Have you ever broken a bone? Describe what it REALLY felt like..

In My Humble Opinion
41

Broke my radius and ulna at the wrist ten years ago. A football was belted at me from a couple of yards away when I was taking my turn in goal. I stuck an arm out to stop the ball and all the energy traveled up through my wrist. There was no snap or breakage that I could detect but it did feel as if some one had applied a hot, throbbing persistent hammer blow. I played on for another 45 minutes until I realised that I was about to faint even though I wasn’t perceiving a huge amount of pain.
I didn’t go to hospital (of course not) and went home with the intention of sleeping it off after a hot bath. I woke up in the middle of the night unable to move my body due to fear of setting off the inferno in my now purple and football-sized wrist.
I woke my then heavily-pregnant wife and she drove me to A&E. How she managed to drive so well whilst rolling her eyes so much I’ll never know.

So for me the pain was waves of pressure and heat with an occasional stabbing or piercing. Certainly the immediate aftermath was nothing compared to six hours later when the swelling kicked in and the arm had not yet been set.

I also broke my nose when a team-mate kicked me full in the face (by accident…so he says). In that case, buckets of claret, lots of bruising but only a dull headache and tender nose for a few weeks.

42

When I was 13, I broke my right arm an inch or two above the wrist. And I mean broke: it looked like I had two adjacent wrists on that arm, bending in opposite directions.

But it didn’t hurt, that I can recall. Certainly not when it happened, when I was lying on the ground just kinda gaping at it, knowing it wasn’t supposed to bend like that. And I don’t recall that it hurt later, either. It was just incredibly inconvenient, especially since this was back in the days of plaster casts.

43

I think the healing pain is worse than the pain of the breaking action.

I’ve broken at least a dozen bones (I even broke 2 of the little bones in my ear). I remember they hurt but I don’t remember the pain of any of them except the ribs.

Ribs are fun to break. They don’t really hurt the day you break them but they cry in agony for the next 3-4 weeks. You’ll know you’re making progress when you can sleep on your side again. Laughing, coughing and sneezing are the worst, especially in those last couple of weeks of mending.

Oh, almost forgot the collarbones… you can kinda feel the little bones sliding against each other as they heal. Really makes ya feel ALIVE!

44

Broke radius and ulna near the wrist in both arms at separate times; left arm at age 12, right at age 50. Interesting to note the contrasting effects: left arm hurt worse initially, but healed in six weeks with full range of motion; right arm hurt less (a severe dull ache) but required installation of a metal plate, I was in a cast for ten weeks followed by eight weeks of physical therapy and with all that I ultimately lost about 20% range of motion at the wrist.

In the pain sweepstakes, the broken arms come in a distant fourth, after kidney stones, impacted wisdom teeth and gout. In fact, when I broke my right arm, as I got up off the floor and looked at my arm hanging at a grotesque angle, my first thought was: “You know, this doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as kidney stones.”

45

Spiral fracture of my fibula and broke the end off of my tibia while playing rugby 7 years ago.

I heard the crack, and remember my brain being flooded with warning signals, but there was no pain that I can remember. I was shocked when I looked down and saw my foot pointing the wrong direction. When they carried me off the field I remember telling them to take me out through the end of the field, rather than all the way across it, so that the game could resume but they told me not to worry about it.

I got to the sideline and they were going to call an ambulance, but I told someone to just drive me over in my car. I was surprisingly calm and was trying to calm everyone around me.

Now, when I got to the hospital and they had to wrench my foot back into the proper orientation, that HURT! Even through the haze of morphine, it was memorable.

46

I’ve had four kidney stones, and I almost agree with this (since I really, really don’t like Trump). They were, by far, the most intense pain that I’ve ever experienced; I had female doctors and nurses assure me that I was experiencing a level of pain comparable to childbirth. :eek:

Back to the OP’s question: I’ve broken three bones:

  • I broke a toe when I stubbed it against a piece of furniture. It hurt like mad for a few minutes, then settled into a dull ache, and I pretty much forgot about it – until I took my sock off, a few hours later, and saw how black and blue everything was. Nothing to be done for it except to tape it to the adjacent toe as a splint; it ached for a few weeks, but after those first few minutes, the pain wasn’t bad at all.

  • I (likely) broke my coccyx (tailbone) when I slipped and fell on the stairs. That hurt like crazy for a few hours, and continued to ache for weeks afterwards, and made it difficult to sit for extended periods.

  • I broke a bone in my wrist three years ago, when I slipped and fell on ice. Even at the moment of impact, it hurt, but not extraordinarily so. This happened as I was walking into my office, first thing in the morning, and I iced it all day (thinking it was a bad bruise). The ache subsided over the course of the evening, and when I woke up the next morning, I thought that it was better – until I turned on the shower. The twisting motion of turning on the shower was excruciating, and that’s when I realized I needed to go to the doctor.

47

I’ve had 6, and they ranged from ‘that hurts, I wonder if I broke something’ to ‘I can’t decide if I’m going to puke or pass out first’. I’ve also had a kidney stone, and with that I did puke from the pain (about a dozen times, but the last 7 or 8 weren’t really productive, I was just going thru the spasms). I’ve had some smashed fingers that hurt more than a break, and 1 smashed finger that did break, but it wasn’t the worst.

The worst was comming down from a ladder - I thought I was on the bottom rung when I stepped off, but I wasn’t. Full weight came down on my straight leg, and the thigh bone squished all the bits in the knee and broke the “tibia plateau”.

Using the 1-10 scale, I’d say broken bones can be between 4 to 9, kidney stones 9 to 9+.

48

When I was younger, I had an open compound fracture of my femur. I pushed the bone back into my leg, fashioned a makeshift splint from old tree branches and cauterized the wound with some gunpowder. It stung a bit for a few days, so I had to favor the other leg.:cool:

49

I mangled my ankle, with my foot pointing in completely the wrong direction, but I suspect the adrenaline and/or shock kept the pain manageable as I crawled across the floor to the phone. Once it had been fixed in hospital, it wasn’t all that bad as long as I kept it raised. Swelling inside a cast is more uncomfortable than actually painful. My new metal ankle still quietly throbs away in the background, though.

Cracked ribs was worse. Don’t ever catch a bad cold when you’ve got cracked ribs.

50

Had my sternum broken for me (open heart surgery). That hurt for weeks, well after the rest of the surgery was healing. Coughing was uncomfortable, hiccups were bad, but a sneeze was excruciating. Trying to stifle the sneeze was even worse, and I literally cried like Pyle after his blanket party after I did that the first time. The hug pillow really didn’t help a lot beyond a cough.

Cracked ribs. Pfft.

51

4 broken bones here:

  1. one of the bones in my right forearm when I was 6. I don’t recall what it felt like, just that it hurt, and the orthopedist had absolutely NO bedside manner. Walked up to me, grabbed my arm, and without a word YANKED it to set the bone. And it wasn’t right, so he did it again. Asshole. I hadn’t been crying up until that point.

  2. Right elbow when I was about 31. I was walking along and tripped while stepping up over a curb. Went splat on both my forearms and my front teeth (one tooth was slightly nicked, that was all… a co-worker who had injured herself in a nearly identical manner a few weeks earlier actually killed the root on her tooth and had to have a root canal and veneer). It hurt, but I picked myself up and went back home. It began to hurt more over the next hour or so, so I had my husband take me to the ER. Diagnosis: radial head fracture. Treatment: a few days in a splint then just a sling. Sudden movements or “wrong” movements proved to be ill-advised indeed.

  3. Left elbow, in a slightly more spectacular tumble (I rolled my ankle walking down some stairs at a hotel in Arizona, and somersaulted down the rest of the stairs). Once the shock of the fall was over, lotsa stuff hurt. We got back to the hotel room, and I got to thinking the elbow was pretty messed up so I sent my husband to a drugstore to get a sling. It got to hurting even WORSE - unpleasantly reminiscent of that previous experience - so I took a cab to the nearest ER (he had to stay at the hotel with the kids).

They X-rayed it, said it wasn’t broken, did a quick neuro check to make sure I didn’t have a concussion (we didn’t think I’d hit my head but couldn’t rule it out) and sent me on my way with a scrip for Vicodin that I hadn’t asked for (evidently being a fat middle-aged woman didn’t trigger their drug-seeker radar, that along with the fact that I waited around for an hour or more before being seen, without complaining about the AAAAGOOOOOONEEEEEEE).

So 2 weeks later, back home, and the arm felt every bit as bad as the previous occasion (these were 15 years apart) so I went to an ortho near home, who redid the X-ray and said “yep, broken radial neck, but the treatment is what you’ve been doing”. Given where I found bruises after the fall, I’m damn lucky the radial neck was the only neck I broke that night.

  1. Broken foot (4th metatarsal). I had a disagreement with a flight of stairs over the number of steps remaining. I lost. Splat on the floor at the bottom of the stairs I go up and down every day of my life. Foot kinda hurt. I was a bit suspicious of the pain, so I managed to struggle upstairs with help and put on some sweatpants (in case they needed to go over a cast later), struggled downstairs, had my husband find one of my canes (yeah, I injure myself a lot), and hung out on the couch until the workday began and I could call the orthopedist and make an appointment - I figured there was no need to go to the ER. Upshot: I got put in a removable boot (phew - much easier than a cast).

So the general pattern is:
At impact: Ow, ow, ow! Huh. That’s a bit painful. Better take it easy, maybe some ice or ibuprofen.
An hour later: This is starting to hurt. I hope that ibuprofen kicks in.
An hour after that: Mr Fr. this REALLY hurts. Crap, I accidentally bumped it. Shitshitshitshit.

And you’re hovering at that last stage for at least a few days even once it’s in a cast or whatever. Then it gets to that stage only if you do something wrong to it.

I would think that a more severe break would skip the first and possibly the second stage above. My son broke his upper arm at preschool, and he definitely skipped the first. His was a displaced fracture that was very, very queasy-making to look at. Apparently his first reaction was to go to his teacher and say his arm hurt, and he asked her to kiss it better. She was a bit surprised, but did so, then decided to slip his sweater off to take a look - at which point she went :eek: and had the other teacher call 911. Poor kiddo: that was the day he learned that kissing a booboo doesn’t always fix it :(.

Interestingly in my case, with all the broken bones, I’ve only ever had a full cast once, when I broke my arm. With the foot they didn’t even insist on crutches, though I requested a pair as getting myself into the doctor’s office had been pretty gruelling. I remember the cast being pretty hard to deal with - itchy, smelly, had to keep it dry (no fiberglass casts back then).

52

None of mine ever had that feature, though my son’s arm did.

Where a normal arm looks like this


| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |___________
|_ ___________

His was more like this:


| |
| |
\ \
 \ \
  \ \
  | |___________
  |_ ___________

My foot inuries (the break, as well an assortment of sprained ankles - hence the need for canes) were actually pretty spectacular a day or two afterward due to the subcutaneous bruising. I never knew the human body produced such an array of colors.

As far as pain: the initial break was never that painful - but for me the sure sign that it’s broken is that it gets worse over the upcoming hours.

53

Actually, now that I remember, I broke a finger when I was about 12 running into a wall. I kept it to myself while it turned green and then purple, and then brown, and I could barely move it. It ha a pulse, was warm, and nothing smelled, so I wasn’t worried. It hurt when I tried to move it much, but it was only my fourth finger. It’s bent a little now, and I can’t wear a ring on it, but it doesn’t hurt in bad weather or anything.

PAIN I HAVE EXPERIENCED:
from worst to most bearable, but these were all pretty bad:

  1. Migraine headaches (as a teenager-- 1978-1987)
  2. Tonsillectomy/adenoidectomy as adult (2000)
  3. Surgery on ankle to repair old fracture (2009)
  4. labor before the epidural arrived (2006)
  5. forceps delivery attempt (2006)
  6. c-section recovery (2006)
  7. untreated ankle fracture (1983)
  8. treated severe ankle sprain (1999)
  9. untreated broken finger (1978)
  10. infected tooth pain that resulted in root canal (root canal itself not painful, but pain that indicated it was necessary was) (2016)
  11. pain in legs after running on them numb when I decided to run through shin splints in the Army. When I stopped running, I collapsed, and my legs were pulsing between pain and numbness. I couldn’t stand for about ten minutes. Fortunately we had a DS we made us stretch. I sat in the back and just sat. After that, I could pass my PT test, though. (1993)

No other remarkable experiences of pain that come to mind.

54

I have broken my toes several times, ribs once, and had my index finger crushed and broken when my cousin dropped arm armload of firewood on it. They all hurt like hell and I would describe it as a mixture of dull and sharp pain that won’t go away. I have never broken a major bone like in the arm or leg but I have witnessed people that have and they were obviously in extreme pain. It is difficult to get them to even answer questions when you are trying to figure out what to do.

However, broken bones aren’t the most painful thing I have ever been through by a long-shot. That honor belongs to the scratched cornea that I have been stupid enough to get twice. It feels like someone is pouring Drano in your eye and any light or even sound are breathtakingly painful for days. You have to go to the ophthalmologist every day and then every other day for two weeks to fix it. The only reprieve is if you can manage to fall asleep somehow which is no easy task even with painkillers.

55

I broke two bones in my hand playing football at the age of 13. I don’t remember it being particularly painful, but the swelling was pretty remarkable.

Nowhere close to being the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. That would be a root canal without adequate (like, zero) numbing.
mmm

56

I’ve had 16 broken bones ranging from ulna/radius complete displaced fracture (bone ends making pointy bumps under the skin) to hairline fractures of another ulna. Two broken ribs, 3rd metacarpal, right non displaced temporal fracture, and a fractured non displaced centrum of the 5th lumbar vertebra. Shattered patella that looked like a pie had been cut - it had 6 very regular sections. And some others.

In general, the completely displaced fracture was the worst, because the broken bone ends poked other tissues until they were set. Then all was well, but before then it was the second worst pain I have had. The least painful were the non displaced (hairline) fractures. So the pain level really varies according to the type and location of the break.

Motorcycle racing, contact sports, and an auto accident are not good for bones. 14 of these happened between the ages of 13 and 27. Then I slowed down and only had the ribs and a fall from a ladder after that. Nothing in the last twenty years.

None of these compared to the pain of my major heart attack…like maybe ½ the pain.

57

Broken finger. Was trying to lead a horse into the barn and it reared back. Unfortunately, the halter leads didn’t come free and my hand (and body) went with her.

Broken toe. Karate. Never healed properly.

Cracked bone in foot. Yeah, took my black belt exam with that one. :frowning:

58

Oh yeah. And you know what? Breaking your collar-bone messes up your back muscles for good. Well, at least it did for me. There’s a section of muscle near my clavicle that almost always a little bit achy.

59

I broke my second thoracic vertebrae. It felt like extreme pressure on that part of my spine with a ton of pain for months.

60

Pardon my ignorance, for I’ve never had one… but I’m sure I read painful heart attacks are more like a final warning, or a signal to get yourself to hospital asap before permanent damage occurs… whereas the type you really don’t want to get, are the painless ones where you just feel faint, enter cardiac arrest and immediately go unconscious…?

This brought back horrific memories of a bad chest infection I had in 2010. Every cough hit my chest with such an intense sharp pain, I would literally be in tears afterwards. In hindsight, I probably should have gone to hospital, but even walking to the toilet left me out of breath and induced coughing fits… which as you’d probably guess, was something I was terrified of.

A broken sternum… that’s probably the scariest break to go through aside from the neck.