Pain, Pain Go Away--

Don't let the title mislead you, I am not in pain at the moment. At least I don't think I am. Pain is all relative. A few years ago when I had one of my more drastic surgeries, a boy that was in my class at school, who lived not too far from me, came to visit. He was and assume still is a very sincere, serious boy. He told me that he knew just how I felt because he had had surgery once and he remembered how painful it was. When I enquired about the nature of his surgery, he said he had had his tonsils removed. A few weeks later he came to visit again and that time he told me that he had told his mom what he had said to me about his tonsilectomy and she said he needed to come back and tell me that he didn't really know how much more drastic my experience was and he was truely sorry.

You know, I don't think it was at all a goof-up on his part that he compared his experience to mine. When you think about it, his tonsillectomy was probably the most painful experience he had ever had and maybe unknowingly he was comparing his pain to mine, not the procedure. I thought about that a lot and realized that his commiseration was so accurate. He did know how I was feeling. He had experienced the greatest pain he had ever had and knew how it feels to be in that much pain. One could only hope that he will never suffer more pain than he did for that minor procedure. Dealing with head aches, skinned knees or knuckles, paper cuts, muscle aches, stomach aches will, by comparison, be not all that bad.Which brings me to the point I'm trying to make.

Measuring pain is a difficult task. Now they have these little charts in doctors' offices and hospital ER's and they hold the chart up for you to see and ask " How would you describe your pain? " The chart has a gradated thermometer type drawing of a scale from 1 to 10." What level of pain do you have?" I am always tempted to ask, " as compared to what? "If you have had many, many levels of pain at other times or have never had anything worse than a flu shot injection, how can you gauge your pain? A 3 or a 6 or an 8 or maybe a 10?

There are categories of pain: A piercing pain, a stabbing pain, a heavy pain, a dull ache, a pain that radiates, a pain that builds in intensity and then subsides and then builds again. They're all pains but how could you put a number on anyone of them?

Their are so many factors to consider when asking people what level of pain they are suffering. How about the people that are a pain in the neck? Even there it would require some kind of comparison, right?

I think I've given myself a headache, trying to figure this out, I don't know whether it's a 3 or a 7 but I'm going to go lie down!Ciao