I’m not really sure what to write about today.
I’m pretty calm. My back is feeling a bit better, too. So, relatively little pain.
Maybe I’ll write about pain tolerance. But that can be a loaded subject, can’t it?
I think most everyone thinks they have a high tolerance for pain. I’ve met precious few people who literally up and say “Nope! I’m a wimp. If something hurts I’m immediately dying.”
No, I’ve seriously heard that from people. And the strangest thing is, they’re always far more understanding about pain than people who live with a lot of it.
I think it’s possible that all of us kind of assume, from time to time, that no one hurts as badly as we do. While I understand that, I still have to think that might just…not be true.
I think pain is very subjective. It’s why I suck at the pain scale so much.
I hope you don’t have to have reason to know the pain scale from firsthand experience. It’s one of the worst things about hospitals, in my personal opinion.
In my case, if I’m in the emergency room, or at a suddenly scheduled doctor’s appointment, the pain is bad. Like screeching bad. One of my doctors told me I was stoic once, and I’ve held onto that particular classification ever since. She wasn’t wrong. I just deal with pain very quietly. Making any sound, in my experience, makes the pain worse, so I kind of…enclose it I guess. Wall it off.
This made it all the more embarrassing to hear that I started screaming in the first hospital I went to for my brain hemmorage. Historically, I’ve never screamed from pain unless I was literally giving birth. That got me screaming.
And yes, I said embarrassing. For one thing, I am a 6 foot tall woman. I am not lithe or thin. As my dad says, “My daughters are built like brick (out)houses.”
My sister and I are not to be trifled with, to be honest. We’re tough. My sister didn’t want to tell me that she got pain relief during the birth of her eldest child after they induced her.
When we were finally able to talk about it, I flat out told her: Pitocin means all bets are off. Have something administered that intensifies labor, then expect you’re not going to “cry uncle?” No dice, man. You sing that “uncle” from the rafters, where you are likely hanging by your fingernails because of the pitocin. I will applaud your upper arm strength, not deride you for needing pain meds.
I feel similarly to most people’s reactions to pain. Pain is a very subjective thing. I recall hearing an explanation of the pain scale once, where someone described how things might work for different people.
The pain scale is a scale of one-to-ten. One being little to no pain and ten being unbearable pain. If you are an adult, and you have experienced memorable pain, a papercut would rate maybe a 2, tops. A broken arm would rate significantly higher. Likely up there with a 6 or 7. However, if you are, say, 7 years old, and you have never felt significant pain, a skinned knee might feel like a 5. A broken arm might be unbearable, and a 10. However, if you are a child who broke their arm when they were 5, and then they break their wrist at 9, they might think the wrist is only about a 6.
See? Subjective.
I think about things way too deeply, apparently. I second guess how much pain I might be in on a regular basis. I’ve literally caught myself thinking “Well, I’m not screaming in a hospital, so it’s not bad at all.”
I’ve caught myself thinking this in the last week, when I haven’t been able to stand up straight because my back has been in spasm.
To be clear, this wasn’t a 10. Not by a long shot. The beginning of the week was an 8, and it’s gone down from there to now being a 2. My personal 10 has classically been childbirth, which, as I alluded to above, was without pain meds (again, having pain meds for childbirth is not a weakness, at one point I found myself thinking I was crazy for not having them available). Now, my personal 10 is “should I be screaming right now?” If the answer is yes, then that’s a 10. Spoiler alert: I haven’t had pain that would make me scream in public since the stroke.
That being said, I’m still embarrassed about screaming at the hospital. I’m glad I don’t remember it. That’s another thing about having a 10 on the pain scale. It’s highly unlikely that your brain (whether exploding or not) is going to let you remember something like that, even without being damaged. My brain sure didn’t, which I am profoundly grateful for, to be completely honest.
You may be thinking “But I thought she said she hates the pain scale. Why does she bother to have her levels of pain classified, then?”
It’s because I need to.
I now get asked on a regular basis to rate things on a scale of one to ten, primarily my dizziness. As a result of the stroke, I am constantly dizzy, usually in two ways. I have some vestibular dizziness, though not a lot. I have some dizziness that is caused by my vision being messed up a bit (due to a palsy of one of my cranial nerves, my left eye sees to the right of and slightly below my right eye) and also, possibly an equilibrium issue due to either pressure from the ventricles being overfilled and/or a midline shift of my brain (the two hemispheres shifting slightly within the skull).
All of that is a bit more complicated than I can explain, really. However, it comes down to the fact that I don’t always really know where I am in space all the time. This translates to dizziness, sometimes careening into walls, not sitting too gracefully, and sometimes suddenly falling on my butt for no reason.
Highly dignified, right?
So, when asked how dizzy I am on a scale of one to ten, I have to think of an answer. My baseline constant dizziness is a 2, solid. I’m never at a 1. I’m always slightly off. If I have vestibular dizziness too, that puts it up to a 4. This past week, I’ve been on muscle relaxers for my back, which have a side effect of dizziness, and boy have I felt that. It’s completely different from the other two I usually have. Most days have been a solid 6. I can define why, though. Muscle relaxers relax muscles, they’re not particularly interested in which ones. So my eye muscles have been weaker as a result. Adding that little extra craziness to my left eye makes a pretty big difference. Though I just realized I haven’t fallen this week despite all this, which is a win, really.
I do have a 10 for dizziness. I had a couple of vertigo episodes before the stroke, and those were 10s. I had nystagmus, which is your eyes scrolling not unlike you’re watching the end credits to a movie at lightning speed and trying to read each line. I wasn’t able to walk without help from another person, and was sick every 10 minutes or so on the way to the hospital. So that’s the worst I’ve ever had, worthy of the highest number.
I think at this point I’m super done with one to ten scales. I mean, I could work in a few more. Maybe “rate this pasta dinner on a scale of one to ten,” or “rate this banana split on a scale of one to ten. That I could handle.
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