When you go to the hospital, the doctors and nurses ask you to evaluate your pain so they can try to understand what you are feeling. There is no "pain-o-meter". So they ask you to express your observations by putting a number on it - "On a scale of one to ten".
Well, I have known some pain in my time - a hysterectomy, an episiotomy with failed anesthetic, a colonoscopy with failed anesthetic. That pain is ten plus. The pain I have had in recent months can be described as 8 to 9. Or, simply this way - It gets to where you don't scream, but sometimes you just sweat. Most of the time it is less than that.
My father used to tell a story about a missionary who comes out of the jungle, staggering and bleeding. The rescue workers ask him what he has experienced. He tells them that the cannibals tied him to a tree and threw arrows at him and they were cooking him in a cauldron of boiling water until he managed to escape into the bush.
The missionary asked him, "Didn't that hurt, my son?" -
"Only when I laughed," he said.
My Pop told wonderful stories. I have needed stories all my life. The movies fed me for decades. Then there came TV. I still watch the old black and white re-runs through the night.
Well, I have known some pain in my time - a hysterectomy, an episiotomy with failed anesthetic, a colonoscopy with failed anesthetic. That pain is ten plus. The pain I have had in recent months can be described as 8 to 9. Or, simply this way - It gets to where you don't scream, but sometimes you just sweat. Most of the time it is less than that.
My father used to tell a story about a missionary who comes out of the jungle, staggering and bleeding. The rescue workers ask him what he has experienced. He tells them that the cannibals tied him to a tree and threw arrows at him and they were cooking him in a cauldron of boiling water until he managed to escape into the bush.
The missionary asked him, "Didn't that hurt, my son?" -
"Only when I laughed," he said.
My Pop told wonderful stories. I have needed stories all my life. The movies fed me for decades. Then there came TV. I still watch the old black and white re-runs through the night.
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