Question for the collective wisdom of Dreamwidth:

If switching rapidly between cold, dry, dim air conditioning and bright, humid, 90 deg F outside air reliably gives you a pounding headache that settles in for 4+ hours and feels like your eye sockets are being slowly ground away by a belt sander and pooling in your teeth and jaw, with bonus mild nausea, light sensitivity, and the desire to rain down destruction on anything making even as much noise as a vibrating phone except that would require rapid motion so no, and standard painkillers don’t help noticeably but you spend the next day feeling like your brain is balanced on a fresh breezy mountaintop over a miasmatic swamp of pain - is that a migraine?

Because ever since I was tiny I’ve assumed it was just that America’s relationship with air conditioning is bad for humans and all other living things, but in my age I’m starting to think it’s 90% that America’s relationship with air conditioning was borrowed from one of the circles of hell, and 10% maybe you have a migraine trigger, sweetheart.

Anyway, in honor of my lost yesterday afternoon and evening, here is a poll about pain I’ve been meaning to post for a long time. Somebody did one like this ages ago on LJ and it was super interesting to see how everyone’s pain baseline was different, and I would love to see everybody’s answers now. Also, I keep playing with an OC who can sense others’ pain, and I feel like I don’t even have a good idea of, say, what percent of a crowd of people she would sense at any given time.

Poll is anon; comments can be anon or signed, if you want to elaborate. Feel free to share it around - I’m more interested in lots of answers than in a balanced sample, or I wouldn’t be posting on DW. And these are all going to be very subjective answers, because what I’m interested in is peoples’ subjective experience of pain, so don’t think too hard about accuracy if there’s an answer that seems more or less right.

For all pain scale questions we are using either the Hyperbole and A Half Pain Scale, or the Mankoski Pain Scale, your choice, so please read over those if you aren’t already familiar with them.
( long poll under cut! )

(responses to responses to the freetext question: a) "Back" is not listed as an option because I forgot it. Oops? Pick the closest one?
b) There's no good way to compare the experience of pain, but one of the things I like about the Mankowski scale is that it talks about effect on your life rather than some sort of 'how bad does it hurt' - everybody may hit "I can't sleep" at a different pain level, but "I can't sleep" is fairly a measurable standard.)