A sensory evoked potential test, last winter, when a neurologist spotted some mild neuropathy.
The hand test was… interesting. Unpleasant but not intolerable, and sort of entertaining when the tech turned on the power and I could see my thumb moving of its own accord.
The foot portion was painful as HELL. “some discomfort” my ass. And she had a LOT of trouble getting to the right spot for the probe. We very nearly had to terminate it because I couldn’t tolerate. Oh, and the stress caused my restless legs to kick in (literally) big time. I’d be lying there, praying for death and/or the test to be done (didn’t have a strong preference, really), tears running down my face, and then TWITCH went the entire leg.
Childbirth. I knew it’d hurt. I thought there’d be pain relief if it got unbearable. Foolishly, I thought the pain relief would be reasonably prompt (it took 2.5 hours for the bastard anesthesiologist to get around to me), administered correctly (you’re NOT supposed to scream in agony when that needle goes into the spinal column), and would work (it did not).
To this day I can’t drive past that hospital without feeling sick.
I’m a big guy and had a window seat (at least from Germany to DC I did, I honestly don’t remember what I had from Cairo to Germany). The combination made the prospect of trying to unlace and remove hiking boots even worse than the prospect of keeping them on.
Similarly, the summer I had off. A while back I got laid off from a job. That was in early June. Since I had some money saved up and the unemployment office said that I didn’t have to file right away, I decided to take my first summer off since 1983. GF and I got to the beach a couple of times a week, I got to the pool every other day, and I became a summer bum. It was awesome!
Well, kind of.
I spent most of the summer wondering if I was going to be able to get a job in September. It put a damper on the whole thing. A vacation full of worry is not much of a vacation.
As it turns out, the only interview I got was a phone interview, and that got cancelled because some assholes decided to run planes into buildings that day. It was another year until I got a job.
My personal coping mechanism when shit hits the fan is to talk myself through it by asking myself “is this the hardest/ most painful/ most humiliating. . .(whatever) you’ve ever been through?” to which I can always bring up the memory of something that was worse. Because of that I think I’ve distorted my perception to the point that I’ve lost a sense of proportion. That being said, when I was about seventeen I had to have my tonsils out. Nothing prepared me for the soul crushing pain that brought. I thought I’d have a bit of a sore throat and get to eat icecream all day and everything would be chill. My ass. I’ve had surgeries and wounds and heinous toothaches but at least with all of those you can take pain meds. Not possible when you can’t even swallow your own blood infused saliva.
Getting a tattoo. Actually getting my second tattoo over my first tattoo. I had a small flower on my ankle that had faded over the years and decided to put something bigger and brighter over it. I don’t know if, like they say of child birth, I didn’t recall the pain or in 15 years, I became more sensitive to it but OMG. I actually didn’t allow him to finish shading some areas, said I would come back, and so far have not and probably will not.
When I was 20 I had plantar’s warts removed. The local anesthetic injections were murder. When the podiatrist put that needle in my feet, I could feel the sweat popping out of my pores all over my body. It was probably worse than if he had just cut those warts out.
If the plane goes down over the Atlantic Ocean, shoes will not help.
Do you keep your shoes on in the back seat of a car? I do have shoes on for takeoff and landing, as something might happen then where they might be of use.
Oh, one more. I had heart palpitations. Really bad, and they wouldn’t go away. They told me to give up coffee. So I quit my 4 cups a day, cold turkey. Big big big mistake. I felt like I had the flu, deathly ill - I felt like I was underwater, so tired, so groggy, so irritable - and the headache, I can’t even describe it. Ghastly experience. In comparison, labor and childbirth was a breeze (but I was only in labor 12 hours and then had a C-section).
In fact, if one is going to quit anything addictive - cigarettes, alcohol, coffee, or whatever, it is a wise idea to taper off, to do it slowly. I’ve learned this through bitter experience.
I agree. I fly a lot, and I always wear shoes. Dress shoes, sneakers, even the odd pair of cowboy boots – without discomfort. I sort of look down my nose at all the people that started wearing slip-ons and flip-flops for the 10 second convenience it gives you at security. If my plane goes down, and I’m lucky enough to survive the impact, I’m not going to be wading through flame, and glass, and twisted wreckage, and shattered bone in my bare feet before spending a night on a scree-filled mountainside waiting for rescue.
I’ve had a number of horrible medical procedures but most of them don’t fit the OP’s requirement of being “worse than you imagined”, since I expected them to be awful.
One that was much worse than I expected was an abdominal MRI. I’d heard that people sometimes panic but I was sure I could keep my self control.
To say I was claustrophobic would be an understatement. I was in total panic. It was like being in a coffin. My fight or flight instinct went into overdrive. They had to pull me out at one point.
I did finally manage to get through it. I think my male pride in front of the cute female techs was what made me get through it. One instinct overcame another.
Just thought of this- prepping for a colonoscopy. Before my first one my folks told me “oh, yeah, the prep day is no picnic. You have to drink this stuff and it makes you go to the bathroom a lot. It’s a little uncomfortable.”
Holy fucking shitballs. “A little uncomfortable”? After the first 5 hours of wiping my ass, it felt like I was getting anally raped by a flaming studded dildo, and it went on for another eight hours. I was so glad to get to the procedure so they could put me under general so I’d be unaware of the fire between my cheeks.
That’s pretty much how I got through my root canal. Cute dental assistant and cute oral surgeon pulling my face into her breasts so that she could go medieval on my jaw. It was sexy pain.
A co-worker just had a colonoscopy this past Monday. Her experience echoes corkboard’s, with the added unpleasantness of having a sciatica attack the night before her colon’s television debut.
That’s not quite the same. The only thing in my face was the coffin wall of the MRI machine. What happened with me was that my fear of looking like a whiny little girl in front of the cute techs was (just barely) greater than my fear of being entrapped in a tomb.