Holy shit, I experienced some incredible pain in my big toe when shopping earlier. Standing next to my car, I dropped a Perrier bottle no more than two feet, but it landed right on the toe’s “knuckle”, and for several minutes the searing pain was so intense all I could do was basically lie in the hatchback area and kind of writhe in agony. WTF was that about?!? I mean, I’ve had some super painful stomachaches, headaches, and burns in my life; but this topped them all by like three million percent. Did I just perfectly strike a nerve or something?
It’s just a sensitive spot, I think.
Many years ago I had some minor surgery on my right big toe to fix a badly ingrown nail, the doctor injected an anesthetic with a you’re-joking-right? sized needle right into that joint and the pain was unreal, made me woozy.
More recently I broke a pinkie toe a couple years ago, by accidentally dropping a 2lb lead diving weight right on the last joint,slip! THUUUUNKKK!!!. I still joined the dive after 5 minutes of grinding and clenching my teeth… followed by 50 minutes of grinding and clenching my mouthpiece. :rolleyes:
It’s like when you bump your kneecap on a desk drawer. You don’t hit it particularly hard, but it hurts so bad, it makes you sick to your stomach.
My sympathies to the OP. About three weeks ago, I knocked one of my woodworking clamps off its perch. Ten pounds of steel landed on my metatarsal arch. Most of the bruising is gone, but it’s still tender to the touch.
Throughout the day on Saturday, there was not even a mark. But yesterday a big purplish bruise formed.
Chefgyy, that sounds painful indeed. But that sounds much heavier and more accelerated then my bottle, which still seems weird. But I guess it is what Honey said. I haven’t experienced that with the kneecap, but I have noticed my ankle hurts if it bumps fairly lightly against something.
:::whimper:::
I did exactly the same thing a year or so ago, with a shampoo bottle in the shower. I think it hit edge on, at just the “right” wrong spot, and was stunningly painful for a minute. It’s a good thing I wasn’t facing the spray just then or I might have drowned.
Yes. At a former job my desk had the drawer just in the wrong place. If I didn’t push my chair out a little further than I thought necessary when I swiveled around in the chair I’d crack my kneecap on the drawer every time. You’d think I’d learn after a while but no. I worked there twelve years and I still cracked my kneecap even the last week I worked there. I’d hit my kneecap, start cussing, and the lady in the next cube would say “You did it again, didn’t you?”
Ahhh…very interesting! That’s even lighter and softer than a bottle of Perrier, yet you experienced that same blinding, burning pain. What is is right there, I wonder?
Sympathy to the OP here as well. I did something like that once (oil can in my case) and the pain was so bad and just long enough that I had it x-rayed. The doctor looked at me like I was an idiot and serious wimp and I felt very foolish. But it hurt like Hell. I’ve had compound fractures that didn’t hurt that bad.
Huh, I wonder if this is something medical science is as yet unaware of.
The worst part is that it takes 2-3 seconds before it hurts, and in that time you’re thinking. “Oh man, this is going to hurt” 
When I was 17, I jumped up to deflect a volleyball with my right arm extended more or less above my head. Somehow, the ball landed on the tip of my thumb. To help you picture their respective positions imagine that my finger was the letter “i” with the ball as the dot and the latter falling straight down.
A volley ball isn’t really heavy so it shouldn’t hurt, right? Wrong! The pain was incredibly sharp almost all the way to my wrist and lasted for a couple of days.
The feet are a lot more tender than we think of them as being. That’s why a good old foot stomp is an easy and highly effective distraction/release technique in martial arts. You come down directly on the superficial peroneal nerve. You might even take out the navicular and/or cuneiform bones, and maybe a metatarsal or two. Added bonus if you are wearing shoes and manage to rake the edge of your shoe down their shinbone.
All of this is incredibly painful and immediately changes the bad guy’s focus from his attack on you to how his foot feels like he suddenly stuck it in a fire and it won’t hold his weight any more.
Amazingly enough, gentle massage of the superficial peroneal, the dorsal nerves across the top of the foot and the plantar nerves across the bottom do not cause pain. Quite the opposite, actually, and a man who learns how to do this properly will be highly beloved of women. 
In December 2013 I was turning an awkward corner in my house and my body and left foot and rest of me went one way, and the left little toe bent at a right angle to the rest of my foot.
It was broken and dislocated. The bruising circumnavigated my foot, almost immediately. I knew that there is nothing for a broken toe but taping it, and rest, but I couldn’t reduce it back to a normal pointing direction.
Turns out, I had broken the toe as well as the metatarsal just below the joint, and dislocated the toe I went to emergency and had it reduced and fixed. The one thing I did not like was the injection of the freezing. There really isn’t a lot of cellular space to give a big honking needle in the foot, and the resident actually had to try three times to get it. The first jab was in the wrong place, the second jab was with a needle not properly secured to the syringe, so when he pulled back he had the syringe in one hand and my foot with a needle sticking out of it in the other. I was horrified, and tried to stay calm but suggested, once he was finished, quietly and politely that he should go get some spares and practice his needle techniques. I am a nurse, and I have been a nursing lab/placement instructor. Anyone who screwed up like that in nursing would be pulled from providing care until they could show competency of those skills.
That sucked so much. It was three days before my son’s birthday party and 17 days before Christmas. We simplified things a lot that year.
Actually, it was a large bottle of shampoo (24 fluid ounces), and the cap (which is harder plastic) was what actually hit the base of the toenail, so it was hard and sharp-ish.
If I had dropped it at any other angle, I’m sure it would have been painful enough. But there’s just something about hitting at >>that<< angle, and >>THAT<< spot, that would make a saint weep and cuss.
How’s your foot feeling now? Any interesting bruises?
Here is another OWWWW!
I was camping and cooking bacon in a cast iron frying pan over the fire-pit.
Lifted it off and promptly dropped the whole shebang on my right foot.
One can only imagine the dance I did after that.
Were there also colorful metaphors, once you were able to breathe well enough?
If you drank regular water instead of that hoity-toity stuff, your pinky wouldn’t have been extended; therefore you would have had a better grip on the bottle & it wouldn’t have dropped it on your toe. :dubious:
Hope it’s better now.
Oh yeah. In college, I grabbed my calculus book off the kitchen table, but didn’t have as good a grip as I thought. Bottom edge of the spine hit RIGHT on my big toe. Holy shit, that hurt so much worse than I would have ever thought.
I figured a decent size nerve probably runs along the top of the toe and I was “lucky” enough to hit it. Goddamn that hurt.
Laughing, as there is not enough ~!@#$%^&*()_+ on this keyboard to describe my outburst.