Describing pain
In early July Maree was able to visit a pain management clinic to review her condition, and the application forms she filled in asked a range of very detailed questions about her pain. Her new drug is working amazingly well at managing the pain, and so it's remarkable to recall how bad it was only two months ago.
On the application form she was asked to rate the pain intensity using the normal scale of 0 (no pain) to 10 (worst pain imaginable); at the time of the survey she rated the pain as 6. During the previous week she had a range from 2 to 6, with an average of 4.
Over the full six months she rated the worst intensity as 10, and the average as 7.
After a week or two of this whole exercise, I found that I could recognize fairly easily each of the intensity levels from 6 to 10. It's really hard to see someone experiencing pain levels 7 or 8, and the last couple of levels are just awful.
There was also a section with descriptive words for alternative ways that people describe their pain, and she had to choose the most appropriate words for her experience. This sort of pain map approach is obviously a normal part of the assessment process for chronic pain, but it's very confronting to get a glimpse of the range of things that some people go through.
The words that Maree used for her own pain were pulsing, drilling, cutting, itchy, hurting, splitting, exhausting, vicious, intense and penetrating.
On the application form she was asked to rate the pain intensity using the normal scale of 0 (no pain) to 10 (worst pain imaginable); at the time of the survey she rated the pain as 6. During the previous week she had a range from 2 to 6, with an average of 4.
Over the full six months she rated the worst intensity as 10, and the average as 7.
After a week or two of this whole exercise, I found that I could recognize fairly easily each of the intensity levels from 6 to 10. It's really hard to see someone experiencing pain levels 7 or 8, and the last couple of levels are just awful.
There was also a section with descriptive words for alternative ways that people describe their pain, and she had to choose the most appropriate words for her experience. This sort of pain map approach is obviously a normal part of the assessment process for chronic pain, but it's very confronting to get a glimpse of the range of things that some people go through.
The words that Maree used for her own pain were pulsing, drilling, cutting, itchy, hurting, splitting, exhausting, vicious, intense and penetrating.
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