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

hurt.
     
       
    Several studies have suggested that children using the Wong-Baker scale tend to conflate emotional pain and physical pain. A child who is not in physical pain but is very frightened of surgery, for example, might choose the crying face. One researcher observed that “hurting” and “feeling” seemed to be synonymous to some children. I myself am puzzled by the distinction. Both words are used to describe emotions as well as physical sensations, and pain is defined as a “sensory and emotional experience.” In an attempt to rate only the physical pain of children, a more emotionally “neutral” scale was developed.
     

    A group of adult patients favored the Wong-Baker scale in a study comparing several different types of pain scales. The patients were asked to identify the easiest scale to use by rating all the scales on a scale from zero, “not easy,” to six, “easiest ever seen.” The patients were then asked to rate how well the scales represented pain on a scale from zero, “not good,” to six, “best ever seen.” The patients were not invited to rate the experience of rating.
     
       
    I stare at a newspaper photo of an Israeli boy with a bloodstained cloth wrapped around his forehead. His face is impassive.
     
       
    I stare at a newspaper photo of a prisoner standing delicately balanced with electrodes attached to his body, his head covered with a hood.
    No face, no pain?
     
       
    A crying baby, to me, always seems to be in the worst pain imaginable. But when my aunt became a nurse twenty years ago, it was not unusual for surgery to be done on infants Without any pain medication. Babies, it was believed, did not have the fully developed nervous systems necessary to feel pain. Medical evidence that infants experience pain in response to anything that would cause an adult pain has only recently emerged.
     
       
    There is no evidence of pain on my body. No marks. No swelling. No terrible tumor. The X-rays revealed nothing. Two MRIs of my brain and spine revealed nothing. Nothing was infected and festering, as I had suspected and feared. There was no ghastly huge white cloud on the film. There was nothing to illustrate my pain except a number, which I was told to choose from between zero and ten. My proof.
     

    “The problem with scales from zero to ten,” my father tells me, “is the tyranny of the mean.”
     
       
    Overwhelmingly, patients tend to rate their pain as a five, unless they are in excruciating pain. At best, this renders the scale far less sensitive to gradations in pain. At worst, it renders the scale useless.
     
       
    I understand the desire to be average only when I am in pain. To be normal is to be okay in a fundamental way — to be chosen numerically by God.
     
       
    When I could no longer sleep at night because of my pain, my father reminded me that a great many people suffer from both insomnia and pain. “In fact,” he told me, “neck and back pain is so common that it is a cliché — a pain in the neck!”
     
       
    The fact that 50 million Americans suffer from chronic pain does not comfort me. Rather, it confounds me. “This is not normal,” I keep thinking. A thought invariably followed by a doubt, “Is this normal?”
     
       
    The distinction between test results that are normal or abnormal is often determined by how far the results deviate from the mean. My X-rays did not reveal a cause for my pain, but they did reveal an abnormality. “See this,” the doctor pointed to the string of vertebrae hanging down from the base of my skull like a loose line finding plumb. “Your spine,” he told me, “is abnormally straight.”
     
       
    I live in Middle America. I am of average height, although I have always thought of myself as short. I am of average weight, although I tend to believe I am oddly shaped. Although I try to hide it, I have long straight blond hair, like most of the women in this