Not really. Everything but the jellyfish was self-inflicted. And the shoulders, I suppose - those were from rugby. Honestly, that’s pretty much the sum total of my lifetime injuries, anyway. I did split my scalp open as a kid when I was knocked over by a dog onto some flagstones, but that didn’t hurt that much. I also had my nose broken by a cricket bat as a kid; that hurt a lot, but I might have been crying more because I was watching so much blood stream out of me. Being kicked in the balls hurt more than anything except the jellyfish, now that I think about it.
The most painful thing I’ve ever encountered was when I had a metal pin removed from my foot. I’d had my ankle fused (for the second time but that’s another story) and the surgeon drilled a thick (quarter inch or so) surgical metal pin to hold things together while it healed. The pin ran from the bottom of my heel up into the tibia, with about an inch sticking out of my heel. He’d casted around it and after a few weeks he replaced that cast with a walking cast (rubber heel embedded in the cast) and told me to start walking. It was agony and the only way I could walk on it was to put weight on it until the pain increased in intensity that it numbed out. So I did that for a couple months.
Then when it came time to take the pin out, doc grabbed a pair of pliers, yanked really hard and ran out of the room. I wasn’t expecting any pain so the suddenness and the intensity of it made me scream like someone had chopped my leg off. That’s what it felt like. Mom wasn’t expecting it either, so I think she peed her pants when I screamed like that. I remember her jumping up and asking what was wrong and I was too busy screaming to answer her for a while.
My sister said the shingles she had on her head was horrifyingly painful, and there was little that could cut it other than opioids.
Merely brushing against the Australian stinging tree will inflict an excruciatingly painful rash that lasts for months or even years.
I’ve had shingles and I’ve had an intractable, week-long migraine. I’d take the shingles in a fucking heartbeat. In a fraction of a heartbeat, no contest. There is no one I hate enough in this world to wish such pain on as the pain of that migraine.
Gall bladder attack. I’ve had broken bones that hurt less than that.
How many were you attacked by? Did they run on little bladder legs or fly? :eek:
Attacked by one GB, 5 times. It was a fifth column action.
I would say either burns or gout.
I’ve had a 13 mm kidney stone, and a massively extruded L5S1 disk so bad it left my foot partly paralyzed, and I woke up too early on the operating table once. All of these were very painful, but in different ways. For one thing, pain for a fraction of a second and pain for many hours are differently bad. For another thing, some kinds of pain make you frantic to change them, whereas other kinds depressingly make you miserable and passive. Some pain makes you frightened. It’s hard to compare these simply to say which was worse.
I got a brand new axe for my birthday once and went on a mad tree killing spree. One of them decided to fight back. I swung hard, glanced the blade off the trunk and chopped my knee instead. I had to do an army crawl for about 500 yards to get help leaving a trail of blood the entire way. My left knee never did heal quite right even after 30 years.
However, that was simply the most gruesome injury, not the most painful. That honor belongs to a scratched cornea that I got not once but twice working with sheetrock without protective glasses. I thought the first one was plenty bad enough but little did I know. A badly scratched cornea feels like a constant acid drip right into your eye. Light is excruciating but even simple sounds hurt as well oddly enough. All you can do is lay there in the dark as still and quiet as possible for a week or two. Just when you think the pain, couldn’t get any worse, random noise or light will crank it up another notch like a winch that only goes in one direction and never releases the tension. I had to go to the ophthalmologist every day for two weeks to fix that one and ensure that there would be no permanent damage. The combination of eye drops they gave me cost literally thousands of dollars and hurt just as badly as the original injury but they got the job done eventually.
Take care of your eyes and always were eye protection in situations that dictate it even if you have gotten away with being casual and careless before.
I’ve passed a kidney stone and I’ve had shingles.
The shingles lasted for weeks and kept coming back. And they can make you blind if they get in your eyes. The kidney stone pain lasted a few hours so I didn’t have the ‘got knocked out’ kind.
Pain is relative. What bother’s some people don’t bother others.
From what I’ve read trigeminal neuralgia sounds the worst. At least with a kidney stone, it will go away. And shingles will go away.
On the other hand, I got thrown off a horse and landed on my feet, bruising the bones in my feet. It was six months of agony with every step and only one pair of beat up old tennis shoes with holes in them were wearable. I also had facial surgery at the same time and my face kept twitching uncontrollably. In the midst of all this, I had a job interview. The humiliation of that interview may not have been as painful as trigeminal neuralgia, but it was really, really memorable.
Digital ischemia. It was described to me as “burning your fingers in a gas flame, and then slamming them in a car door.”
Coincidentally, she suffered costochondritis and digital ischemia simultaneously. Scleroderma hits all the high points.
For intense pain, I would say kidney stones. But at least between waves of pain, you can joke that “this too shall pass”. My sister has had kidney stones, gall stones and given birth to 2 kids. She is also an RN, she rates the kidney stones as the worst pain. A friend had kidney stones and a heart attack, he also rated the stones as worse pain but far easier to recover from of course.
For me it was kidney stones too. My urologist said he’d treated mothers who said it was way worse than childbirth. And he’d had big, tough guys crying in pain from kidney stones.
I’ll go with migraines – I once had one post-seizure that was so severe I couldn’t even move my head without excruciating pain. I mean, as in literally, I couldn’t even turn my head to the side. I couldn’t even sleep it off – I was just laying there, looking up at the ceiling until someone came up to check on me. 
It was the kind of pain that you’d sell out your grandmother if that would make it go away.
I also have trigeminal neuralgia and chronic migraine. I’m in a Facebook support group for TN and despite how agonizing the pain is, it seems I got off easy. There are almost-daily posts from members contemplating suicide, who have lost their jobs because it is too painful for them to speak, who are in court trying to win disability benefits, who can’t even get a proper diagnosis from doctors who insist they have TMJ, who have had dangerous surgeries with only fair chance of success. I worry these things are in my future.
For me, it’s migraine, but not every migraine. I am a regular sufferer of them and usually they are awful, and I go to bed and lay there in a semi-conscious (since the pain is too bad to actually sleep) and wait for the meds to kick in and for it to pass, while praying that the meds stay down.
But
Every once in a while, I get one bad enough that I have to go to the hospital. The ones that make me not only vomit up any medication I try to take, but have on occasion driven me to just scream. Not because it helps, but because there is actually nothing else that can be done.
Stupid.