I know, I know. It’s awful and I still feel bad about it ten years later. I just didn’t feel comfortable acting all friendly on these boards without revealing the truth about my past. This, too, is a part of who I am.
Now you know why I believe no one is beyond redemption.
Ball TAP. TAP, DAMN YOU! The problem here stems from your friends referring to it as a “meat check.” I’m not even sure how to literally comprehend that.
The image of someone getting hit in the balls is, for some reason, inherently funny to many people. It sure as hell cracks me up. As the victim proceeds to writhe in pain, moaning and at the same time struggling to breathe, I sit back and bellow with laughter.
This reminds me of one of my favorite Simpsons episodes, where Springfield hosts a film festival. Hans Moleman presents: Man Getting Hit by Football!
Homer: [thinking] Hmm…Barney’s movie had heart, but “Football in the Groin” had a football in the groin.
One of the first things we learn in nursing school is: What is pain?
Whatever the person in pain says it is. People’s pain is not really comparable - hell, it can’t even be measured very accurately.
Worst pain I’ve ever been in -
The time I ran on the treadmil just before the start of my period, and was rewarded with cramps that felt like my uterus and overies were being crushed. I crawled into the shower and lay on the floor while cold water poured over me. I was fighting vomit and gasping for breath so hard I’m surprised I didn’t drown myself. It went on for about 30 minutes before ebbing into a dull throb that I could deal with.
My older sister who works at an alternative school says that she sees a lot of fighting teenage boys get kicked in the nuts, and they don’t act like it’s all that bad. However, as a good nurse, I’ll take y’all guys word for it. 
Labor, you guys understand, actually tears your genitals. Imagin something exiting your penis, and ripping it up on the way out. Yeah. I’ll take a nice shot in my hypothetical balls any day.
At any rate, I conclude that gender has very little to do with pain threshold. Whinning, of course, has everything to do with personality.
We used to deadleg each other, that’s where you take a knee right to a person’s thigh causing it to go limp. If you fail he comes after you and you’re fucked. If you’re good though you watch them crumple when they take their first step and you get away until they come back for revenge.
I thought giving unmedicated birth to twins was the worst pain I’d ever feel. And then I ruptured my ACL.
I think lotsa women give birth without drugs. I asked, believe you me. But by the time I got to the hospital I was already dilated 6 cm and the doc told me it was too late and I was out of luck.
Should labor not be laborious, rather than painful? We don’t say, “Oh, she’s had 8 hours of agony,” in a medical sense. I think the excruciating pain some women go through is due to not actually being in condition to give birth, & the body not being able to stop the process.
A 110-lb. weakling expected to haul sheets of drywall for 10 hours will give out at some point, before half done. But what if he couldn’t?
So I expect the pain of labor varies. Still sounds less vile than septic arthritis, though.
See, I’d heard that kidney stones (I’m a four-time winner) were the only thing comparable to labor pains, but even I doubted that that rough little bugger could be anything close to a 9-pound kid.
It’s interesting to get the perspective from someone who’s endured both. Let me just say, I feel (one of) your pains.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but as you can see from the ages of my kids that my childbirth experiences were from back in the day when pain management wasn’t nearly as good as it is nowadays. Epidurals for labor weren’t common and the side effects tended to be drastic–it wasn’t uncommon for women to have complete numbness below the waist for days, headaches from the badly placed spinal needle and occasional incidences of permanent nerve damage and numbness–and occasional paralysis. The other available drugs either had the high potential for bad effects to the baby such as respiratory depression and lethargy or were actually ineffective in dealing with the pain. A good example of the latter was scopolamine, which was used for labor and which many women described as actually making it worse and also preventing the woman from coherently articulating that fact. As a good crunchy granola hippie girl I made the decision that I, as an adult with foresight and knowledge, would be better off taking the hit than the baby. My understanding these days is that epidurals are so well managed and so innocuous for mom and baby that one would be a fool to turn it down, but many women still do for their own reasons.
I will say one thing–the current trend toward birthing centers where baths and support helpers and comfortable areas to walk off the contractions are available is probably helping a lot to return labor to a demanding physical task rather than a medical nightmare and I applaud those who’ve worked to change the culture and bring this about.
Let me guess - when he’s all collapsed, that’s when you stomp his balls with hob-nailed boots, right? All in good fun.
“Stomping”. Everyone does it these days. It’s the latest social ritual. 
See, your pain wasn’t just from childbirth, it was from a torn perineam! (And I suspect you also tore up the front as well, right?) That’s not “labor pains”, that fucking mutilated torn flesh!
That’s the biggest problem I have with the “come back and talk when you’ve given birth!” line. It’s perpetuating this notion we have that childbirth must be painful, must be terribly painful, the most painful thing EVAR, in fact. It’s not, or it doesn’t have to be.
Big Women’s Secret Revealed By WhyNot #423: Some women orgasm from their labor contractions.
Yuh-huh! And while others may not experience orgasm, it can feel all sorts of things other than painful: “intense” “deep” “surging” “explosive” “powerful” “ecstatic” - lots and lots of adjectives have been used other than “painful”, and lots of them are also used to describe sexual pleasure!
Somehow I doubt anyone’s *ever *had an orgasm because of gout pains or kidney stones.
Now, I’m not going to diminish or pooh-pooh the real pain that anyone does have. Absolutely, it CAN hurt, too. But I can’t help but wonder how much less it would hurt if we didn’t prepare ourselves for it with a lifetime of scary stories and tensing up about the whole thing?
Labour, ripped perinium, stitches, constipation, bleeding nipples from breast feeding, constipation from painkillers, sleepless nights -
man - it goes on and on. And your body NEVER recovers from giving birth.
Ball-tapping?
We should be so lucky!
Would also like to add that the pain from my labour completely consumed me. Like a rage. A monster, if you will. You may find that overly dramatic. Well, it was 
Okay, I was going to spare all the guys in this thread and not share my fun story… up until this.
While I was in high school, I was on a co-ed swim team. Once a month our nutzo coach would let us take a half-pracice on a Saturday (after 30 min weights, 5 mile run, 1 hour swim) and play “animal ball”.
“Animal ball” was water polo, with only one rule: if they didn’t have the ball, you couldn’t drown them too long.
So. I had the ball. Michelle decided that her team should have the ball, and tried to grab it from me. She had it in her two hands, me resisting with my two hands, and I guess she felt she needed more oomph. She ducked under water, tucked her legs up, and kicked up.
She punted my groin.
All I knew was a sharp flash of light – like a flashbulb – and then unconsciousness. Apparently, she kicked hard enough that I actually popped out of the water. But, hey, she got the ball, right?
All the guys rushed over, horrified, and dragged me to the side of the pool. A few minutes later I woke up – still in excruciating pain. I managed to stagger my way to the lockerroom, and recovered after a half-hour or so enough to limp on home.
My peepee was very tender for a week after, and actually peeing was like expelling needles through my unit.
The reason I share all this with you, is it turned out that little experience left me with “urethral scarring” (lovely term to hear from your doctor, BTW). Hasn’t really impaired any function, but I don’t use the urinal because the “shake; tap, tap, tap” method really doesn’t do the job in voiding any last drops. And my dreams of porn careers were cut short, since a money shot is not in the cards, anymore.
So, there you go. Imagine that ripping up your hypothetical balls.
As one who suffered a series of gall bladder attacks before having it removed, I’ll take a series of swift kicks to the nuts before I would ever submit to the pain of gallstones again. I’ve read that gallstones are comparable to labor pains, so there you go.
Worst ball injury I know of: Back in my co-op (intern) days, a co-worker of mine was working in the roof area of the house he was building when he fell and landed straddled on one of the rafters. He ended up having to have surgery and even miss a few weeks of work. I’ll take a gall bladder attack over that experience.
Maybe it’s cruel, but I can’t stop laughing at this. olivesmarch4th, the guy was a jerk for not seeing the humor in the situation.
All I know is, nobody has ever offered me an epidural before kicking me in the nuts.
I didn’t think the actual tearing of my ACL was that painful. Sure it hurt, but it wasn’t all that much worse than a hundred other football injuries I’d endured over the years. I sat on the sidelines for a little while, then stood up and limped around a bit. I couldn’t go back in the game by any means, but I thought that I’d be fine with a little ice and time.
The next morning was rougher. The alarm went off, I rolled over, I stood up, and I fell down. The two days after surgery were the worst for my knee, but the physical therapy and rehab were actually a little fun, in a masochistic way. I think I was just happy to actually be moving again.
Still, the pain from kidney stones dwarfed the ACL experience. So, kidney stones > ACL, ACL > unmedicated twin labor, and labor > kidney stones. Round and round we go!
*(falsetto voice) “Childbirth’s the worst pain in the world.”
Yeah? Get your dick caught in your zipper.*
I’ve actually always hated that guys will throw that back about pain “Yeah, try getting hit in the balls!” As if that is the gold standard of pain. When I was in high school, my period cramps would literally have me hitting the floor, throwing up and blacking out in pain. It sucked. I always pull that up when guys say that I have no idea the pain they are experiencing in being hit in the balls. I assume it’s similar.
Whenever the subject has come up while in the appropriate situation, I’ve asked several women who’ve had kidney stones and have given birth which was the most painful.
Without exception they’ve said that kidney stone pain was much more painful.
Also, labor pain comes and goes while kidney stone pain moves in and dwells there.
The winner, though, was a woman that told me she passed a kidney stone when she went into labor.
She may get into heaven, but I bet she doesn’t fear hell.
gout/pseudogout. FTW [or FTLoose?]
If I could chop off my foot, I would - but I am afraid of the phantom pain. Imagine that not going away?
migraines, check
menstrual cramps like labor, check
labor check and check
pseudogout, check
broken bones, check
renal abcesses to the point where they needed to be drained so they didnt pop, check.
I would actually say that it is sort of a tossup between pseudogout and migraine, though labor is exhausting [it may start out half a minute of pain every half an hour, then it can degrade to half a minute of pain every 5 minutes for HOURS upon HOURS upon HOURS. A woman and child can die of the exhaustion from not being able to actually pop the sprog out. Survivable c-sections and dependable pain control have been the best boon to women in history.]
Migraines, on the other hand can take months of experimentation to find the correct meds to control the pain or recurrences, and a small percentage of people can not actually find the correct med or combination that works 100%.
Gout can frequently be controlled by dietary management with some meds to relieve the flares. Pseudogout is not controllable by dietary management but does respond to certain meds once it has flared.
Men can and do get gout, pseudogout and migraines and various cysts/abcesses/stones.
Though mrAru chimed in and mentioned how unpleasant it was to accidently pull out a nose hair …