aspirin)
5 - there’s pain, and it is significantly interfering with my work/mood.
6 - there’s pain, and I need to go lie down. (Time for Vicodin, if I have it, other first aid measures like hot/cold compresses, muscle relaxants, et cetera)
7 - there’s pain, I’m lying down, and the previous measures aren’t helping. (Get a doctor’s appointment, and ask a friend to take care of me.)
8 - there’s pain, it’s sudden in onset or alteration, and the little voice in my head is freaking out. (Time to go to the ER.)
9 - The pain is so severe that I cannot do anything but deal with the pain. (Call an ambulance.)
10 - The pain is so severe, I have lost control of my emotional and physical responses. Crying, screaming, struggling against medical personnel included. (Mug a doctor for morphine, fentanyl, or dilaudid. Probably life threatening.)
I have hit 6 multiple times (thanks, migraines), eight when I’ve had a nerve pinched, woken up from surgery, or broken my ankle, and I was at nine for about twenty minutes when I got a colposcopy. Never hit a ten. Hope I never do.