Excuse me while I go find some more of those silver nitrate swabs to jam in my nose again because compared to what you went through it’d be soooo soothing.:eek:
Penile and scrotal surgery: Recovery was unbelievable; no pain killers because of my history of addiction.
Hideous skin cancer on head; five weeks of surgery once per week: no painkillers because of my history of addiction.
I’ve had migraines that were real killers. Pain that induces vomiting is real pain.
I had kidney stones once, that passed through in the “normal” manner.
Sweet. Jesus. In. A. Pickle. Barrel.
Me, too. (I’ve noted that liquid vitamin B complex really does help if you take it in a large dose. It takes the edge off and makes it bearable.)
The worst pain I’ve ever had to deal with was my menstrual pain. Now, before you pooh-pooh this, realize I would spend hours rolling on the floor in agony screaming, puking, and crying. It was the kind of pain where you not only think you’re going to die, you HOPE you’re going to die.
My mother used to have the same thing. She says she’d rather give birth once a month. Since I don’t have kids, I can’t comment, but I will say that she and I nearly died while she was giving birth to me, thanks to an incompentent doctor.
She has a pelvic deformity which meant she had to have a c-section. The doctor knew this long before my mother went into labor, but she let my mother lie there in labor for almost twelve hours with no pain meds. The doctor told my family that they should be prepared for both of us to die because my neck was breaking against my mother’s pelvis, and she was in dire distress. A nurse fetched another doctor who took over and ordered an emergency c-section, so we both lived. (The doctor later lost her license.)
But for my mom to say she’d rather go through THAT every month than the menstrual pain we used to suffer tells you something.
That’d be a good way to describe my c-section. I had some complications, and they had to enlarge the incision. They cut me open, took out the baby, cut me open wider, the epidural started wearing off, I started screaming, they gave me more epidural stuff, they cut out some stuff, stirred some stuff around and sewed me up. Actually, they stapled me up. I distinctly remember hearing that sound. Ca-chunk, ca-chunk, ca-chuck. Right across my belly. * :shudder: *
I ached for weeks.
Yes, I’d agree with that one. That stabbing pain in the eye is sheer agony. And vomiting only makes the pounding worse.
When you’re really sick or in an accident, you think, “If I died, who would take care of my family?” With a migraine you think, “At least if I died, my head wouldn’t hurt anymore.” It’s that bad.
I was talking earlier with my mom on the phone about this very subject. She told me that when she was suffering from migraines as a teen, her mother (my grandmother) took her to see a doctor who gave her an injection of vitamin B in her eye. (She says grandma fainted while she was watching this happen.) He promised it would “cure” her migraines. Of course, it didn’t. “Damn quack,” mom growled as she recounted this to me.
It is for experiences like that, that I’m thankful that there is no sensory record of pain (think back: you can experience sights, smells, some sensations, and things you heard, but you cannot recall the sensation of pain). I had chronic nosebleeds as a kid and had to have my nostrils cauterized. I don’t remember any anasthetic but I do remember two smoking sticks being shoved into my nose and that it hurt both at that moment and for at least a couple of hours later. They didn’t warn me it was going to hurt either. Bastards. It felt like I was being branded, or at least what I imagined being branded felt like.
I also remember having a severe hate-on for my parents for about 2 weeks for my tonsilectomy at age 4. The doctors figured that while they were there, they’d put tubes in my ears (I was fairly hearing impaired and subject to recurring ear infections), and scrape my adenoids and all of that wonderful ears/note/throat stuff all in one go. If I went through that now I’d probably wish for a head amputation, it hurt for a week, and it was like someone had ripped out my tonsils by the roots, and then stabbed skewers through my ears, not fun.
The most recent experience was with an infection under my big toe-nail. I had been doing groundskeeping at my apartment complex, some of which involved a pressure washer. 1600 PSI, in sandals. I got clumsy and bounced the live tip off of my big toe. It hurt. It got worse. It got infected. I had an ear infection and went to the doctor for antibiotics and while I had him there I said “Doc, can you look at my toe, I bounced a pressure washer off of it and the pain is getting worse”. He looked at it and said. “Yup. It’s infected. We’re going to have to cut it out.”
He then disappeared into the back. (I was wary and not hearing well so I hoped that I had heard “out” and not “off”, and the “cut” was a fancy doctor term and not what you or I would have thought). The doctor returned with a pair of shears that were (I shit you not) the length of my forearm, with one of them menacing bends to make it easier to cut things at odd angles. He grabbed my foot and shoved the point of one of the blades under my toe nail all the way to the nailbed. You want to flinch really bad when something like that happens but if you do it will hurt that much worse. Snip. So we have two chunks of toenail, one hanging by a bit of friction and little bit of unsevered keratin. That bit is next to a raw nerve harrassed by invassive bacteria. It needs help leaving. The doctor pulls out a pair of needle nosed pliers and grabs the offending chunk of nail and yanks. I manage to remove all of the oxygen in the treatment room but am fortunate enough not to swallow any bits of medical equipment or forms because I’m inhaling through my teeth. Strangely enough within two hours it felt a hell of a lot better than before I went to the Doctor. After that, whenever I use a pressure washer, I wear rubber boots.
The last recurring trauma in my life is a recurring knee dislocation. First time it happened I near threw up. Now it hurts but is more or less routine.
-DF
I consider myself lucky that I have no memory whatsoever of experiencing the worst pain I ever experienced.
I’m a cancer survivor (bone leukemia, in remission three years). After I was initially diagnosed, I had to have some tests done to see how widespread the cancer was. One of these tests was to determine whether or not it had invaded my bone marrow, which involves a biopsy.
Apparently, if it’s in your marrow anywhere, it’s in your marrow everywhere, so you can do the biopsy from any bone. The most convenient place to take a sample is in your pelvic bone; there are two “wings” that are easily accessible at the bottom of your back.
The anaesthetic that I was given works via amnesia. I felt all of the pain associated with having a hollow needle inserted into your bone, but I don’t remember any part of the procedure at all.
My wife, who is a veterinary technician and is very comfortable in surgical settings, insisted on being in the room when the sample was done. It takes a lot to get to her - this did it. To this day she won’t tell me any of the details of what happened to me. I do know it involved a lot of vocal expressions of pain, but I don’t remember any of it between laying down on the bed beforehand and getting up afterward.
Please tell my that was sized from an ultrasound before the medico’s zapped it with the sound wave gun.:eek:
My bout of gout is nothing in compairison
Dancer Flight,
I literally huddled into the back of my chair and tears came to my eyes reading about your toenail. I’m still breathing “manually”.
I had a toenail that I did self-surgery on, by accident. I was trimming it, and I’ll admit I was cutting it shorter than you’re supposed to, but it tore down the side. The tear left a jagged piece, which I had to cut out later. So the whole side of the nail was raw. I kept remembering those stories you read about prisoners of war and such who have their nails torn out. I couldn’t put the toe on the floor for weeks, I couldn’t even tolerate the sheet on it in bed. And then one night I was sitting at the kitchen table reading and I moved my leg, bumping the toe straight-on into a chair leg. Searing pain all the way to the knee, and the leg quivered for half an hour. I know this sounds kind of silly, but I felt like I had some small understanding of crucifixion, with those spikes being driven through the foot. I’m starting to huddle again, just typing this.
>2) 13 mm kidney stone.
>Please tell my that was sized from an ultrasound before the medico’s zapped it with the sound wave gun.
Sorry to break it to you, but, no it didn’t. I got this stone, and a 9 mm stone, and a 5 and a 4, all ljammed together, partway down my right ureter before it got stuck. The sound wave gun (extracorporeal shock wave lithotryptsy (sp?)) doesn’t work so well in some cases, including when you’ve got lots of stone in there and it’s left the kidney (sometimes they will push them back up into the kidney to blast them, but more often they just drag it out or cut it out).
No, this mess they cut out in a good old fashioned lithotomy, one of the things the Hippocratic Oath forbids them to do. Fortunately they don’t take the oath too literally. I was in hospital for 10 days and had a catheter into my bladder and a second smaller catheter that went inside the first one, came out into my bladder, and went up the right ureter to the kidney. Having that inner catheter removed really belongs on my list of nasty moments. I am convinced that a strobe light went off inside me at one point.
So I have had one lithotomy, maybe 4 lithotryptsies, and more cystoscopies (where they go in with a probe with a wire basket on the end) than I can remember. I have had over 40 stones, most of which I passed without help (one while driving).
FWIW I asked on SDMB for people who had done both to comment on whether having kidney stones or babies was more painful. Of the 17 responses that had done both, all 17 said the stones were worse.
But it’s only pain. Stones don’t change that many lives.
A couple of pain-by-proxy tales…
My girlfriend slammed her thumb in her sliding van door. When they took her to the ER for x-rays, they referred her immediately to an orthopedic surgeon. This is the guy that sees people with steel rods sticking out of their joints, but when he saw the x-rays of her thumb, he visibly grimaced. She had crushed the first bone (between the fingertip and the first joint). Apparently, it’s a difficult bone to break and even the doctor felt her pain.
In my second story, there was only nominal pain but a huge squick value. My husband had sinus surgery a few years ago. I was good with the surgery and recovery, even when they pulled out the tampon-like packing that was about 10" long. On a post surgery follow up visit, the doctor took a mini-vacuum and literally sucked out the contents of his nose. I thought I was going to pass out.
Oh, I just remember one more. Another girlfriend had a blood clot in her aorta and post surgery she was on mega doses of morphine AND oxycontin. Even through all of the drugs, she was still in excruciating pain from the nerve damage done by the clot. Oy vey.
Up until April, my worst pain was the combo kidney/UT/Bladder infection I had 4 years ago.
In April, I woke up from back surgery, screaming and trying to rip out my IV (I don’t know why). It took 4 nurses to restrain me. The pain was so intense. I can’t even begin to describe it. After what felt like a year (actually only about 30 seconds), the pain killers kicked in and I slept for about 2 hours. After that, the pain was much better and by the time I left the hospital the next morning, it was just a dull throb.
Funny how the “treatments” are always much more painful than the injury itself.
Worst pain I ever had was when my fallopian tube decided it didn’t want to house a baby for nine months and then ruptured – for about three weeks.
In the beginning, it wasn’t bad. I thought I had the stomach flu.
When it finally burst, though, I wanted someone to kill me. Every pothole the ambulance hit felt like someone was stabbing me in the gut with a knife.
God bless Percoset.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We only have women’s word for it that childbirth is such a big deal.
I reckon they exaggerate just to (a) make guys feel guilty and (b) have an excuse for sitting home all day afterwards.
They’re having you on.
Well, for me it was the seven plus months of Sciatica. Herniated disk.
The last straw was when the pain was so bad it took me four hours one morning to get out of bed to go to the bathroom. There was no painkiller that worked and no position that gave relief. Sweating and tears, with much grunting. I had a softball size muscle knot in my ass and my left foot was nearly all numb. A twinging, searing pain that ran down my leg and lasted for hours at a time.
Sucked huge. I would have traded 36 hours of intense labor pains over the continuous episodes of nerve pains.