I’ve always been curious as to how it feels breaking a bone. I know it hurts, and it will kinda put a dampener on the rest of your day, but it’s always been surprisingly difficult learning about the persons experience.
If you’ve been there, please describe in a way that everyone can relate.
Was it the worst pain you’ve experienced? Was it constant or throbbing? Sharp or a dull pain? Was it worse than you imagined or surprisingly manageable? What other pain can you compare it to?
As an example, I’ll describe what my sciatica felt like…
Occasionally, I’d get a sudden twinge in my lower back. It would last maybe half a second, but it would be enough to render me temporarily frozen… usually omitting some kind of grunt or yelp for added effect. It’s a scary type of pain… over in a flash, but the fear of feeling it again is the worst part - hence why I’d remain as still as possible for several seconds thereafter, just in case. The jolt always felt incredibly sharp and ‘hot’, like being jabbed from the inside with something red hot and pokey… a red hot poker if you will.
But that’s boring. Your broken bones are more interesting… please describe!
I wasn’t in significant pain when I broke my tibia skiing back when I was a teenager EXCEPT when I attempted to put any weight on my leg. As long as I was careful I was fine.
So what did that feel like when you put weight on it? Pain aside, could the leg even bear your weight in the state it was in, given the fibula was intact?
I once had just a hairline fracture in my right foot, and that hurt so friggin’ much that I don’t want to experience a break. Or is a clean break less painful that just a fracture for some reason?
March-fracture of a tarsal, which just felt sore and tender.
Clean break of the ulna against a hard rock, which hurt no more than you might expect from banging your arm against a rock.
Weird, though, because my body must have known something was wrong: I came all over faint, even though the pain wasn’t that bad. At the time, I couldn’t figure out why I was near to passing out.
Also, my arm swole up like there was a subcutaneous golf ball. But even that wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t particularly tender.
I once broke my radius and fractured my ulna right above my wrist. When it happened it was just a weird popping sound and sensation. It didn’t actually hurt, but my hand also suddenly didn’t work anymore and my arm was crooked with a weird bulge. At the hospital, they put two fingers in a finger trap, and hung my arm from a stand and suspended weight from it at the elbow to help realign the bones. couple of very painful shots to numb the area and the dr. said “this isn’t going to hurt one bit” right before he set the bone. The Lying Mother Fucker! That’s when the pain began and when my arm bone was set is the only time I remember screaming from pain. Deep throbbing intense ache all night long that the pills they gave me for pain didn’t touch. Didn’t sleep for two days from the pain.
ETA not the worst pain I’ve felt, but almost. I was only twelve at that time and inexperienced with physical pain.
I’ve broken a wrist falling off a slide and broke a finger that was smashed by a rock. They were both dull aches that persisted for a while. The finger was bad enough that I didn’t sleep for a couple days.
I broke both the bones in my left wrist when I was a kid (the summer between grades 6 and 7).
The pain was similar to a sprain, so long as you didn’t touch it, or attempt to move it at all. In those cases, it immediately flared into the worst pain I’ve ever had. Even after the cast was on, if you tensed a muscle that pulled on the bones there, it would hurt like hell. I tried to never, ever move any muscles in my arm to avoid that, but it’s surprisingly hard to not move at all for such an extended period (try it!). I’d feel the urge to move build and build, until there was an eventual involuntary spasm, and the concurrent pain. And all you could do was just watch it all happen.
Hurt like HELL if I put any weight on it. It was a spiral fracture. Due to a misunderstanding I went downhill skiing while wearing cross-country bindings that didn’t pop off in a fall on my skis (my dad misunderstood my school’s plans and thought I was going cross-country skiing with my class). I panicked while skiing down the smallest adult hill in the park, and sat down while going at a reasonable speed. I spun. My skis with my feet well attached did not spin. In hospital for a few days and in a cast for six weeks.
Honestly? It wasn’t that bad, except that I couldn’t walk very well.
I was 20-something (22-23 maybe?) and had a tibial plateau fracture. Basically, a compression fracture of the top of the tibia, right at the knee. A small portion of the bone cracked and slid a tiny bit to the outside.
I was taking the trash out at the time, slipped on the top of the steps and landed flat-footed with my leg twisted a little bit and my knee hyper-extended.
I basically blanked the memory of the landing, but remember feeling like I had actually landed on my knee at first, but then pieced the true landing together. My knee was sore, until I tried to stand up, at which point, the pain went shooting up through the leg. I couldn’t make it back up the back steps and used the garbage can as a walker to get around to the front (only one step up) of the house. Aspirin and ibuprofen didn’t really do anything for the pain, and I ended up going to the ED a few hours later.
That was basically the full feeling until it heeled: a dull ache (about a 3 on the 0-10 scale for the first week and dropping off from there) usually, then shooting pain (about a 7 that night, 5 or 6 the following couple of days, and lessening quickly after that) when I put any weight on the leg. They gave me a few percocets (I think 6?) when they discharged me from the hospital as well as a script for more. I never filled the script and think I threw away half of the percs they gave me.
Really bad sciatica is worse than a broken bone, as long as you don’t put weight on the break. My breaks have felt like dull, throbbing pains after the initial injury, which was a sharp pain. When I broke my collarbone the second time, I was skiing, and I was able to ski down the mountain. I knew right away it was broken because it felt just like it felt the last time I broke it. My toe didn’t really hurt much, even though it the bones were hanging on by that skin that you see on the outside of a spare rib. Almost, but didn’t need surgery. My ankle did require surgery. I knew it something was bad immediately, so I didn’t put any weight on it.
I imagine a broken bone with weight on it would feel worse than sciatica, but you just don’t put weight on it. Since sciatica isn’t an obvious injury, you feel like you can just work through it and that makes it really hurt.
The first time my nose was broken hurt more than anything I could have, up until that time, imagined.
It felt like a bomb went of right between my eyes and it was hard to see for a couple of minutes, which made it the deciding incident in the fist fight.
It was like a blinding flash, a nasty crunch and then a sharp jabbing pain that seemed to go clear to my feet.
From accounts I’ve read over the years, it often seems like people who suffer seemingly horrible injuries don’t hurt too much at the time due to adrenaline, nerve damage, or shock.
When I was in the fifth grade I badly fractured my left forearm. They knocked me out to set it. I remember them calling it a compound fracture, but I don’t think it broke the skin. It looked like I had an extra joint in the middle of my forearm and my wrist and hand were hanging awkwardly at an angle and felt very heavy because they weren’t properly supported (clean break all the way through) and when I ran home I remember it jiggling around. I get the heeby jeebies just thinking about it. I fell from a decent height and landed on it, which caused a sick snapping noise. But it didn’t hurt at all. It went numb right away, except for a stiff, clenching feeling when it moved a lot and pins and needles at the boundary point. I didn’t really know anything was wrong until I stood up and felt it hanging limply by my side and the skin stretched down. I remember feeling light headed and like I was on auto-pilot. So I guess I’m not too much help there. I didn’t cry or yell, but I remember being scared because I thought it would just fall off.
When I was in my early 20s I had a minor avulsion fracture in my right elbow from falling on a slick surface and hyper extending my arm as I caught myself. It didn’t hurt much at first, but then my elbow got hot, puffy, and throbbed with a sharp pain if I tried to straighten the joint even a little, as if debris were thrown into the gears. Had to keep it bent and my forearm held near my chest to avoid the worst of it.
For comparison, probably the most painful experience for me would be the time I had, of all things, impacted ear wax, which felt like someone was trying to rupture my ear drum with a needle. It was a deep, piercing pain every 20-30 seconds which made me wince and curse. If I didn’t get relief for much longer than when I did I would’ve gone crazy.
When I was six years old, I was running full tilt and tripped on a balance beam. I was flung forward and landed on my left arm. I snapped my radius straight through.
There was no pain at first. I got up, tried to dust myself off, and just knew that something was wrong. I got myself to the class line, told the teacher what had happened, and spent two hours lying in the nurse’s office waiting for my mom to get off work. She took me to the emergency room, where they determined it was broken and splinted it for the evening (I don’t know why they didn’t put the cast on till the next morning).
The pain didn’t start until I went to bed that night. Then, every time movement sent a lightning bolt of nerve pain up and down my arm. I didn’t sleep.
After I got the cast on, the only pain was when I tried to move my fingers. At first, only my thumb and forefinger worked freely. I slowly regained the others during the six weeks I was in the cast.
Experience #2 was when I was walking swiftly alongside my (now) husband. We took a corner, I tripped on his foot, went flying, and landed on the cement on my left kneecap. X-ray showed it was “bruised,” which meant a tiny network of fractures all over the surface.
The pain of that one was immediate and breathtaking. I couldn’t get up for ten minutes. I couldn’t do more than limp to the car, then to bed, for a couple hours. For about a week I couldn’t use that leg to bear my weight when I sat down or got up again. The pain this time was more of a profound ache. Like what you feel when you fall and skin a knee, but worse.
I snapped my ankle almost 2 years ago. It hurt like a bitch right away and it got worse from there. My leg was doing that bending in the wrong place thing and any attempt to move it made things worse, pain-wise. My husband brought me some frozen peas and Ace bandages and I splinted it until the paramedics came and took me to the ER. It ended up being confirmed as a broken bone with a dislocation of the joint. Two surgeries to put it all back together.
Not a bone, but a tendon. While climbing a hill in Barcelona, my Achilles tendon snapped. Hurt like a son of a bitch for months. Still hurts on stairs.
I broke a knuckle once. Intense pain that only lasted for a minute or so, then mostly subsided and was just a chronic low grade pain. That went away after a few days. Severe swelling though.