My interpretation of The Pain Scale

   There are undeniably many interesting ideas in Eula Biss' "The Pain Scale", at first I didn't quite know how to approach so many different ideas and thoughts put together, and to be honest I still don't grasp exactly what she is trying to communicate to her audience. However, I did realize that like our thoughts, which are sometimes a random jumble of emotions and occurrences, perhaps this piece is just that. Perhaps, this was Biss' thought process and her method of organization was to arrange it into a scale, into "The Pain Scale."   
   There are several statements in this piece that make me question what I have always believed in, or at least "thought" to be true. For example, I find it particularly curious that she cites Anders Celsius, who introduced the scale himself, and how he had originally made zero the point at which water boils. We have always been taught that the lower the temperature the colder it gets, but how interesting would it be if reality were just the opposite? What if, zero is truly the point at which water boils and turns into nothing, as it evaporates it becomes "zeroed". This brings me to the word "zeroed", as I read over Biss' description of how a chicken upside down becomes "zeroed" I realized that although it isn't a word, I knew exactly what she meant. This is because, I believe I at one point have felt "zeroed" myself. As a baby I was burned by an exploding pressure cooker and although I was young and cannot recall much my mother always says that I never cried, I just stared at her almost as if seeing through her. When I read the word "zeroed" those events from my childhood came back almost as if to aid me in understanding Biss' purpose for including the word.
   Apart from the section on zero that left me so heavily intrigued, I was especially drawn to number five. I assume it is because this is the number I can relate to most. As Biss described "the tyranny of the mean" I chuckled because I knew just what she was referring to. As a runner, I have suffered from many injuries, from shin splints, to runner's knee, bruised knees, you name it. If there was one thing I would've wanted to avoid more than the pain of the injury it would've been trying to get my trainer too understand the intensity of the pain I was in. He would never understand me, and so when using a pain scale, I would always rate my pain five, I figured it is enough pain to need treatment but not enough to be rushed to a hospital or get an x-ray. Sometimes, I would be in excruciating pain, knowing that it was more than a five, but nonetheless I would rate it a five because in my trainer's eyes a five would allow me to run the next day's race and not to sit it out. It is interesting how everyone has their own definition of pain and hence their own scale and so trying to fully understand someone else's pain is close to impossible and I assimilate this to the saying "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," because each individual is quite different and what we see, feel, or experience varies so much from one person to another.