In a sterile room that feels too white and too bright, a man with a smile that is also too white and too bright asks me “on a scale from 1-10, 1 being no pain at all, and 10 being the worst pain you’ve felt in your life, how much does this hurt?” The words hang in the air like a command, as if I should know immediately, as if pain can be so simply sorted into a neat number.
The question is absurd, but I’m used to it. My mind cycles through a reel of memories that flash like a slideshow — pain I can barely hold in my head all at once, let alone flatten to a single digit.
The time my wrist got cut, red spilling across the floor; surprisingly, that was only a one. A severed nerve had stolen the sensation before I even had a chance to process it. The dull ache of a concussion (a 6). And another… and another. A foot broken in three places, bad enough pain for my body to shake and go cold, stop listening to instruction (a 9). And then, my grandmother’s death (surely a 10)— a different kind of pain, the kind he isn’t talking about, though her lifeless body flashes in my mind anyway.
I steady myself for his fingers, my mind steeling as his grip tightens. His fingertips press into my flesh, sinking in, and though my body wants to recoil, I force myself still. I do not gasp. I do not cry out. “Eight,” I say, the word feeling heavy on my tongue, then quickly, “Maybe a seven?” I sound unsure, and I am unsure, because how do you compare a broken bone to a broken heart? He smiles wider — too wide. “We’ll call it a 7.5,” he says with a wink. Did he actually just wink at me? His smile, his casual calculation of my pain, feels surreal.
“How about this?” His fingers find the soft spot this time. Before I can stop myself I wince and pull away. My brain screams TEN. TEN. TEN. THATS A FUCKING TEN. But I only say “I don’t know… an 8.5?… maybe an 8?” He nods, makes a face that almost looks like understanding.
“I don’t know if I’m doing this right,” I mumble. You can’t just quantify pain like that. This scale, the sterile language. You cannot reduce pain to a math problem, as if I can sort my suffering into rows and columns, rounding up or down. As if anguish could be cured by arithmetic. It isn’t just a physical thing; it’s tangled in memory, emotion, even habit. It has edges that are sometimes sharp, sometimes blurred. This particular pain is electric, jagged — and that isn’t a metaphor. It actually feels like electricity, a nerve rubbing on something it shouldn’t, apparently. I feel it under my skin, sparking and searing.
“Have the new prescriptions helped?” he asks, clipboard at the ready. The question feels like a trap. I know what he wants to hear, and I know how to say it, but the truth is more complicated.
The truth is; the pills help to blur the edges of the pain, make it harder to locate, maybe. Sometimes, they even allow me a few hours of sleep. Sometimes, when I ignore the warnings on the bottle, they even usher me into a dead sleep that is so much a relief I never want to leave it. That waking up from the blank silence is like being pulled into a nightmare, not out of a dream.
For a moment, I wonder what he’d say if I told him the whole truth: that I cry every day, that the medication has a hold on me as strong as the pain itself. That the pain is always there, angry beneath the surface, like waves breaking on a shore. Some are bigger, and some are smaller, but they all take tiny granules of me. He doesn’t need to know that, though. There aren’t really numbers for that kind of pain, the kind that slips between digits, and moments. And I get the impression doctors don’t want to hear about the pain I can’t quantify. Can’t put in a box. Can’t give a number.
And then I wonder – who decided pain could be captured on a scale of one to ten, anyway? Who thought they could compress all the messy, jagged, layered ways we suffer into a single, sterile question? Pain is everything from the ache in my jaw to the grief I felt at my grandmother’s bedside. This could always be worse but it could always be better. The doctors will do nothing unless your symptoms are now debilitating.
The doctor smiles at me, prompting me to finally answer. He is ready to finish this appointment. Close my folder like he’s sealing my pain into a neat package. I smile back, a reflex. But inside, I’m screaming: I don’t know how to do this right. I don’t know how to fit my life’s pain into a number.
“Yeah… yeah, I think they are,” I answer.
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