Indiana Social Security Disability Attorney

That is what the nurse was asking me recently as I lay in my hospital bed after my surgery. She wanted me to rate my pain from 0 to 10. I had pushed the button for the nurse and asked her for another morphine shot. I knew it was time to have it by the pain I was having, and by the doctor’s orders I could have had it sooner, but what number should I put on my pain?

I told the nurse that I hated the pain scale as I have had clients who had rated their pain at a number that the judge in their disability case thought was the wrong number for what they were describing. “What is a level 5, what is a level 8?” I asked. I was over-thinking this and the nurse just wanted to chart it, give me my shot, and move on. She agreed with me that the number was arbitrary, but that she needed to chart it. So I picked a number.

As I lay in my hospital bed, I could not help but think of the countless hearings I have been in where the judge has asked my clients to rate their pain. One judge said that a 10 was the worst pain you could imagine. What he did not say was that if you said a 10 he automatically disbelieved you as he believed that no one could be sitting there with a pain level of 10 (he never told them that to their faces). Other judges had no problem with a pain level 10.

I hate the pain scale because there is no way for us all to calibrate our measurements so that they are all the same. I have observed clients in great pain who state that their pain is a 6. I have had other clients who appeared to be in less pain that also said that their pain was a 6. So what is a level 6?

How did I want to compare the pain I had the two nights that I could not sleep from the pain to the pain that I had after surgery? There was a time I thought my pain might be a 10, but what about those I have seen who suffered more than I did those two nights I could not sleep? If delivering a baby is a pain level of 10, was my pain that bad? Since I am a man, I will obviously never know how my pain compares to the pain of childbirth.

So I started to answer the nurse the way I advise my clients to tell their medical providers about the pain. I started to describe the pain without putting a number on it. I started to give the nurse details about the pain. How it felt. Where it was. What aggravated it (at that point for me it was just shifting in the bed). What kind of pain it was ( by this I mean was it hot, cold, constant, throbbing, stabbing, electrifying ect.) How intense it was. She wrote down my description. Now a “real” description of my pain was recorded.

It is important to get a “real” description of your pain recorded into the medical records every time you visit your medical provider. This will allow the judge to read your descriptions and know how your pain was at the beginning of your disability and how the pain continued during all of the time that was disabled. If you only give a number, you and the judge may have different ideas as to what that means. The only way you could “both be on the same page” would be for you to calibrate with the judge your pain measurements on the same scale to discover that your 6 is his or her 8. The problem is that this can not happen until the hearing, and the judge will have already read the file and decided how bad your level 6 pain is. It may be hard for the judge to change his mind. If your full blown description of the pain is in your medical records, the judge will read that as he reads the file and decides how bad your pain is.

Your full blown description of the pain in your medical records is vital to your case.