A 10-point chronic pain scale:
0 - Theoretical, unimaginable, and fundamentally unattainable to the living. Heaven or perfection. The transcendental state of immateriality one reaches when pain is so severe the soul separates from the body and floats away to watch it convulse from across the room. The honeyed caress of God. As a teenager I used to press lit cigarettes against my forearm and endure until the hot ember killed all the nerve endings, so that the small circle of burned skin no longer registered pain and never would again. Fantasized about drenching myself in gasoline and burning everything, until there were no living nerves left. The end goal of this fantasy is a zero on the pain scale.
1 - Just as fantastically unattainable as zero, but play-acting at pragmatics. Feels less like theory and more like being mocked. The sensation of digging my fingernails into my palm to briefly pull my attention away from a numerically larger pain elsewhere in the body.
2 - This is the number I say to the emergency room triage nurse when she asks about chronic pain unrelated to the current medical emergency and I am afraid that if I answer honestly she will write me off as drug-seeking. Two is a non-answer. Two is "don't worry about it, that's not important right now."
3 - A pain scale infographic on the wall in the emergency room describes a three as "Noticeable pain. It may distract you, but you can get used to it." This is less than useless. This describes all pain. It might be more precise to specify how long the adjustment period lasts before you no longer find pain distracting. A hangnail-- seconds or less. A dislocated shoulder-- weeks, initially, but with enough repetition, only as long as it takes to suck in a breath and twist it back into place. This is where any pain scale falls apart. Pain becomes practice, practice becomes routine, routine becomes background noise. It still hurts.
4 - Four is the standard baseline of a good day. At a four, I can hold things with my hands and walk on my legs. I am free to indulge in earthly delights: washing dishes, checking the mail, folding laundry. Every pair of socks I don't drop is a little joy. I make it through the whole hamper. I limp through the garden. At a four, no one needs to know I am in pain. By sunset I am exhausted but the morning is made of endless possibilities.
5 - At a five, pain seeps into my dreams while I sleep. Not nightmares, necessarily, but I spend the whole thing distracted, tugging at the sword I dream is inexplicably stuck in my shoulder like some Arthurian legend. Important dream-plot happens around me but I miss half the exposition and zone out through the whole mystic prophecy. I can't keep my hands off that damn sword. The oracle is so offended that she kicks me out of the castle and I sit down in the mud outside and fiddle with my hilt, no goddamn clue what I'm supposed to do now. When I wake my jaw hurts from clenching my teeth all night.
6 - The body is a wet bag of raw meat and sharp objects. I drop things a lot. Against my will, I cry out when the car hits a bump and sharp pain lances through my spine. It's hard to eat. My sentences trail off halfway as thoughts evaporate off my tongue.
7 - Seven is the immediate aftermath of a botched surgery. Seven is the ICU nurse offering me a little paper cup of tramadol and me shaking too badly to take it. Seven is touch me and I'll scream. My friends stop wanting to drive me anywhere because my crying in the car distresses them. My sentences are short and staccato, four words or less, and I still lose the thread of them halfway through. I can't understand what's being said to me. I can't hold on to anything. I can't bear to sit alone with the pain but I can't do anything to distract from it, can't hold a pencil, can't hold a conversation, can't hold my eyes on the TV. My whole body trembles. My teeth chatter. Cold sweat soaks through my shirt. My spine is a row of kitchen knives. I grit my teeth and endure. Seven is the upper limit of normal. I know I can handle this. "Take courage, my heart, you are a soldier and you have seen worse sights than this." Eventually, either the pain will subside, or I will get used to it. It ends or it doesn't. There are only two possibilities. No apocalypse either way. A person can get used to anything. It ends or it doesn't. Pain becomes practice becomes routine becomes background noise. It still hurts.
8 - I stop caring that anyone is horrified by my sobbing. I stop seeing through my eyes. I want the world to be small and dark and quiet. I want to unmake the universe. I hate the big bang. Thinking of the noise it must have made makes me furious. The noise of an ambulance siren makes me furious. I am incoherent. I no longer remember or care that it ends or it doesn't. There is no moment but this one. I tell strangers in scrubs that I want to die. I don't know why. Later I will only remember confused bursts of sensory information, and none of them are pain. Light, sound, texture. Smooth orange plastic of a stretcher in the back of an ambulance. IV bag swinging as we take a sharp turn. My revolving ceiling fan. Blood and vomit. Blanket. I don't know how to store the memory of this pain. It is too big to fit inside me. It enters wholly and leaves wholly. Every time it happens it feels like something I have never felt before. It is the very first time over and over and over. My previous statements were false; I cannot get used to this. I am shocked every time. I cannot remember it. I cannot comprehend.
9 - Nine is the cigarette and gasoline burning down through layers of skin and fat and bone. I forget about my distress and ascend into desperate hilarity. I only have to endure for a few more moments, until--
10 - I stop feeling anything. I am a glowing psychopomp bathed in the theoretical, unimaginable, and fundamentally unattainable to the living. There is no more body. It doesn't respond. I'm glowing to have shucked it. I melt into the honeyed caress of God.
jacobvanloon
dailybridgerton
romaincrisis
theartofmadeline
annaxmalina
turnnoffyourmind
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kaledo-art
