On A Scale of 1 to 10, ...

Can someone point me to that scale?  Is there somewhere in the sky a special official form which one can reach out and pull down to study for application to special circumstances?  Maybe it's in the ether and I just haven't yet hit the key stroke that will pull it into my working screen area so I can consult the scale on my computer.

In a blog post here quite a long time back, I wrote something about pain and discussed the fact that we cannot clearly compare pain between any two of us.  How I feel a pain is not able to be communicated to any one else so that it is thoroughly understood.  We cannot, with all our grown-up words and sophisticated forms of speech, any more clearly state our conditions than we could as children when we might have said, "Mommy, it hurts."

So someone came up with a terrifically helpful method, aiding doctors immensely; "On a scale of 1-to-10, how would you gauge your pain right now?"

That scale is so vastly flexible, it's hard to see how it would be helpful.  The nearest anyone might get to making this method very helpful would be in the case of a female who has given birth.  Now, there is at least a solid point to which a "10" can be applied.  But then, does a male doctor have a clue about the actual feeling of that childbirth pain?  No.  He could never truly grasp it.  He has perhaps observed that particular pain as experienced by one or more females, but even there, they have all had varying amounts of screaming to express pain or quiet suffering to not allow others to see their pain.  And even if said doctor had witnessed hundreds of births and therefore had a large comparison chart to call upon, his grasp is still guesswork based on what other bodies feel and his own body will never feel.

Based upon the worst pain I have ever experienced as my "10" level (and believe it or not, I do not think of a specific pain to put at this apex of the pain-understanding world), I have to tell medical personnel each time I visit another doctor for an exam, that my pain is "a 3" or "about 5" when those are just floating numbers with no readily attached relevance.  Then there is the big question of "Which pain do these people want to know about - the minor discomfort pain I am feeling at the very moment I'm being questioned, or the slamming, voilent crash against my body that almost rendered me unconscious about an hour earlier just before I took that last pill?"  My sweet wife who cringes in fear and sympathy during those attacks that strike many times per day, in which my body spasms in a way that must look like a man being hit with a tazer, wants me to tell them that my pain is "above 10."  Of course, that isn't supposed to be possible but using poetic license (or just license), I am allowed to tell them that I am experiencing quite a few attacks at "about a 14" - just to emphasize the magnitude of my sporadic pains.  Still it's all based on a completely mystical and incomprehensible scale that floats somewhere in the vague world of "How are you feeling?"

On a scale of 1-to-10, I assume this post will be understood by about 3!  (This estimate will be down-graded if only two actually read it!)