Man, I hoped you’ve either stopped gambling or gotten better at it.
My worst pain was a kidney infection when I was a teenager. I was fine when I woke up and went to school, but by second period I was in throbbing hell. My whole back hurt…I remember puking in the car repeatedly on the way to the emergency room.
When I woke up from general anesthesia from my C-section last August. I woke up and immediately started sobbing because it hurt SO much. I had already been through 20 hours of drug-free back labor, 15 hours of an epidural, and feeling my stomach being sliced open in the operating room when the epidural failed, so I would have thought I’d had enough. They pumped morphine into me almost immediately after I woke up because I was in so much pain.
You know how they say you forget the pain of childbirth? I’ve forgotten almost every pain from my labor, but I still remember the agony of waking up from the anesthesia.
I was sent home from the hospital after surgery (under anesthetic) for benign uterine tumors. Two hours later I was in horrific pain due to some bizarre problem with the anesthetic – it has a name I can’t remember: air gets trapped between the lungs and the shoulder muscles. I could barely breathe, as each movement of my diaphragm caused thunderbolts of pain (about 9.5 - 10.0!)
My SO had gone to the supermarket and I literally crawled to the next door neighbor’s house and had her drive me to the ER.
You should be proud that you were able to contribute to society by serving as an example of what not to do! If only somone had made this sacrifice for you!
The re-locating of my dislocated knee is the 10 on my pain scale, followed closely by the dislocation itself.
It hurt so much I actually have kind of low-level PTSD about it: if I happen to think about it happening, for a brief second I flashback to how much it hurt and I have to remind myself that it was years ago. Hardly flashing back to a firefight in 'Nam or anything, but still enough to give me the occasional willies.
I knew I’d finally make a difference in this world! I just wished it wasn’t as a model of what not to do. 
Migraines: Death would be a blessing
Recovering from penile/scrotal surgery: Unbelievable
Horrendous skin cancer on head: Hurt really bad
The whole background story doesn’t matter too much. In short I was about 6 years old and we were crouched down on a cement floor in a garage watching our neighbor fix something. Said neighbor put his lit cigarette on the ground and I mindlessly put my right hand right up against the lit end. It didn’t have that kind of instant shock sensation where you pull away immediately so it probably took a second or two before I felt the pain and pulled away and that made it much worse.
Another for kidney stones here. 3 episodes in 3 years and it still makes me want to cry to remember it.
You should’ve just written those damn romance books and not give that psycho lady any lip!
The worst pain I ever felt? The lovely Miss Holly T.
She broke my heart, and sometimes, I can still feel it hurt.
In other words, nothing ever really really painful has befallen me. Yet.
When I was (much) younger I was playing on some sort of see-saw thingy. Except this one had metal handles of some sort…and my face got a little too close, and by that I mean I smashed my head into it. Except it wasn’t quite my head that hit, but my front teeth. They shattered.
I’m lucky that I don’t remember any of the pain, or much else about it. Just that it happened, a few seconds in some sort of ER/Dentist office, and those llittle cotton balls to stop bleeding.
When I was thirteen or fourteen, I had a sudden half-hour of incredible abdominal pain. I’ve always assumed that it was an ovarian cyst bursting. It came on suddenly, and while it lasted, I couldn’t stay still from the pain. I had to keep moving–standing up, sitting down, walking, bending and straightening up. It was awful. I took an Aleve right away, and I don’t know if the pain ended by itself or because the Aleve started working… but it stopped, and I slept. It exhausted me.
Major abdominal surgery and severely inadequate painkillers. Imagine a legion of evil trolls, all of whom got Freddy Kreuger gloves for Christmas, having a drunken party in your intestines, and you’ll be getting close.
You and me both, brother. Half of mine went fine but on the second, um, half, he just couldn’t get the aneasthetic into the appropriate spot and I told him to go ahead.
He spent about 10 minutes tugging and pulling trying to get to that spot for the painkiller to no avail.
You guys would NOT believe the swelling for two weeks plus following that. And you don’t want to, folk. You really don’t.
Wow, no one mentioned menstrual pains yet. Those were the worst for me. Before I got on the BCP, I used to be curled into a ball two days a month, crying from the deep, intense throbbing from my nether regions. It felt like I had knives being shoved up my girly parts and everyone knows you just don’t DO that to the nice girly parts!!
To give you an idea of how much pain I was in, and how bad it looked, imagine this. I come from a VERY strict and somewhat traditional Asian family. That means you don’t talk about sex or sex-related issues like your period. I got on the pill without telling my mom in hopes of stopping the pain, regulating my periods and reducing some of the bleeding. After a few months my mom noticed I wasn’t in the fetal position every month and asked if I was ok. I told her I got on the BCP and I haven’t felt as bad since. This is the first thing she said to me.
“Oh good! Stay on it! You were such a bitch when you were on your period!”
Thanks mom, I love you too!
Oh yea and my knee cap pops out sometimes. If I lose my balance, my knee cap pops out and sometimes I have to pop it back in. If I’m not standing on that leg, I can usually catch myself. But if I’m standing on that leg then I usually flail my arms out, fall, then get scraped up as well as have that pain in my knee. I’ve only had to pop my knee cap back in twice and those were some pretty sucky times. I should really work on that, eh?
Broken wrists, slicing both arms to the tune of 69 stitches, infected burn from a motorcycle muffler…
I was on a trip up in the North Georgia mountains one beautiful fall day. We had stopped for a picnic and I left my wine cooler unattended for a moment. When I picked it up and took a drink, a yellow jacket stung me on the inside of my upper lip.
Incredible screaming pain. And to add insult to injury, my lip was so swollen I looked like a duck for the rest of the day.
Another kidney stone victim.
I got to spend Memorial Day weekend (and, coincidentally, my birthday), in the hospital while they flushed me with IV fluids in order to get the stone to pass.
It never passed. In three days, it never passed. It felt like getting kicked in the nards, once per minute, for three days.
Finally, they went in and got it.
After they got it and I was back up in my room, I asked if I could leave. They said, “Sure, as long as you urinate first.”
Hey, no prob. But they didn’t tell me what that was going to feel like. It wasn’t anywhere as bad as the stone itself, but it sure was a shock. Hot acid razor blade peepee.
A toothache that kept me awake for three days. When the dentist injected the novocaine, I immediately fell asleep.
I’ve had numerous surgeries on my knees…nothing really tops the kidney stone pain.
I’d like to kiss the feet of whoever created fentanyl and toradol (sp?). And morphine…sweet sweet morphine. They made the bad pain go away.
I had amazingly bad cramps (lasting up to 4 days) before getting on the pill - and then before finding the right pill when that one stopped working - but I think for sheer intense, shorter-term pain, a particular migraine that I had was worse. I had about 30 seconds of warning before it hit me, and thank goodness for that because I was driving at the time. I pulled over into a parking lot, and ended up balled up in the passenger seat, crying in pain and holding my hands over my eyelids because they couldn’t shut out enough light when closed. I even managed to dry-swallow 4 Aleve (naproxen sodium, 220 mg each) when normally I have trouble getting a single BCP down without a gulp of water. My husband was nearly panicking and wanted to take me to the ER, but I cried that I just wanted to go home, and being only a few minutes from there he complied.
Bad menstrual cramps are really freaking awful, though. I felt like I was having my insides alternately ripped out and knotted up, and I would have gladly accepted an offer to have someone reach up inside and yank out my uterus without anesthesia, because that couldn’t possibly have hurt less in my opinion.
My husband had that happen once, but for his lower lip via a yellowjacket hiding in his soda can. I think he said the worst part of that pain was his lower lip swelling to the point where he felt like it would split open. Antihistamines and ice brought it down somewhat.