When I was a young man, mowing my parents’ back lawn, I ran the mower over an underground bees’ hive. The bees did not appreciate my radical redecorating of their home, and they rose en masse to express their displeasure. I was stung a couple times before it dawned on me that I was under attack, and I ran for the porch with the bees in pursuit. Inside the screened porch I was able to fight back and smush the bees that made it in with me, while outside their brethern looked on in helplessly impotent bee fury.
Anyway - I was stung at least eleven times, given the stingers that we were able to pull out. It hurt. I don’t think I’ve ever had physical pain worse that that, and since bees are only a 2.0 on the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, I imagine others here have insect injuries that hurt worse… and that’s not even considering pain inflicted by non-insect means.
So – what’s hurt you the worst, physically, in your life?
I actually don’t feel at this moment like getting into the worst pain ever. So instead I’ll do second worst.
I was 15 years old, and I had decided to try to make rotis, or Indian flatbread. No one was home. So I fired up the stove, and not really knowing a damn thing about cooking, started up.
I put way too much oil on the griddle. I went to flip the bread over and instead of doing it away from me as I now know, I flipped it toward me.
Boiling hot oil splashed up from the griddle. I am forever thankful it missed my face, but it hit my upper & lower right arm, splashing all over the place. Some even hit my hand.
The pain didn’t come right away…it took a few seconds, and when it came, it was howling pain. My entire arm was burned, with huge, puffy, angry blisters, and the skin’'s shape and color was entirely changed.
shudder I still have faint scars from it. Thankfully the scars are almost exactly the color of my skintone.
I think we may have done this before. A nuber of years back my face collided with something sharp and solid in the back of a darkened theater. I had quite a gash directly above my right eye, so I went to the ER to have it looked at. It needed stitches, and the doctor who looked at me asked if I wanted an anesthetic. Since he asked, I assumed there must be a down-side, like I’d lose control of my eye for a while, so I said “no.” So, five stitches in my face without any anesthetic. Thats about it for me. I’m sure others have much worse stories.
Part 1 was the abscess under the filling. Intense dental pain, couldn’t sleep, anbesol, chewed tylenol, advil, whatever, on my way in to the dentist to get a root canal. I hadn’t heard good things about root canals but man, that was a relief.
Part 2 was a bit later, I can’t remember how long, but the infection had taken root in my jaw and the pain and pressure was so intense I felt that if I angled it correctly I could fire my tooth into orbit.
Back to the dentist, then to an oral surgeon, where we got the vicodin and antibiotics going, then after the infection abated the surgeon peeled back my gum and drilled out the infection in my jaw. More vicodin and I was good to go. Until I had to wean myself off the vicodin but I got over that.
I’ve had a lot of the standard rambunctious kid injuries growing up… broken arm, broken ankle, concussion, and torn rib cartilage…
…but the worst for me, probably by a factor of 2 or 3 over the breaks, was a dislocated shoulder. That was a very deep, throbbing pain for weeks even after the initial injury.
I will say the torn rib cartilage was very inconvenient from the standpoint of treatment. You can’t wrap it or immobilize it, just suffer through the healing process.
One of my “worst pain” stories is similar. I was nursing my first child. The baby and I were at home alone, so I had just pulled off my top to nurse him. At the same time, being industrious, I had begun supper preparations by settling a pot roast in to cook on the stove top.
Baby finished nursing, and I needed to check the roast. Thankfully, I had the sense to pull on a T-shirt instead of going in the kitchen topless. I grabbed a large meat fork to turn the roast, which was now at full boil, and the baby gurgled. I took my eyes off the roast ( I had it raised out of the pot) to glance back toward the baby, and it slid off the fork, splashing back into the pot and throwing boiling hot water(mixed with a little boiling hot fat from the meat) onto my chest. I immediately ran to the shower, and let cold water spray over me. When I peeled the T-shirt off, skin came with it.
Let me tell you, that was a scary looking burn, and it covered the tops of both breasts, ending just at the edge of the areola on both of them. I used a lot of lanolin, went topless and braless (in the privacy of my home) a lot that summer, and -the part that I think makes me the hero of this story - I continued to breastfeed the baby.
The scars are almost invisible now, thanks (I think) to the lanolin. I wear low cut tops and corset the girls up for SCA events, and it looks like nothing other than smooth skin. There’s one small patch on the top of the right one, but it looks more like a small, light brown birthmark than anything else.
For me, it was the passing of kidney stones. That hurt worse than anything I’d previously experienced in my life…including being in labor and delivery, with no pain meds whatsoever. I know. I did it.
Delivering a 9 lb. baby feels GOOD, as do earaches and toothaches, compared to passing a kidney stone.
Edited to add the fact that broken bones (I’ve had both ankles broken twice. Each.) feel much nicer than passing kidney stones, also.
Sounds like dangerous working conditions. I take it you filed suit?
I had my gallbladder removed. Surgical complications stretched a normal one hour surgery into a four hour ordeal. I’m glad I slept through it. But the week I spent in the hospital post op was the worst pain I’ve experienced. To date.
When my last son was born, the anaesthetist was an idiot and couldn’t figure out the epidural in time. So, I did the labor and all without drugs. That wasn’t the worst pain. Then, he was facing the wrong direction, got stuck and came out really awkwardly, so I had a third degree tear (remember, without drugs)…it took them hours to stitch me up. That wasn’t the worst pain. A few days later, the stitches became infected. I spiked a fever and was in intense, shivery pain. That wasn’t the worst. The worst is when I went to the GP that day. She said she needed to take the some of the stitches out, so lying on the table, without any sort of painkiller, I bit into my hand as she removed 40 stitches, one by one, from infected skin. She apologized with each one.
In the realm of childhood fun, there was the time:
[ul][li]I fell out of a tree onto a rather pointy fence and impaled my butt. That left a mark. A stitch or two later I was back in the tree-- that tree house wasn’t going to build itself.[]I foolishly stepped on a bumblebee nest in the woods about a quarter mile from my house. I sprinted all the way home and was bitten/stung several times before jumping into the swimming pool. I don’t know if they actually followed me all the way to the pool, but they were gone when I came up and that was good enough for me. I don’t see them on the Pain Index, but let me tell you that those things leave some pretty huge aching welts.[]I burned the crap out of my hand conducting a little “experiment” during my pyro phase. Let us just say it involved a bottle of hairspray, a cigarette lighter, a flash fire, and a lot of “ow.”[/ul][/li]
More recently, there was the “two weeks of suffering” that involved a cracked tooth which, in turn, revealed a rather nasty cavity, which, in turn, necessitated a root canal. Naturally, this occurred unexpectedly between Christmas and New Years when it is ever so easy to schedule a dental appointment. Fun, fun, fun.
Also, wisdom tooth removal is nice-- particularly the shot they give you in the freaking roof of your mouth. I think that’s the winner for me. I’ve gotten a lot of shots in my life, but that roof o’ the mouth shot is something else.
I can’t say if it was the worst pain I ever had–it very well may have been–as I don’t really remember it too well, but I had a similar experience. When I was about five or six, my family attended a family reunion at a local park in the woods. Being a kid, I was running around playing in the woods and I stepped on a rather large wasp nest. I was immediately swarmed and probably stung a dozen or more times as I ran screaming and crying out of the woods bringing the swarm into the whole of the picnic. If only I’d had a screened porch to protect me.
I had bone marrow drawn when I was a kid. A new doctor was doing it for the first time. There was lots of local anesthetic, but holy cow did it not help. My regular doctor (who was not in the room at the time) later asked how it went, and I said poorly, he was very surprised. He said he occasionally volunteers to allow new docs to draw marrow from him, and he didn’t think it was ever that bad.
I still get a little woozy thinking about it. Imagine a needle or a nail slowly piercing one of your teeth – not a dentist drill buzzing its way in, but an object being deliberately forced into your tooth: that’s what it felt like to get the needle in my hip. Then they had to suck the marrow out: as the plunger was pulled back, I vividly recall feeling as though all my guts were liquefied and were being sucked out by an incredibly small and powerful vacuum. Now I’d roughly compare it to having the life sucked out of you by the kiss of one of those Dementors from Harry Potter.
My worst pain actually took place just a few weeks ago. I’ve been undergoing some physical therapy on my legs, and part of the treatment is having my legs taped up. Well, it came time to remove the tape, and OH. MY. OG.
I’ve got fairly hairy legs, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that removing that tape was the worst pain I’ve ever felt. I’ve since shaved those areas so that the current tape won’t hurt so much.
I put a butcher knife through my palm while cutting an avocado (the pit cracked and I did something really stupid that I won’t mention here). I had to sit in the operating room with the wound open for about an hour until they contacted the plastic surgeon. While I was waiting a mother and a daughter stopped at the doorway and the mother said, “see, this is what happens when you’re not careful with knives." Talk about insult to injury.
Hypodermic needle in the corner of my eye nearest my nose (almost as bad as the pain is the fact that you see it getting bigger and bigger and bigger as it comes toward you). Quoth the doctor, “This may be a little uncomfortable.” And the winner for the understatement of the year goes to…
The botched vasectomy performed by the Dr. Marquis de Sade. I could have done it quicker, and with less pain, had he given me two bricks.
- I continued to breastfeed the baby.
