We've all been asked this question a thousand times- "How would you rate your pain on a scale of 1 to 10?" I really hate the pain scale question, despite understanding how useful it is. Since living with chronic pain my approach in answering has changed.
These days anything that I would rate under 5 I would not use the word pain as the descriptor. Instead I would use discomfort or ache. A rating of 5 means I'm straddling between pain and a bad ache or discomfort, unable to really tell if it is one or the other. The real pain scale, as far as I use it, is between 6 and 9. This is where most of my pain takes place. Even though sometimes I'm tempted to say my pain is a 10, I'm fairly sure there is pain worse so I try to stay away from using that rating. Instead what I'll do is use 9.5.
How do you use this scale when facing this question?
