In your experience, what is the worst type of pain?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was talking to a friend the other day about my appendectomy a few years ago and how I felt at the time that my appendicitis was the most “special” kind of pain I had ever experienced.

He also had had an appendectomy and scoffed at me and related some gallstone issue he had in the past and how it was a far more acute type of pain.

So, I am curious…what’s the worst pain out there? I have never broken a bone, I have had teeth extracted with only novocaine, I have nearly cut my fingertip off, torn my meniscus, rolled my ankle countless times…but for me appendicitis still wins out.

What’s yours?

2

Kidney stones. I’ve had 'em and thought I was being knifed in the gut. My urologist said he’d had big tough football player types bent over and crying like little girls, on account of kidney stones. He also said female patients who were mothers said the stones were worse than childbirth.

3

I have a guy that works as a courier for our bank at my business. Nice guy, retired Army NCO, older dude. Last year he had what he thought was a recurrence of his kidney stones, apparently because of where the pain was associated on his body. He called his doctor and the doc told him to tough it out and to keep taking his stone meds. A day later, he’s in even more pain and his wife takes him to the emergency room. Turns out his appendix had burst right before he got to the hospital.

He nearly died. He was in the hospital for over a month fighting the infection from the burst appendix. It was really scary. He’s fine now but man…to be that close to the edge due to a misdiagnosis…scary.

4

Good grief, I’m glad he made it. That is a scary story!:eek:

5

Toothache

6

It was scary. He’s such a nice guy, too. It turns out we were both in the Army Field Artillery stationed over in Germany at the same time in the early 1990’s.

Really? I have broken a tooth that had a filling in it while eating Doritos and had the pointy-end of a chip directly hit the exposed nerve, and that was…pretty damn painful. But “special” pain has to have more than intensity…it has to have duration too. I was able to get that temporary tooth capping putty stuff and put it into the hole until I could get it extracted at the dentist (it shattered into a million bits when she tried to pull it…not fun).

7

“Threw my back out” pain. I’m talking 3 days of complete bedrest, having to think about how to move so much as a finger (that is NOT hyperbole, that’s literally literal) pain, and nothing at all helped relieved it.

After that, toothaches from an abscess surrounding an exposed nerve are the worst in terms of type, if not pain level on a pain scale. There’s just no getting away from a really bad toothache - it’s literally and figuratively “in your face” all the time.

8

Like Baker’s urologist, I’ve heard that an obstructing kidney stone is one of the most painful experiences, widely considered worse than labor pain.

The worst pain I’ve personally experienced was probably a severe ear infection. It was pretty painful the time that I had abdominal surgery and ended up realizing I couldn’t get out of bed without flexing at the incision site but that pain only lasted for a couple seconds rather than the prolonged tenderness/pain of a raging infection.

9

There’s a difference between the pain of a broken filling and the far worse pain of a dental abscess. I haven’t experienced the latter, but my fiance has. He described it as “feeling like my face is going to melt off”. And it doesn’t go away until the infection clears up.

People who have experienced dry socket after a dental extraction also say it’s pretty bad.

10

The pain I get at intervals of about a month is pretty bad. It’s worse than a headache, anyway.

Also, that thing you do sometimes when you twist your neck around the wrong way and get a really sharp pain.

11

lets see, I’ve had some pain with my throat cancer, alittle more having two broken bones in my leg reset with no anesthetic, apretty fair ammount with a dental abcess where my whole face was swollen, even more when I had a large infection on my C-1 vertebra and the pressure was so bad I couldn’t turn my head but the most pain I ever had was a kidney stone.

12

I guess I’m pretty lucky - I’ve never experienced many of the things mentioned here. For me, the worst pain of all was childbirth. I ended up getting an epidural, and I don’t think I would have made it all the way through if I hadn’t. As it was, I was tachycardic at the end. Granted, this childbirth was a little unusual in that they wanted to keep the fetal monitor on me at all times. They claimed that when I got up from a lying-down position, that the baby’s heart rate fell. I still think that’s not true - my heart rate was just really high, and that was what they were measuring. Anyway, because they wouldn’t let me get up, squat, walk around, take a bath, or anything that would have provided some comfort, the pain ended up being really intense. It comes in waves, so just as I thought I could handle it, it started up again. After seven hours of that, I decided heck with it, epidural it is.

In the process, I discovered that my epidural space is apparently very small, meaning that anybody giving me an epidural is virtually guaranteed to puncture it. So after giving birth, I got an epidural headache. If I laid down, the pain subsided, but my son was in the NICU, so to see him meant that I had to get up, travel up 7 floors, and then sit with him. Sitting with him was unbearably painful, like the cradle of my skull was rocking bone against bone. I got a blood patch after a day, and that ended up fixing it, leaving me with a severe but manageable tension headache.

But all of that doesn’t compare to before birth, when I had PUPPP, a vicious and poorly understood skin disease brought on by some kind of bodily reaction to the pregnancy. That wasn’t painful at all - it was itchy. Except the word itchy doesn’t even begin to describe it - mental illness does a better job. I couldn’t stop itching even though itching didn’t relieve the itch. Itching just made the rash worse, causing it to spread and to develop these thick plaques all along my legs and over my belly, and yet itching was all I could think about. Those last four weeks of pregnancy were awful. A doctor who saw me after my son’s birth (when the rash had already subsided somewhat) told me that I had PUPPP on steroids. I am praying (and I don’t pray) that if I should get so lucky as to be pregnant again, I don’t get that godawful rash.

(All in all, it was still worth it. My son is the most wonderful being in the world, and all of those experiences were, in the end, temporary.)

13

In my personal experience, it’s a toss-up between the pain of my kidney stones and the cramps (contractions?) associated with my miscarriage. Both had me near-vomiting, curled on the floor, rocking back and forth. At least for the kidney stones they quickly gave me a decent painkiller.

14

Oh, yes, yes! I had that with the final trimester of my first pregnancy, and it was indeed just awful. I remember deliberately scratching my skin open and pouring salt water on my legs, because the pain of the salt in the open skin stopped the damn itching…for about 3 minutes. I feel you, I really do.

I didn’t get far enough along with my daughter to know if I would have had it again. And gods help me, when she was born by emergency c-section at 23 weeks, my first thought..okay, my first thought was “I hope she lives”. My *second *thought was, “At least I won’t get PUPPP again!”

15

The worst physical pain I’ve ever felt was when I twisted my knee and busted my MCL and tore my ACL while skiing in February. Blinding white searing pain which subsided after 10 minutes of laying in the snow. I think it was the adrenaline that did it, because when I decided that I could probably stand on it and ski out rather then calling ski patrol, that was a big, big mistake. As soon as I put weight on it my knee popped out again. Much pain. I got to ride down in a sled stretcher though.

I had a ruptured ectopic pregnancy last year, but I was already in the hospital and on morphine when it actually ruptured. I felt a hot pain spread from my left side and up under my diaphragm, but I was on morphine, so it didn’t really affect me. I knew what had happened though, and was just about to call the nurse when they came in to roll me in to surgery (I had been waiting in a bed for the OR all day - just happened that it ruptured right before they took me in).

I’ve had much more severe emotional pain, but that’s a little different.

16

Thank you for understanding! I remember reading someone somewhere who posted that she wanted to give birth early (she was at 34 weeks, iirc) to stop the rash. She got a lot of hell for that, but I thought the reaction was entirely undeserved. The words “itchy” and “rash” do not suffice to describe the experience, and I was quite shocked at how little research had been done on this condition. It’s almost like doctors would rather not study it, because many medications (such as steroids) can’t be given during pregnancy. (Dandelion root is supposed to prevent it though…)

I hope your daughter thrived despite her early birth, that must have been quite scary!

17

I’m gonna say unmediated childbirth, but I don’t have much to compare it to. The worst part about that was knowing each push was going to hurt like crazy, but you had to do it anyway. Then again, I did it without medication at least partly because I wa afraid of the shot, so what do I know.

18

I know what you mean. People really don’t understand it if they haven’t had it because everyone’s had an itch, and it’s like that, right? No, not right. (Kind of like when you have Clinical Depression and people think it feels like they felt when their grandma died.)

And yes, she’s 7 now and wonderful and we were very lucky!

19

Tearing my ACL is the worst pain to date for me as well. Moving, touching resulting in searing pain. First words out of my mouth at the hospital was give me something for the pain please. Stat.

20

I really think I’ve been lucky in the pain department, but I’d say endometriosis and its associated IBS are the worst kind of internal pain I’ve felt. It amazes me that you can feel like your insides are being ripped apart and yet not have a life threatening condition. Every time I’m surprised - does it really hurt this bad? Yes, yes it does.

That and depression. Depression is very painful, and it does have a physical effect on me.

As for most painful in general, I suspect burns are universally the worst. I’ve only ever had mild burns and those hurt like a sumbitch.