Pain Scale...devolving into ridiculousness

In Health Assessment this week, while talking about doing an initial patient assessment, our instructor mentioned the pain scale.  You know, the "On a scale of 1 to 10, rate the pain you are experiencing right now". This is done via words for adults and with little cartoon faces for the pediatric patients.  I like the faces, myself.  But that's me.

Anyhoo...I immediately thought of this post from Hyperbole And A Half.

{Pausing while you clicky-click on over and take a look.  Go ahead.  The last couple of sentences below won't make sense unless you clicky-click on over.  Besides, it's funny and worth the read.  Just be sure to come back and finish here...then you can go back over and take a look at her "Best Of" list.  You will understand any future references to ALOT and PARP?}

While her chart is more colorful and...interesting...I somehow don't think it will be commonplace in medical offices and clinics anytime soon.  Not sure my instructor would go for it for class either, although with her spunk and propensity to toss out a "bad" word here and there, I'm sure she would find it amusing.

And to relate this nonsense to the real world...my lovely migraine adventure yesterday?  I'm thinking a 10.  But there was no actual bear that I could see with my own two eyes.  Migraine-bear was well-established in my head, though, and wreaking much havoc.

I'd like to imagine this is a *picture of Migraine-bear, growling/roaring and swinging his large-clawed paws around, damaging tissue and making grey and white shredded cerebral bits as he goes.  If a during-migraine brain scan was performed and showed this scene, I would not be surprised.  And I bet those of you who also experience the joy of migraines would also not be surprised.

*bear image courtesy of this post, which had nothing to do with migraines

Alright, enough ridiculous nonsense.  Must get back to work.  This post took on a mind of its own  :-)