Free Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction by Lex Williford, Michael Martone Page A

short.
     
       
    It took sailors more than two hundred years to develop a standardized numerical scale for the measure of wind. The result, the Beaufort scale, provides twelve categories for everything from “Calm” to “Hurricane.” The scale offers not just a number, but a term for the wind, a range of speed, and a brief description.
     
       
    A force 2 wind on the Beaufort scale, for example, is a “Light Breeze” moving between four and seven miles per hour. On land, it is specified as “wind felt on face; leaves rustle; ordinary vanes moved by wind.”
     

    Left alone in the exam room I stare at the pain scale, a simple number line complicated by only two phrases. Under zero: “no pain.” Under ten: “the worst pain imaginable.”
     
       
    The worst pain imaginable…Stabbed in the eye with a spoon? Whipped with nettles? Buried under an avalanche of sharp rocks? Impaled with hundreds of nails? Dragged over gravel behind a fast truck? Skinned alive?
     
       
    My father tells me that some things one might expect to be painful are not. I have read that starving to death, at a certain point, is not exactly painful. At times, it may even cause elation. Regardless, it is my sister’s worst fear. She would rather die any other way, she tells me.
     
       
    I do not prefer one death over another. Perhaps this is because I am incapable of imagining the worst pain imaginable. Just as I am incapable of actually understanding calculus, although I could once perform the equations correctly.
     
       
    Like the advanced math of my distant past, determining the intensity of my own pain is a blind calculation. On my first attempt, I assigned the value of ten to a theoretical experience — burning alive. Then I tried to determine what percentage of the pain of burning alive I was feeling.
     
       
    I chose 30 percent — three. Which seemed, at the time, quite substantial.
     
       
    Three. Mail remains unopened. Thoughts are rarely followed to their conclusions. Sitting still becomes unbearable after one hour. Nausea sets in. Grasping at the pain does not bring relief. Quiet desperation descends.
     
       
    “Three is nothing,” my father tells me now. “Three is go home and take two aspirin.” It would be helpful, I tell him, if that could be noted on the scale.
     
       
    The four vital signs used to determine the health of a patient are blood pressure, temperature, breath, and pulse. Recently, it has been suggested that pain be considered a fifth vital sign. But pain presents a unique problem in terms of measurement, and a unique cruelty in terms of suffering — it is entirely subjective.
     
       
    Assigning a value to my own pain has never ceased to feel like a political act. I am citizen of a country that ranks our comfort above any other concern. People suffer, I know, so that I may eat bananas in February. And then there is history…. I struggle to consider my pain in proportion to the pain of a na-palmed Vietnamese girl whose skin is slowly melting off as she walks naked in the sun. This exercise itself is painful.
     
       
    “You are not meant to be rating world suffering,” my friend in Honduras advises. “This scale applies only to you and your experience.”
     
       
    At first, this thought is tremendously relieving. It unburdens me of factoring the continent of Africa into my calculations. But the reality that my nerves alone feel my pain is terrifying. I hate the knowledge that I am isolated in this skin — alone with my pain and my own fallibility.
     

    The Wong-Baker Faces scale was developed to help young children rate their pain.
     

    The face I remember, always, was on the front page of a local newspaper in an Arizona gas station. The man’s face was horrifyingly distorted in an open-mouthed cry of raw pain. His house, the caption explained, had just been destroyed in a wildfire. But the man himself, the article revealed, had not been