Rate Your Pain, Kid!

No, that's not what I say to the kids when I'm punishing them, or when they complain about how "mean" I am (sometimes it's a parent's job to be mean, but that's another post!).

Nurses are trained to ask patients who are in pain, to rate their pain. This gives us a way to assess the severity of the pain, as well as how effective medication or other pain-relief measures are. It's natural for me to ask the kids (and my husband, and my parents, and my in-laws!) to rate their pain when they are having pain. (If you want to use this technique, ask the person how bad the pain is on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being "very little or no pain" and 10 being "the worst pain I can imagine." A rating of '17' means they're not taking the pain scale seriously!)

Cody came home Saturday evening not feeling good, and still wasn't feeling well when he and Morgan left for the show on Sunday. By mid-morning Sunday he was feeling so rotten he went to the pickup and slept there until Morgan was done showing, and then I took him home.

I've found that it's as hard to watch your children being sick when they're teenagers, as it is when they're little babies. When they're babies, they cannot tell you what is wrong, but they will accept any and all cuddling you'll give them. I remember many "sick" days spent rocking and cuddling with sick kids. Of course I don't like it when my children don't feel well, but there is something about being the only one who can comfort them in the midst of the flu or an ear infection.

Teenagers are very able to tell you exactly what's wrong . . . not that they are always willing to. Yesterday I heard "I can't tell what hurts . . . I just feel yukky . . . quit asking me! . . . I don't know how bad my pain is . . . I don't feel like giving it a number . . . " before I got the information that he had a bad headache, and his muscles and stomach hurt. Same thing this morning--stomach pain at a 6-7 rating, enough to get me to be a bit concerned that it was something serious. Thankfully, by the time I got home from work, and several hours after Cody had taken some medicine, he rated the pain a 3. Hopefully it is just a virus and will pass.

The hard part about having a teenage boy who is sick is that he most definitely does NOT want extra hugs, or cuddles, or even to have me near him. He's texting his girlfriend and other friends . . . I guess that is the teenage form of cuddling when you're sick!

Time to ask Cody to rate his pain again . . .