Hey there, my friends!! I hope that this past week has been kind to you and has treated you well. For those of you who follow me on social media, you may have noticed that I’m making it a point to post on things like my Facebook Story or my Instastory more often. Usually, I share pictures and videos of Trouble and my fiance’s parents' dog, Worf. And whenever I do my yoga exercises for the day, I definitely make a post about it. I also often share other posts that I find in regards to fibromyalgia while I’m scrolling on Instagram. Among all of those posts, I sometimes open up a little bit about not just my life, but about the pain that I’m feeling at that moment. As I got to thinking about this over the last few days, I realized that maybe some of you don’t know what I’m talking about. So let’s start at the beginning and start talking about what the pain scale is and how it works.
Doctors created an assessment tool that they use when they are assessing someone’s pain — it’s called the pain scale. It’s a scale that starts at 0 and works its way up to 10. It is my understanding that doctors might use this scale to figure out whether the pain is getting better or worse. I think that this tool is meant to be relative. I don’t like this tool at all because I feel like it is pretty useless. At least the faces on these scales are usually pretty comical.
- 0 — No pain. This is where people who aren’t dealing with pain are. I don’t remember what it’s like to not be in pain anymore. It’s been coming up on almost two years since I have felt no pain.
- 1–3 Mild. This is a little bit of pain, but the pain is not moderate.
- 4–6 Moderate to severe. This is the range where most people who deal with chronic pain start. When I first started experiencing chronic pain back in January of 2019, I was at a 6 on this scale. Unfortunately, I didn’t stay there long, which was why I suddenly had to stop working. I have not been at a 6 since late March of 2019.
- 7–9 Very severe. This is the range that my pain is usually in. My pain seems to be around 7 usually during the warmer days and an 8 during the colder days. The days are getting colder here now and my pain has started spiking up to a 9 when I’m experiencing a flare-up.
- 10 — Worst pain possible. I have a couple of issues with this being on the pain scale. One, what are you comparing it to? Two, how many times have you heard that if you are in this much pain that you should seek out medical help and go to the emergency room? If everyone who experienced this went to the emergency room every time they are this bad off, they would practically end up living there. I know that I don’t ever want to live in a hospital. I’d much rather be at home in my own bed and just try to cope with the pain in familiar surroundings and sleep as much as possible.
It’s really sad, but those of us who experience chronic pain learn to be really good at not noticing the pain when it’s in the lower ranges (somewhere in between 4–5 depending on who you are and how you handle pain). I know that I don’t usually notice being in pain until somewhere around a 6. This means that I’ve gotten used to being in this much pain minimally every day. On the flip side though, it also means that I’m able to tune out pain up until that point. I’ve been learning how to live my life with this pain one moment at a time. And that’s a good thing. Since we’ve talked about why I don’t like the standard pain scale, let’s talk about what I think that a pain scale that includes chronic pain might look like.
While I was researching this blog post over this past weekend, I stumbled across Julie Ryan’s blog called Cutting My Spoons. Julie is a “spoonie” (a “spoonie” is someone living with a chronic illness), fibromyalgia warrior, and e-health advocate. I stumbled upon a blog post that she had written called “The Chronic Pain Scale: Communicating Your Pain” dated November 5, 2020. The image above is the scale that she had made. I really love this scale and I feel like this scale is a lot more relatable for me from the day to day. On this scale, I would be somewhere around the 8–10 range most of the time, but at least the scale looks much more accurate for how I am actually coping with my chronic pain. And I really like how the faces that aren’t smiling are a guide for my doctors to the face that I should really be wearing on my face. Something that I’ve been finding on my journey with chronic pain is that I’m getting better at acting like I’m not in pain. I can be at an 8 and still smile somewhat convincingly for people who are strangers to me. This means I struggle with opening up to my doctors and feeling like it’s okay for me to drop the act that I’m okay when I’m actually not. At that point, I usually end up in tears from the pain and also out of a sense of relief that it’s okay for me to cry in the doctor’s office. But it’s tough for me to get there to that point and really tell my doctors how I am actually feeling. This is something that I’m trying to work on getting better at so that we can hopefully get some more answers than we currently have.
Thank you so very much for taking the time to read my blog!! Also a huge thank you to Julie Ryan for writing your recent blog post! If you want to read her blog post that I talked about, I’ll post the link at the bottom of this post. I really loved knowing that I am not the only one who doesn’t like the standard pain scale from 0–10 because it’s not that simple when you are living with chronic pain. I’d like to share a short joke with you that my fiance’s father shared with me over the weekend:
Nurse: What’s your pain level?
Me: Pi.
Nurse: Pi?
Me: Yeah, 3.14159268… Low-level, but it goes on forever.
Please feel free to applaud this blog post (where the hands clap together) and comment down below. I’d love to hear from you. I hope that you will have a great week! Stay safe out there! Until next week, my friends! :-) ❤
— Moriah
Resources:
- “The Chronic Pain Scale: Communicating Your Pain” by Julie Ryan https://countingmyspoons.com/2020/11/the-chronic-pain-scale-communicating-your-chronic-pain/
- Urban Dictionary definition for Spoonie https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=spoonie
