Post blue.

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? Buried under an avalanche of sharp rocks? Impaled with hundreds of nails? Dragged over gravel behind a fast truck? Skinned alive? Determining the intensity of my pain is a blind calculation. On my first attempts, 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 conclusion. 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 have helped, I tell him, if that could be noted on the scale. Assigning a value to my own pain has never ceased to feel like a political act. I am a 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 napalmed Vietnamese girl who’s 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.” This thought unburdens me of factoring the continent of Africa into my calculations. But I am terrified by the reality that I am isolated in this skin—alone with my pain and my own fallibility.