Monday, in the emergency room with a kidney stone.
I don’t think actual physical pain has ever made me cry. I’ve had severe toothaches that had me almost catatonic, but haven’t cried. I had a muscle biopsy done when I was about ten, and I cried, but it was more in terror and anxiety. I once got my leg stuck in the V-shaped part of a tree, and the fire department had to come, and I cried, but it was because I thought they were going to cut off my leg to get me out.
I’m not a he-man, but I have a very high pain threshold.
ETA : I had my finger smashed in the hinge-side of a door when I was in second grade. I’m sure I cried at that. It was bad…
Joe
One year ago I was playing Frisbee on a grassy field with two friends. I was running backwards to catch a nicely thrown long shot. When the ground changed from grass to sidewalk I lost my footing and wiped out. I bounced hit my elbow on the concrete, then I slid and tore open one of my palms. I also twisted my back. It all hurt, a lot. At first I held back the tears and pretended that it wasn’t too bad, but then I put on my sunglasses stopped playing for about 10 minutes and cried without being noticed. When I fell and looked up I could see one of my friends in the distance laughing his butt off, he didn’t realize how much it hurt, I guess. That’s the last time I cried from pain/injuries. I was sore for days from my muscles tensing up from the fall. It sucked.
I’ve been in the hospital twice this year: first for a mild heart attack, then for kidney stones. The stones had me crying in pain.
Last summer, when I was 34. I developed a Bartholin’s gland abscess, a huge one with palpable swelling about an inch into my vagina and almost 2 inches back into my perineum, which was plenty painful all by itself–by the time I could get into the doctor I was sitting sideways even on deeply-cushioned chairs. Diagnosis involved poking and prodding the area. Treatment involved getting multiple needles full of Novocaine stuck into my already-painful tender bits, for reasons I’m still not really clear on since Novocaine doesn’t work on infected tissue and I could feel everything when they sliced the area open with a scalpel and mashed and squeezed all the yuck out. And then they put direct pressure on the swollen, infected, sliced open area to control the bleeding before packing it very firmly with gauze.
But that’s not the part that made me cry.
The bleeding turned out to be less under control than previously thought and didn’t really respond to at-home measures to get it under control, resulting in poor DoctorJ having to leave work to fetch me back to the clinic and finding me sitting half-naked in the floor of a bathroom that looked like someone was using it butcher livestock with a bloody towel pressed to my crotch trying not to hyperventilate.
Now we’re getting to the part that made me cry.
Back at the clinic, there was more pressing and poking and mashing. A lot more. Then they brought out the electrocautery, which wasn’t as pleasant as it sounds and turned out to be ineffectual. So they went back to just trying to hold it off, which meant another 15 or so minutes of direct pressing. Which is when the tears started. And then there was another go with the cautery. And back to the pressing. Which was when I asked for the emesis basin and they decided it would be best to just take me to the OR and remove the damn thing.
At no point before being prepped for surgery did I get any kind of pain relief or happy juice beyond the thoroughly ineffective (and quite painful to administer) Novocaine. At the point surgery was suggested, I would have agreed to letting them cut off my fucking head if it meant they would stop mashing on my mutilated crotch.
But on the bright side, everything else felt so much better than that, I got up and went to work at the vet clinic the next morning without any pain meds and did great.
Yep, tooth pain will do it. Last December (at the age of 33) I was, not exactly crying, but had tears in my eyes and was totally unable to catch my breath or do anything but roll around and whimper, for several hours. I must have sipped my way through about five pints of iced water, as that was the only way I could get a few seconds’ relief at a time. I thought it was an impacted wisdom tooth, it turned out to be a very deep abscess in the tooth next to an impacted wisdom tooth.
When I went for the root canal and the anaesthetic kicked in I felt like crying with relief. 
Probably when I was in labor with my son - induced, botched epidural, tears running down my face at one point.
Before that, I’m sure it happened quite a bit as a kid but the time I remember specifically was when I broke my arm at age 6. The orthopedist came in after viewing the X-ray, and without a word to me (at all, let alone “this’ll hurt a bit”) grabbed my arm and YANKED. I cried all the way through having the cast put on, the X-ray done, the cast removed, and the YANK being redone. I was almost certainly dehydrated by the time the ass was done.
Just last month or so I smacked my elbow in just the right way on the coffee table - you know, the way where the pain shoots up and down your arm? I cried. Luckily I was alone at the time.
Waking up from sinus surgery, in my forties, as I was coming to, when they asked how I was feeling, I couldn’t speak but just cry big old tears. They gave me a shot and I was gone. This happened 3 times, then they removed the packing, which hurt tons but, aaaah!
41, waking up from an emergency C-section after four hours of pushing-type labor with the worst migraine I’ve ever had, which was after two days of contractions, having had an incompetent intern anesthetist who botched the epidural THREE TIMES before his boss came in and did it right and not incidentally gave me a shot for the migraine too, but then they let the incompetent one knock me out for the C-section anyway, and oh my god I hated that man. Pouring down tears and sobbing “Please! Please! It hurts it hurts it hurts please help me!” until he finally got something effective into my IV. And I could stop sobbing long enough to see my new kid, and hold him, and then everything was just fine.
You know, I endured unmedicated childbirth with my third baby and I actually don’t remember any tears of pain during the entire experience, oddly. Pain yes, tears no.
A few years ago, my daughter, then aged 3, started to take a tumble down the steps on our front porch. I dove to catch her, and I did catch her, but I skidded on my knees across about half a foot of concrete sidewalk. That brought tears to my eyes. I still have a scar from it, too.
I’ve also found through past experience that a hard slap to the face will always bring involuntary tears.
I don’t cry easily…in fact almost nothing makes me cry and I think I have a pretty high pain threshold.
A few years ago (I was 50) my bad back went nuclear on me and I had a horrible, two-weeks-long attack of sciatic nerve pain. I haven’t given birth or had a kidney stone, which I understand are excrutiating, but the sciatica is the worst I’ve ever experienced.
I live alone and my leg kept going out from numbness…I was attempting to walk from the couch to bed (silly me) when it gave out on me and I ended up writhing on the floor and sweating and nauseated, very late at night. I contemplated calling an ambulance just in hopes they’d give me something, I didn’t care what as long as it worked, in hospital. Instead I called a friend and started crying, then felt miserable and sorry for myself, and she eventually talked me down.
I think I was crying because I made the mistake of reading online accounts of people who became permanently disabled from this, and I really was feeling sorry for myself and also somewhat scared. And the pain had been unrelenting for many days at that point. Also at the time I had no health insurance, so I felt doubly helpless because a trip to the ER would have cost a ton of money I didn’t have.
I have no memory of crying in pain. Probably aged 7 or 8 or something like that.
Don’t know. I must have been pretty young. Wait, recalling now when some big kid grabbed a block of ice and hit me in the face with it. I think I was 9. I had no warning, so no time to prepare for it. Crying was a sign of weakness, and we a had a mutual support system to deal with it, if you cried, someone would hurt you more.
I guess I was 43-43. We had been out on the lake and were coming in to the dock when one of the bumpers fell off the boat. I jumped to the dock and went down the stairs into the water to grab the bumper, not thinking that wood steps sitting in water get slimey. My foot went out from under me and I landed with all my weight on the right side of my butt - on the sharp edge of one of the dry steps.
I thought I had broken my back - I couldn’t move my legs for a few minutes. If Mr. SCL hadn’t been there I possibly would have drowned, even though it was less than 3 feet of water. Scared the hell out of him - he’s know me since I was 17 and has never heard me cry from pain.
I was bruised from my waist to halfway down my thigh. X-ray showed no bones broken, but somehow I managed to lose nearly an inch in height. I still have back problems, but nothing has ever hurt that bad…
I’m 47, and this summer I had an intestinal blockage that ended up with me puking stuff up that should have gone the other way. After days of that, exhausted and sore, they decided to put a tube down my throat into my stomach. No numbing gel or anything, just pushing it down and trying to get me to drink water to swallow it down, as I gagged and puked water. Like others upthread, exhaustion/getting to the end of your rope contributes a lot to weeping.
I have no response to this story other than pure, unadulterated horror. I am so sorry.
Last year, when I was 34, and entirely of my own stupidity.
I had periodontal surgery wherein they sliced open my gums, removed some gunk (and some of the excess gums), and then stitched them back together. Local anesthetic was used, and I was given a prescription for some potent pain killers to get on the way home. Piece of cake, right? So, what went wrong? Let’s examine.
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For this type of surgery, they recommend only getting one quadrant of your mouth done at a time because of the pain and how it affects your eating. But I was feeling all gung-ho, so I insisted on having two done at once. I actually asked to have all four done at once, but I was refused.
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When the procedure was done, I felt just fine. No pain! Of course, the anesthetic hadn’t had time to wear off yet, but why pay attention to logic? So, did I go straight to the pharmacy for pain killers and then home? No, of course not. I decided to stop in to visit my real estate agent, who was down the street from the periodontist, and she and I chatted for about half an hour.
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Of course, after that, I headed [del]straight to the pharmacy and then home[/del] over to my doctor’s office to ask her about some entirely unrelated issue I was having. Another 40 minutes gone.
Finally, I started to head toward my pharmacy and then home – about a 40-minute drive from the area I’d been in. As you can guess, the anesthetic was definitely wearing off by now. My condition deteriorated rapidly while I was on the road, and by the time I got to the pharmacy, I was doing a steady hopping from one foot to the other in a manner that looks a lot like that dance you do when you have to go to the bathroom badly, except mine was entirely from pain.
I got home and downed my Vicodin as quickly as I could, but by this time, it had been more than two hours since I’d left the periodontist. The Vicodin did nothing. I was in agony, and I got on the phone with jsgoddess, who was trying to keep me from shooting myself in the head. But I eventually was in so much pain that I just couldn’t manage a coherent conversation any longer. So I hung up and spent several hours lying in bed with tears rolling down my face, unable to sleep, until I felt enough time had passed for me to take more Vicodin.
Suffice to say that when I went back for the remainder of that surgery, I was not so incredibly stupid again.
Just last week. I felt so bad from severe bronchitis that I was in tears before my g/f took me to UrgentCare for a chest x-ray and drugs.
To add insult to injury, the first round of antibiotics created a yeast infection. When it wasn’t resolved after the first antibiotics, the doc prescribed a second antibiotic. NOW I have the remnants of bronchitis, yeast infection AND a newly diagnosed urinary tract infection. Soooo, I now have an unprecedented third round of antibiotics.
I think I’ll go cry again.
It did indeed suck mightily, but everything else, including the concussion I got last winter, doesn’t seem nearly so bad.