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| On A Scale Of One To Ten
I do not understand the pain scale that the doctors use so frequently today. Each one will explain it differently. I cannot help believing that I am not the only one left in a state of confusion. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most pain you have ever been in, how do you rate your pain today? My problem here is that the scale is completely thrown off balance when another chronic condition makes its appearance. How do you compare the pain of arthritis with the pain of a knee which needs to be replaced or with the pain of degenerative disc disease with its ruptured discs? Do you compare all this with major surgery or with childbirth? How do you compare throbbing, piercing, aching, burning, spasmodic, nauseating, and blinding pains? I find it impossible. Even if they are using the scale on one malady at a time, I have a problem there also. If I were not in acute pain, I would not be in the doctor’s office in the first place. That means until my recovery, the one through five are useless. Yesterday I may have been in the most pain I have ever been, so it is a ten. If the pain gets worse today what do I rate it? The doctors do not find it funny when you say twenty. How can they chart the worsening pain if it is rated ten no matter how much worse it gets each day? If you say ten each time, they just roll their eyes as if you are too dense to understand. Maybe they are right. Worse than the scale of one to ten is the flip side of the chart with the circle faces. Can you imagine what a child thinks when they show them the faces that range from a smiley face to a sad face and then to a crying face? What did they do to the poor smiley face to make him cry? Are they trying to traumatize our children? Someone let me know who initialized this system of pain perception. How much actual thought went into that? Some nurses have explained it as ten being the most pain anyone has ever experienced. If I have not been the one to feel that pain, how can I compare my present pain level with the unknown? Imagine the pain of a person in the Holocaust, of physical abuse and neglect, of amputation, or of Cancer. I feel sympathy for that person, but I can not feel empathy for them. I have not been there. I do know one who has been there. When I think of Him, I know that my own fleshly pains are a zero. Jesus suffered through the most unthinkable excruciating pain that has ever been felt. Jesus did this willingly and without complaint, because He loves us more than we will ever be able to comprehend. Jesus is the way for us to enter in to eternal life with no pain, no tears, no fears, and no sorrows. Our pain here is temporary and brief. To God be the praise and glory forever and forever. On a scale of one to ten how do you rate your pain today? 2 Corinthians 4:17-18 For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal. Shirley Anne Cox Bristol, Tennessee Do not use without Shirley's permission. |
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