Have you ever seen one of those pain charts – you know, the ones the show little pictures to help you decide what number to assign to your pain? Yeah, well, I have been reflecting a bit on pain lately and decided that the stock chart just doesn’t work for me – so I made some modifications.
Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I think I am a badass that doesn’t feel or acknowledge pain – I mean I get all light headed when I have blood drawn – it’s just that I have a hard time getting all emotional about stuff. I mean, if I thought contorting my face and crying would make something that hurts feel better I would be all over it. I am a huge advocate of medication. Ibuprofen is nearly my best friend.
Anyway, yeah, a one for me is pretty much where I am at waking up. Being as old as me hurts just a little bit. I suspect that in the future I may be waking up at a 2 or a 3 or worse.
Two, well that is the equivalent of watching an episode of glee. The stomach is slightly off, vision is slightly blurred, and I develop a concern for the whereabouts of my man card.
Three is root canal pain. I mean you can’t really feel anything while they auger the guts out of your tooth, but there is some moderately uncomfortable after effects that keep on giving for a few days. Or weeks if it gets infected. Yeah, that’s a solid 3, maybe a 4.
You know what is definitely a 4? Listening to any song by Josh Groban. An entire album would be like an eight – but who the hell does that? You lift me up my ass.
This one time I broke some ribs. That was about a 5. It only hurt when I breathed. If it would have hurt all the time it would probably be higher. It was about the same when I cracked my sternum. Again, with the breathing thing.
This other time I had a nasopharyngeal tube. That’s fancy talk for a tube that goes up your nose, turns the corner then goes down into your gut. It didn’t really hurt that much, but on the basis of constant annoyance I give it a 6. As a general rule, I think that any time there a tube going up something that wasn’t meant to have tubes going up it – that’s at least a 6. Like the time I had the barium enema.
My appendix ruptured once. It was like a twelve or a thirteen – but it only lasted like a split second, so I only give it a seven. Thank god you only have one of those things – that was kind of below average.
Eight is like a bike race. A really bad bike race. This one time I raced the Tour of Eagle Crit – It was like a million degrees and there was some fuckwit barbequing and smoking up the whole backstretch. My lungs haven’t been the same since. I am assuming that good bike racers may be able to amp it all the way up to 10 on the pain scale, but me? Me, I’m mediocre on my best days – so I will stick with eight.
If having a tube inserted in an orifice is a 6 then having a tube with some type of grasping devise on the end is definitely a seven. If said device is actually used to extract something from said orifice you may as well bump that on up to an eight. Now, if the something being extracted is, well, larger than the orifice you can launch that up to nine. At least nine depending on the relative size of the object and the orifice.
That’s why I feel pretty comfortable saying that the time I had a Mini Cooper sized kidney stone extracted from my, well, you know – that was a 9.5.
I would say that the last one was a 10, but I wanted to leave a little room for err, improvement.
That stuff about objects and orifices? Yeah, I think that applies to having babies too, you know, in case you were wondering.
Right, anyway, with the 10 hanging out there I head into my man procedure tomorrow. I am fairly confident I won’t achieve a 10, but it is my sensitive bits and all.
Ok. TTFU. Later.
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