The Pain Scale

So, when you're at the hospital, they do this odd thing where they have a zero-to-ten pain scale. Zero means you have no pain at all. Ten is the worst pain you can possibly imagine. And one through nine are anything in between.

And when they ask you what your pain level is, they expect you to answer with a number.

Seems kind of silly - is there some sort of unit of measurement I'm supposed to be using? And what sort of scale is it? Is it a linear scale? Quadratic? Exponential?

When I was in for my surgery, they added a third point to the scale...they asked me what number I would consider to be a "manageable" or "tolerable" level of pain.

Well, that seemed like a silly question, and seemed like whatever I chose was going to be pretty arbitrary, so I just said: "Five". Kind of "middle of the road", right?

It wasn't until after I was coming out of surgery that my foggy brain started to realize that this was actually a useful piece of information to have, because when they asked me what my pain level was, I didn't even need to consider for more than a second: I said "Six."

And my thought process was: Oh, please, let them give me some pain medication...hmmm...if I don't tell them a number higher than five, they probably won't!

So, it turned out to be useful to have that number. Even though the number itself was quite arbitrary, it's probably the most useful number on the entire scale.