I remember that after I had surgery on my finger (the bone healed wrong so they had to cut it and rotate it), a nurse asked me to rate my pain 1-10, and I said: "it's alright, like a 7?", and she was like "that's not alright, let me give you some meds".
It did actually feel like a 7/10, it really hurt, but somehow it didn't bother me. And it was like that for weeks after the surgery, I didn't really end up taking any pain meds when I got home.
And I wouldn't say my pain tolerance is generally particularly high, pain does usually bother me as much as anyone. Not sure what that was about.
I never understand those charts. To me a 10 is a state that only briefly exist before I passed out from agony. If I was at a 7 pain scale you wouldn't need to ask me, it would be obvious.
I’ve never understood that scale. Is a “10” the worst pain I’ve ever experienced in the past or the worst pain I can imagine? Either way, how can my relative approximation to that “10” be enough information for the doctor to decide what to do next?
It’s much easier and more fruitful to ask “mild, moderate, or severe?” regarding pain. It frames the question in terms of how it affects you instead of trying to relate it to other types of pain you may or may not have experienced before
I think mental disposition is a huge component of perceiving pain, and it can be entirely sub-conscious. I can't speak for your case of course, but perhaps you were "ready" for the pain in your finger and what is to come and thus the panic inducing element was gone. You could be almost just an observer of the pain rather than the subject.
Fear of the pain can make things much-much worse. If that fear is removed, you won half the battle.
Of course, there are levels of pain where all of the above goes out the window and it is absolutely debilitating, but maybe that's the 13/10 pain level that hopefully most of us never have to experience.
Where on the finger? From personal experience, the finger tips can be excruciating. Anybody that’s gotten stitches knows that nothing compares to the initial administration of localized anesthesia.
If a level ten is passing out, that one would win via Price Is Right rules.
It did actually feel like a 7/10, it really hurt, but somehow it didn't bother me. And it was like that for weeks after the surgery, I didn't really end up taking any pain meds when I got home.
And I wouldn't say my pain tolerance is generally particularly high, pain does usually bother me as much as anyone. Not sure what that was about.