I am all for pain management, and in just about all cases I give my patients the full benefit of the doubt. Still, sometimes I am confounded by the answers I get to the pain scale question. “That’s be a 10.” “Oh, I’d say definately an 10.” “Five thousand. On the scale, mine is a five thousand.”
The other day my preceptee asked a patient his pain scale, and the man calmly said, “That’d be a 10.”
Now I don’t even remember what the patient’s presentation was it was such an unremarkable call.
“I don’t think you understand,” my preceptee said. “Zero is no pain, 10 is like an alligator biting your leg off pain.”
I about drove off the road I was laughing so hard.
Unphased, the man said, “Yeah, mine’s a ten.”
Later in the day, another woman said her pain was an 11.
It made me recall the famous scene from the movie, This is Spinal Tap, where the guitarist describes his amplifiers that go to 11.
