How well we mask it

They ask me a lot these days about my pain level.  On a scale of 1 - 10, with one being none and 10 being the worst pain ever, where am I at right now?

And, this kind of stumps me.

At first I attributed this to my being a technical writer.  I immediately wanted to know if the gradations were arithmetic or logarithmic.  Not that I strictly know the difference (and yes, I've just restrained myself from looking it up on wikipedia).  But I want to know if they mean that the distance between 3 and 4 is the same as between 6 and 7 (like it would be on a ruler)?  Or is it more like the Richter scale -- where an 8 point earthquake is, like, 100 bigger than a 7 point earthquake?  That's where my brain goes first: can we please define our units of measurement?

But of course I don't say this out loud.  I have enough problems as it is without them thinking I'm a left brain nut job as well.

So I answer with a number that is kind of calculated to 1) make me not sound like a wussy while 2) still getting me some pretty good pain pills.

This is true. 

Most of the time that's how I come up with an answer.

But I realized after a few days of this that it would really be a good idea to know how much pain I am in, especially as I'm pretty much in charge of my own medicinal management these days.  I do feel better when I feel better.  I just don't have a good clue as to how I actually feel.

When I was in the hospital and being asked this all the time, I realized that the more I turned my brain to the area that was hurting, the more elusive the answer to how much pain I was in became.  It became something... quantum.  Something Schrödinger's cat.  Something about looking at the thing causing the thing itself to change.  The car at the mechanic's suddenly losing that annoying ping.

I didn't know how to really deal with that.  Asking me how I felt right now usually made the pain completely go away.  Or I'd start answering with how it felt if I were moving, which I wasn't.  I am WAY too literal, as I'm sure you've all figured out.  So I would go back to the default answer, stay within the 4 - 6 ranges, and just... kind of... make something up.

But then something interesting happened.  I started to notice that the answer lay in my teeth of all places.  The more I hurt, the more my teeth clench up.  When I would have these happy blissed out Percoset naps, my jaw was light and carefree and relaxed.  The more a medication wore off, the closer my teeth came together, until they were clenching and my jaw was tight.

Interesting.

For some reason, I found no answer when I was looking at the thing itself, but I could look at my teeth and actually get a reading that did not evaporate the second I checked it out.  Ever since then I could pretty much assess where I really was on the pain scale and then act accordingly.

It struck me yesterday how absolutely skillful I am (how we all are, I'm guessing) at masking our pain.  Pain is an amazingly useful indicator of things that are important to us.  It triggers fight or flight.  It tells us when to stop.  It tells us where we need to take care of ourselves. 

But in our daily rushing around, driven by that little guy in the brain, sometimes pain is just ... well... a pain in the ass.  It is something to be gotten through, ignored.  Pain is for wussies, unless we're at the gym, at which point we are supposed to court and solicit it, otherwise we're not doing our workout right.

We are adrenaline junkies.  At least I am.  A little bit of adrenaline goes a long way to mask these uncomfortable feelings, enables us to fly or stay and punch it out, enables us to get out of the tiger's cave before we realize our leg has been chewed halfway off.  And we use that pump of adrenaline liberally, unconsciously.

Where do I hurt?  Beats me, let's get back to the job at hand.

Where do I hurt?  It will go away, don't be a baby.

Where do I hurt... not only physically, but emotionally?  Spiritually?  We don't even want to go there.

It's a little bit weird.  And scary.  And unnerving.  Even when it's in our own best interest, it's sometimes hard to know exactly where we stand on matters that are a little bit dark, that expose a little bit of vulnerability.  Far easier to mask it, to ignore it, than to admit it. 

We are very skilled indeed.

I'm grateful for my teeth.  I'm very happy that I figured that secondary measurement out.  I'm thinking there may be other tells like that, maybe for emotional pain, or spiritual starvation.  Snapping at people you love may be a tell.  Eating without tasting may be a tell.  Drinking to numb may be a tell.  The colors leeching out of the world until everything is a monochrome may be a tell.

Maybe we just can't look at the thing itself for answers. Maybe most of us are still too unenlightened to see everything the way it is just at this moment.  But this is all important information.  Important enough that maybe it's worth it to find the secondary measurements and pay attention to them.