Brian Regan discusses this issue:
I’ve had a broken arm, dry socket, and unmedicated transitional back labor with a stuck baby (no, I’ll never get tired of talking about it). The third one far outpaced the other three, in terms of awful awful pain. Still, when they asked me to rate my pain on a scale of 1-10, I said 9 because I’ve never had third degree burns or kidney stones.
I guess REAL pain as described still awaits me.
I have suffered toothache (had to sleep sitting up all weekend till I could see the dentist) and migraines where I had to pack my head in ice and lie flat in a dark room for hours (thankfully those went away). Menstrual cramps when I was in my teens that were every single bit as intense as labor pains I had decades later. Burns on my hands from cutting up hot peppers! My hands were on fire for hours and hours, nothing took the pain away except keeping them submerged in cold water. Backache - nothing too debilitating, but annoying like a bad toothache, and made standing up or sitting down an exercise in bravery.
Natural, unmedicated childbirth. 4 times.
The worst pain I’ve experienced was my major heart attack. Made broken bones and such seem like dull aches in comparison.
Hopefully you will never have the chance to make the comparison.
I’ve had both kidney stones and gallstones. I really don’t know which one hurt worse, but in both cases, there were times that I longed for death.
My blood pressure spiked to the point where I am surprised that I didn’t stroke out in either case. If I’d had them at the same time, it probably would have killed me.
For me, a slipped disc, earlier this year- no painkillers really touched it. Even rolling over in bed (in an attempt to not get bedsores) took a few minutes, and left me pretty much crying with pain, because no muscles wanted to move. Getting to the bathroom took about half an hour of crawling…
Lasted a month before I got surgery - not the fault of the doctor, I really, really didn’t want surgery, so didn’t really admit how bad it had got.
I have had back pain requiring surgery and gallstones. To me, visceral pain is far worse. My gall bladder attacks left me in the fetal position, complete with tears and breaking out in a cold sweat.
I gave birth unmedicated and it was nothing compared to toothache. The thing with labor is that (1) it’s not constant and (2) the harder and more frequent the contractions, the closer you are to ending. Toothache for me was about 100 times worse and it doesn’t stop, even for an instant, and it will not end without intervention. Also the intervention is unpleasant and the area will continue to hurt for a while afterward.
That said, the pain I saw my husband in with kidney stones certainly looked worse. This is a guy who usually won’t even take anything for a headache, and he was white with pain and begging for something to make it stop.
Childbirth also comes with a whole host of brain numbing hormones that both lessen the pain and prevent long term memory formation related to the pain. It’s a brilliant “design” that allows us to have more than one pregnancy without killing ourselves in a panic.
Gallbladder attack. The last one had me taking a shower to try to distract myself from the pain, and ended with me curled up, naked under the hot-as-I-could-make-it stream of water, slightly rocking and whimpering “make it stop” until it finally did.
They’re rather frightening in that the time it takes to go from “huh, there’s a twinge; I wonder if it’s my gallbladder…” to “holy hell” is less than five minutes. That being said, I’ve never officially broken a bone (though I might’ve chipped a finger bone when I was 18), never had a terrible accident, and had relatively mild migraines when I had them. The only thing that comes close to the gallbladder pain was a fun mix of otitis externa and otitis media (swimmer’s ear & middle ear infection) that started to progress to my parotid gland. That wasn’t worse intensity-wise than the gallbladder pain, but it lasted much longer. The first time that the ENT guy suctioned out my ear was pretty brutal, though.
[quote=“Donnerwetter, post:21, topic:640674”]
Brian Regan discusses this issue:
[/QUOTE]Dude, throw us a bone and at least tell us the time it starts. I’ll link to it.
How would you describe your pain?
He really gets into it at 4:42 or so, but it’s worth it from where I linked. 
Acid reflux is pretty bad. Especially since it has this tendency to last for hours on end. The first time I got it, I thought I was having a heart attack.
It really is like this. Mine happened at work, workers comp, but I’ve been told I can’t get a second opinion unless I pay 100% cash, so I’m stuck trusting company doctors.
Years ago, I had the tooth thing. (I was stupid enough to say ‘No novocaine’ in my 20s to some cavity drilling. I lasted 3-4 minutes …and I challenge you to do better.)
But back pin around the lumbar spine is Insidious. It comes when you most need it not to. Trying to manipulate your arms, legs, and back seems like you are trying to assemble a “Transformers Toy” just to be able to stand. Its both pain and humiliation.
Worst pains I’ve experienced:
- Labor
- Severely sprained ankle & toothache (tie)
- Pleurisy
- Gall bladder attack
Of all of these, pleurisy was actually the worst, not because of the pain level but because it lasted so long (about a month).
I also had the pleasure of experiencing PUPPP with my fourth pregnancy. Usually you only get it with your first, but because this child was with a different father than the others, it was considered a “first” pregnancy. My doctor told me it’s like the body’s allergic reaction to the pregnancy/sperm so in the majority of cases, you won’t have to go through it again. Hopefully. 
I have had small kidney stones twice and I would take those over my unmedicated childbirths any day. I have also had an abcess when my wisdom teeth were pulled…and yeah, that ranks right up at the top. Mostly because you can’t get the pain to stop and you’re not sure how long it will last. At least with childbirth, you know there is an end point!
Anything kidney-related (not just stones) is pretty high up there. I had migraines for years, and they have nothing on pissing blood from a kidney injury. That’s some searing, knee-buckling pain.
I’ve had kidney stones and back spasms, but the worst pain I’ve ever experienced was bone pain. Not just fractures - those hurt, but not that much and not for that long. But I had a routine ligament reconstruction in my knee a few years ago that consisted of:
[ol]
[li]Cutting out about a third of the patellar tendon (which connects the kneecap to the tibia), with a plug of each bone at either end,[/li][li]drilling one hole in the bottom of the femur and a second in the top of the tibia, and[/li][li]placing the plugs of bone at either end of the patellar tendon into those holes and securing them with “surgical screws*.”[/li][/ol]
The bone pain from that wasn’t sharp, but it was just a constant, unavoidable ache that got worse and worse, all day, every day. If you put a gun to my head and told me to choose between kidney stones and more of that bone pain, then bring on the stones.
*A blatant lie! I use screws all the time, and I know damn well what size they are. I saw those things on the followup x-ray. They are surgical lag bolts.
Gallbladder for me. It makes me wonder just how much pain you have to be in to ‘pass out from the pain’. I certainly wished it would happen, but it didn’t.
Hm, in no special order -
until getting my internal reproductive organs ripped out with extreme prejudice and slightly ameliorated by supressive medication the sheer living hell that PCOS and endometriosis made of my menstrual cycle. I best describe it as someone reaching up my hoohaa up to their elbow, grabbing a handful of innards and twisting on the way out constantly for anywhere from a week to several months while an ounce of liquid per hour drizzles slowly out carrying pingpong ball sized clots. Add migraines complete with visual and scent auras and vomiting.
Preop prep for my first attempt at a davinci hysterectomy. Nothing by mouth after midnight, the dehydration from the constant shitting triggered a migraine at about 3 am. In at 11 am per instructions I begged for anything to help the migraine so I was given one of the micro cans of ginger ale. I managed to fill 3 emesis bowls and luge down myself and the recliner I was in. Did I mention the BP of 210/190 that got me admitted, though the highlight of my day was whatever they shot me up with that stopped the migraine, whatever they gave me to drop my BP back to normal, and the quiet dark room with a hospital bed and perfect privacy … [and a new appointment 4 months later to gut me and rip out the offending organs.] Well, also the promise that I will NEVER EVER FUCKING HAVE TO DO ANY SORT OF CHEMICAL PREP PREOP EVER AGAIN. They will work with me on fasting and enemas.
[Pseudo]Gout. There is nothing quite like waking up because the cat has jumped up on the bed and landed on a foot that had 3 cm edema on the bottom surface, 2 cm edema on the top surface and tapers up the shin to about 1 cm midway up the calf. [Why yes, my first attack ever was rather special, thanks.] The scream woke my husband, terrified the cat, and I was not overly thrilled myself. The logistics of managing to get me out to the car and hence to the ER was interesting. A single cane [which is what I had in the house left over from breaking a bone in my foot earlier] really was inadequate. [we grabbed an office chair and made it into an impromptu rolling crutch supporting myself on my knee and rolling to the front door, gently outside and next to the car. We got myself a transport chair after that on sale for $200 bucks. I still have it =)] None of my flares have been this bad since, and I praise the ancient who discovered colchicine worked.
Severe and previously asymptomatic kidney infection [and the case that finally got the Navy to agree that I can wander in and get checked for UTIs with no symptoms any time I want] Slight back ache, like I strained it doing something. With sheep, you haul sacks of feed and bales of hay around fairly frequently so I could have done something stressful to my back. Treatment NSAID [good] and heating pad [really really BAD.] As I was working temp jobs and was working as a receptionsist as I was one of very few people that my agency could find that was willing to do a 4 hour job. So I get there as their normal lady took the afternoon off. I worked all afternoon, though I had a pretty bad back ache at this point, so I took a dose of ibuprofin. Afternoon came to an end, and I went home. I laid down with my trusty heating pad, and our roomie of the time Ian nuked us both congee with chicken, I had made a large batch to freeze as we had eaten the last of it the week previously. This is a rice based gruel heavy on garlic, ginger and chicken used frequently as invalid food in China. Ian headed off to his job, mrAru was out to sea. Midevening I got a bad wave of nausea and made it to the bathroom, but was not happy, so I grabbed the 5 gallon stockpot so I wouldn’t have to make a limp for the bathroom and hurt my ‘strained back’. Ian got home, there was at least an inch of vomit in the pot [well more than the portion of congee I had eaten.] I swear it felt like I vomited my toenails by the time Ian got home. We decided to run me down to the ER on base, they still had one in the base hospital at that time. We checked me in, and waited until I vomited on their floor, then they managed to find me a cubical. Ian reported to me later that the guy on the desk seemed to think I was in heroin withdrawl. I really looked well and truely zombi - dead white, dark sunken eye sockets … hair wasn’t combed so it was seriously bed head. When they finally dragged my corpse through all the diagnostics, I was pretty much about to have my kidneys shut down and they decide that I was an idiot for letting a bladder infection that I never knew i had get this bad.:rolleyes: Then the urologist they woke up to deal with me determined that I get totally asymptomatic urinary tract issues mainly because of what they did to me when I was 5 years old - it apparently damaged some nerves so I don’t feel anything that I should. :smack: Right up until it is hospitalization time. I can pretty much only monitor it by color, cloudiness or smell. :rolleyes: But as soon as it feels like someone wound up and nailed me in the small of my back with a baseball bat, I need to get to an ER. Or if I start pissing blood. :dubious:
Broke my left ankle, tib/fib and tore the ACL while riding a steeplechase. 5 miles into the 10 mile course. Only way out is to get back up on the horse and finish the ride. :smack: