Departments
I dislike the name ‘Accident & Emergency’. It makes me feel like such a fraud whenever I have to visit that part of the hospital.
The last time, I had broken a wrist after losing a fist-fight with a fire door. I felt pretty stupid, since I considered it not to be an accident, but rather the inevitable consequence of punching something harder than me. Similarly, my embarrassment had made me wait over 24 hours with a broken wrist before I had to get it looked at. I was neither Accident nor Emergency.
I did feel slightly better when I entered the waiting room. It was about 6 am, and the only other people in there were previously involved in a fight outside a night club. These people deserved to be injured, just as I did. There was no one in there who had suffered a true misfortune – something painful and unpredictable.
The triage nurse, called me in to a partitioned office to assess the damage. She asked me what was wrong and how it happened. I would have told a lie, made something up, had I not been so tired, but instead I told the truth. I swear, she laughed at me… and rightly so. There’s no more effective way to stop people doing stupid things than laughing at them.
Then she asked me a curious question, and one that has been somewhere in my mind ever since – On a scale of one to ten, how much pain are you in?
How do you answer that question with any objectivity or scale. I want to know what the ten levels of pain are, and I plan on turning my results into a comic.
I figured that I had to establish the most pain I had ever been in. That was easy, it was the first and only migraine I have had. I genuinely thought my time was up, and then it got better. The broken wrist was no where near that, mostly because it didn’t hurt if I didn’t move it. Migraines hurt all the time, you can’t escape them. But then, when I did move my wrist I certainly hurt a lot more than anything else.
I answered, as I imagine most people do, ‘err, about 7?’.
And so, the question is two-fold. What is the most amount of pain you have experienced? And what are the ten levels of pain?
Ben on 
Ty on
The only time as an adult that I’ve visited the Emergency Room (as it is called here) was about two years ago when a severe medicinal allergy caused me to not retain any fluids for about a month. I had to be taken into the ER in a wheelchair because I was so deteriorated my body had started eating its muscle and therefore couldn’t walk. The nurse took me back, made me stand up and asked me the “scale your pain” question. I said 10 and she scoffed at me and said that since I could stand without fainting, I wasn’t severely dehydrated.
It turned out I was about a day away from massive internal organ failure and it took three liters of saline that night and three more a few weeks later to get me back to “not dying”. I wanted to tell the doc who told me I almost died to go out front and relay that message to the nurse.
I agree on the migraine front- been having them fairly regularly since childhood- but the above experience is my only “10″.
Well, that sounds like a new 10 to me… but that’s the problem, I guess if you are able to answer the question then you’re not really a ten:
If your answer to the question ‘on a scale of one to ten, how much pain are you in’ is ‘Urrrrmph, arrr’, then you’re a ten.
I had heard that you folks call it an emergency room. I also heard that instead of doctors you have clooneys.
When I was in the emergency room with a broken neck, one of the nurses told me that I was fine and could go home. I think they have a tendency to underestimate exactly how badly people are doing.
My Big Tow has a tendancy to ‘fall out’ of its position.
That really does hurt.
/b
Toe, even.
/b
ow, why?
I have no idea.
-M
I’d have to agree with you, migranes are the absolute worst. Forget being involved in an traffic accident on a bike that knocks you unconscious – then at least you are unconscious until your body decides to wake you up again. When I get migranes I just have to succumb to not being able to do anything for at least an hour (I have developed strategies to combat migranes).
I generally get migranes when i’m overtired, and I find that 2 ibuprofen and a cup of coffee generally cure them, meaning that I only have about 30 minutes – 1 hour of pain compared with the 5 enfeebled hours I had to waste before I discovered this. However my migranes seem weird – quite a lot of people claim to get migranes when they have had too much caffeine (so more wouldn’t help), but that has never happened to me.
I find that a cup of coffee and a couple of ibroprofen cures most things… both of these ingredients could alleviate the pressure causing the migraine in certain cases…
I know of a couple of people that get the visual disturbances, often caused by migraines, without getting the headache. I suppose I’m saying that there must be different types, perhaps with different underlying causes.
I take it that you must get them fairly regularly, and as such you really have my sympathy. Before I had one I assumed it was just like a bad headache, and I suspect many people see them like this. The truth is that a migraine is closer to being repeatedly beaten around the head for several hours.
For me, migraines normally start with the visual disturbances (directly where I’m trying to look – I have to look to the side of something to see it which is incredibly annoying), and then left unchecked they grow into the throbbing (beating) headache and feeling of sickness. This rarely happens though – only when I am cut short of Ibuprofen.
I remember the first time that I had a migraine and the visual disturbances came – my line of thought was similar to yours, but as it only started with the disturbances I thought ‘well isn’t this great, I’m going to have to learn to live with weird eyesight for the rest of my life’. When I realised it was a migraine (after the beatings had kicked it), it seemed better than what I thought, but I soon came to realise how bad migraines are…
For the past few months I have luckily not had any migraines, but before that they usually came in phases of around 1 week with 5 migraines, and then possibly two months without any. Thanks for the sympathy
It’s all about triggers, isn’t it?
I know I can set them off through eye strain and lack of sleep… the two things I’m constantly faced with.
Apparently orange-flavoured chocolate is a potent trigger for some… for others it’s just being smacked repeatedly around the side of the head.
Be careful with those visual disturbances but no pain…that is actually a form of epilepsy, called a simple partial seizure, or more commonly an aura. Some people say they get auras before they get migraines, and it is the same situation.
And the reason, or so I’ve been told, that coffee helps is because the caffeine helps the ibuprofen get to your brain faster by making your heart beat faster.
Worst pain I ever had was when I broke my hand and part of my wrist kickboxing (as a sport, not in a fight.) I’ve actually just gotten used to the migraines and seizures, and it is somewhat disconcerting.
That’s interesting, about the caffeine as it hints that any medication working through diffusion action would be helped by a cup of coffee. I might have a look into that, although I suspect the ‘everything that is bad for you is good for you’ brigade will have covered it already.
Broken wrists are more painful than I expected, I suppose in the same way as when you damage a part of your body that you don’t often think about but use almost constantly. It took me almost six months to be able to open a door with my withered hand again.
Kickboxing, eh? we have a ninja in our midst.
A lot of migraine medications have caffeine in them.
Personally, I’ve never had a migraine, but I’m a little bit worried because my grandmother, my mom, and all of my aunt’s on my mom’s side get terrible migraines. If they’re hereditary, I’m pretty much out of luck.
I can’t rate pain. I also don’t remember things like pain for very long. The worst hurt I can recall is when my tooth went bad, other than that I haven’t had much in the way of major pain that I can remember. This jibes with my lack of major injury (my only hospitalization was a mystery disease I had when I was eight and that didn’t hurt it just fucked up my kidneys) and is lucky since I happen to know from the few painful incidents I have had that I have virtually no threshold for pain.
A fortunate disposition, a short-term memory for pain… although coupled with such a low threshold, perhaps it’s a coping mechanism.
Toothache… I can understand these stories of people trying to remove teeth with shotguns. It’s a ‘in your face’ sort of pain (no pun intended) that is very much with you.
my mom, (a nurse) was puzzled by the pain-scale thing too. i looked around a little and couldn’t find a satisfactory answer, i suppose they’re trying to get an idea of if the pain goes on without medication whither it’ll damage your health your health or not .
i’d say the worst pain i’ve had was a toothache, i couldn’t think very well, and i started walking in circles
Migraines. Hurt. Like. FECK!
I used to get them quite a lot. The first time I had one, I had the same reaction as you, Ad, I thought I was dying an’ all. Nowadays I get the occassional headache that I can sleep off, but those migraines meant intense pain that you can’t sleep through, and it wouldn’t die down until I’d been sick, for some weird reason. Grown out of it now though
The only time I’ve been to A&E was in the 6th hour of what would be a 7 hour long nose bleed. It’d been so long I was dizzy and covered in blood that we couldn’t be arsed to clean off because I was still bleeding. But I didn’t get the scale question because it didn’t hurt.
Nosebleeds are good for the fact that they can make you look seriously messed up without causing too much pain… Still, that’s an awful long time to have one go.
*just gave me an idea for a comic… I’ll do it this week*
I think I’d rather have a nosebleed than a migraine any day. People don’t think you are faking nosebleeds just to get out of work.
Nosebleeds are kinda fun. One day, the day after I’d had a nosebleed, I was telling people how I had started it by hitting my nose of my bed like *this* and hit my nose with the side of my hand….and thus bled all over the floor. The school cleaners hated me.
Then, later, another one started in english. I was, at the time, sat next to one of the most popular guys in school, but when the nosebleed started, I swear he nearly fainted. Wuss.
I’ve had appendicitis and a kidney stone in my time, along with a variety of small injuries, so a 10 on the pain scale for me is always “kidney stone” with inflamed appendix being about 7. I have a decent adrenal/shock response, so I don’t have a clear sense of what the pain of my various injuries has been.
I seem to recall on of my friends who works at a hospital tell me that they have a little chart with smiley-faces on it, but rather than smiling, they have faces that are contorted in various levels of pain, and they use that to diagnose pain in non-verbal patients, or before they get a translator.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_scale
There it is. Apologies if this is a re-post. My computer is acting up.
…and now there are two scales, one to five, and one to ten…
Though neither of them have ’so painful I’m delerious and passing through consciousness’. Perhaps there’s no point in asking if someone reaches that stage.
deadlytoque – both of those sound awful, especially the kidney stones. Did you get to keep your appendix or was it kicked out of your abdomen like the freeloading former organ it is?
Chris – Your dad has my sympathy, a friend of mine suffers from a ‘bad back’ (somehow it never conveys just how serious and painful the condition can be) and, like migraines, it seems to be a condition that a lot of people assume you’re faking, when in fact it is seriously painful. I think that conditions like that should at least come with a visable rash, just to inform people.
There is actually a scale to measure pain, it’s loosely based on measuring pain against certain physical ailments like a burn or sprained ankle, etc. My dad, thanks to a bad back was typically quite high on this scale until he started on meds.
Here’s something that explains how the scale works:
http://www.tipna.org/info/documents/ComparativePainScale.htm
I got admitted for severe stomach pain a few years ago.
The nurse asked me what level of pain I was in on the 1-10 scale.
I asked what ten was. Apparently a ten is equivalent to having things shoved up under your finger nails.
Having had drill bits go up under my finger nails, I replied, with a high degree of confidence, that my stomach pain was much worse then that.
He scoffed at me.
WTF is the point of asking for a rating, giving a scale and defining the scale and then ignoring the answer?
Migraines are a 7 or maybe an 8.
Herniated spinal discs hurt, lie still, breathing gently and wanting to scream. That starts off at ten and after a few hours comes down to an 8, in a week gets to a 7 and stays there for aslong as it takes to heal (months).
Broken jaws hurt, but are kinda funny aswell.
Ripping skin off of your eye balls, twice in one week, hurts, 10 to start and that settles to a 5 in a few hours.
2nd degree burns to face and arms, 7 to start, 9 when shock wears off and after a few hours, maybe 6. After a week, 9 when it is exposed to sunlight.
Shrapnel, not penetrating deeper then the skin, 4.
Getting staked in the foot, 5.
Getting stabbed in the hand, 8.
Listening to modern pop music, 11, 10 after using a 15mm spade bit to remove ear canals and drums.
(ranked using http://www.tipna.org/info/documents/ComparativePainScale.htm)
I could keep going, but, I have things to do today.
I was asked that question quite a bit when I was in the hospital two years or so ago. I think they told me that a ten was being run over by stampeding elephants and a one was a mosquito bite.
Then they asked me if I wanted any pain medication, I said no, and they started me on morphine.