Peritonitis three years ago from a torn colon, and a week in the hospital.
Forty something kidney stones over the years, the biggest being 13 mm. Probably 50 by now.
I’m disgustingly healthy but the sickest I’ve ever felt was when I had mastitis. I wasn’t actually sick but I felt dreadful.
Other than that, I did have pneumonia once and 'flu one time as well. Like I said, disgustingly healthy.
The sickest I’ve ever been was probably back when I was a toddler, and had croup. All I can remember of it was that I just could not stop coughing.
After that, probably the flu last year. From what I’ve heard, it wasn’t a particularly bad case (I wasn’t nearly as incapacitated as others have described), but it’s the only time I’ve ever caught it, and thus was the worst flu I’ve had in my life.
And not a sickness, but the closest I’ve ever been to death was when I was about 4 or 5 months old, and Mom left the window open in my room overnight. There was a big and unexpected temperature drop, and I was pretty far into hypothermia when Mom saw me.
Dengue fever, northern Thailand, 1989. Too sick to move, so could not seek help. No one came by my house, because they thought I’d gone out into the province. Thought I was dying. After a couple of days, I felt better enough to make it to a doctor.
The worst I’ve ever felt due to illness (rather than injury) had to be Leningrad, study abroad program, fall 1989, food poisoning. It hit me on the tram on the way to class not long after we’d arrived in-country, which meant that my Russian was terrible. Luckily a couple of classmates dragged me off the tram, where I lay on the sidewalk because it was nice and cool, though I was covered in sweat. I was immediately surrounded by little old Soviet ladies offering to call my embassy, an ambulance, etc.
Someone out of my classmates, I don’t remember who, dragged me back to the dorm in a cab, and by the time we arrived, let’s just say I’d lost control of my intestinal tract. Luckily it passed within a few hours. By the time my program director arrived at my dorm room that evening to investigate, I was functional enough to explain what had happened in a combination of Russian and pantomime (we’d had to sign a contract that we would speak only Russian for the whole semester).
Knock wood, I’ve had potentially life-threatening conditions a couple of times (blood clots, not painful but dangerously located), and things that felt awful but weren’t to the point of being life-threatening (pneumonia twice, a bunch of bronchitis with bronchiospasms that required codeine cough syrup so I could sleep, but never bad enough for ER or hospital admission). But never ended up in the hospital for anything both painful and life-threatening. Well, unless you count the deep vein thrombosis after the surgery to wire my left leg bones back together, but the DVT wasn’t the painful part, the fractures were.
Post-natal eclampsia. I was two days post-partum with kid #4, when I felt a weird, horribly intense headache that seemed to come out of nowhere. Like an icepick between the eyes. I’d had preeclampsia (during the pregnancy) with each of my kids, and I’d read up on the topic a little bit, just enough to suspect that I might have the nasty version.
I managed to notify the floor nurse, who assured me that I probably didn’t have it, because it was quite rare, just as I had the first seizure. They had a very hard time regulating my blood pressure that night, and it was touch-and-go for a couple of hours. I don’t really remember very much of it, except that they did allow me to keep my newborn son with me in the ICU for most of it, because my blood pressure would go even higher if he wasn’t in my sight.
0/10 Do Not Recommend.
When young, every cold or flu turned into bronchitis or pneumonia or so it seemed. Asthma was my close, personal enemy. I had to sleep sitting up whenever I got sick to be sure my lungs stayed as clear as possible. I would cough so hard I would black out. I missed a lot of school. Despite all of this, I never landed in the hospital. My mother was a trained, but non-practicing nurse. But she practiced on me. I was a china doll.
My last big case of bronchitis that triggered an asthma attack came in college. That is until last winter, when I was actually working back at my old university, in a chill, drafty building. I got walking pneumonia. Barely cured of that, I got a cold that became bronchitis. The coughing from the bronchitis triggered my first asthma attack in over 30 years. I was unprepared but deja vu told me what was coming with my next attack. I blacked out and my head hit the keyboard. I gather I was out for several seconds. When I came to, I had a coworker trying to get me to use her inhaler. That was a miserable time. I got to my doc, got a strong inhaler and slowly recovered. It took all winter before I got my energy back.
That said, I am very lucky to not have experienced some of the things you all have been through. Bless you. Get well soon.
I got a stomach flu (or intestinal flu, never went to the doctor) just before Thanksgiving one year. The reason I mention Thanksgiving is because that is an “eating” holiday, and I couldn’t eat.
Well, I could eat, but immediately after, I would have to either throw up or let what I just ate squirt out of my backside. Every time I burped, a smell of rancid farts came with it. And farts, you don’t want to know about.
Except for one. I was on the throne and a fart started. It would start to taper off, but then another round of gas made its way out. This happened several times – every time I thought it was about to end, more gas. It seemed like it was five minutes, but probably closer to one minute. Whichever, it was my life’s highlight of a fart.
Gallstone blockage in October 2014. Intense pain and constant vomiting bright green bile. When they cut me open they found a gall bladder that was shriveled and blackened and had apparently already suffered years of damage.
I’ve mentioned before that I’ve had malaria twice in my life. I don’t remember the first one, as I was only about two, but I got it when I was fifteen and it was terrible.
I am 5’5" and weight 117 pounds at the time. In two weeks of misdiagnosis and ignorance from American doctors I lost 20 pounds. I could not even keep down Sprite and only could drink water. I threw everything up.
American doctors haven’t seen the spirochete that causes malaria much so they had no idea and kept making guesses. Hepatitis? Herpes? Some other horrid disease? I don’t remember much detail of this point in my life, just the misery. I thought I was going to die.
After two weeks my mom finally called an Indian doctor who said “Oh, yup, sounds like malaria, bring her in, I’ll give her quinine.”
My next worse one was a stomach bug too. I am an outrageously independent woman and was so as a young girl, too, which shows you how bad this was - I called my parents to come get me from college. I was throwing up every hour on the dot. It was brutal and left me shaky.
After that, I don’t have any more serious sicknesses, just injuries. I’ve never broken a bone but I’ve had a few bad burns.
Apparently I have led an amazingly healthy life (so far). I’ve had two or three bouts of flu that have left me bedridden for a week or so – one of which destroyed my appetite to the extent that I was seriously worried it wouldn’t come back. I was subsisting on drinkable yogurt for a couple of weeks. Also had the noro virus once and broke a 40 something year long no-vomiting streak in spectacular fashion. I now keep a few bottles of Gatorade permanently stashed in my fridge, because when you live alone and can barely drag yourself to the bathroom,much less prepare food, it’s damned handy to have some electrolytes and sugar handy.
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Pancreatitis: Had gallstone pain before bed, took some expired Dilaudid, woke up at 3 with the worst pain I have ever experienced. Went to the ER and they gave me a ton of shit for having opioids in my system. Was in the hospital for miserable hours.
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Pneumonia: One of my final years of high school, I caught some sort of pneumonia. Was out of school for two weeks, hacking and coughing and feeling terrible. I played a lot of FF VI and Tactics Advance, though…
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Long, drawn-out nausea: For 1.5 years (also in high school), I had a mysterious malady that was so vague it was very difficult to figure out what was going wrong. I was nauseous all the time, sometimes extremely, sometimes mildly. I lost a ton of weight, missed school, and was generally a very unhappy person. I finally got my gallbladder yanked out, which helped the nausea, but now I actually have gallstones. Go figure.
Two for me.
The first was food poisoning, like some others. I was so sick I was hallucinating for some time - came too in a hospital, couldn’t remember being brought there.
Second was worse. Some sort of fever both my wife and I caught while travelling in Malaysia. We were staying in a reasonably remote area. My wife’s temp was so high, I thought she might die - I put her in the shower with some cold water, which seemed to help, then took her out and dried her off; then we both passed out. That was bad. We drifted for a long, long time.
A couple of days later, we basically crawled to a boat, and some friendly locals floated us to a police station, and we begged the cop’s help locating a doctor; the nearest one was miles away. He eventually showed up, but by that time we were feeling better - the cops, very nicely, allowed us to stay in their (empty) jail cell, which I remember being wonderfully cool and dark; whatever it was that had got us, was wearing off. The doc gave us all sorts of pills anyway, which we took, but I have no idea if they did any good.
Never did find out what it was we had.
Just had my second kidney stone last Saturday. Bad, but nowhere near as bad as the first. This one passed eventually, but I had to get Roto-Rootered for the first one.
Gallstones. Can’t decide whether they hurt worse than the kidney stones.
Back in 1980, I was planning to go on my first overseas trip to Indonesia and everyone said I needed to have a vaccination against cholera. Two injections, one week apart. The first one, no problem, no side effects. The second one nearly killed me.
I suppose the week in a step-down room with congestive heart failure was the sickest, but it didn’t feel as bad as the two times I had tonsillitis. However, the absolute worst I ever felt was when I had the measles in high school. Anyone who thinks measles is always just a mild ailment is seriously uninformed, and I consider anyone who would intentionally let his/her child contract measles to be an abuser.
I had appendicitis too, when I was … 21, I think. either 20 or 21. That was also pretty bad. I never thought it was that, because I had intense stomach pains, no pain in my side. It finally got so bad after a few days that someone had to drive me to the emergency room at a hospital. This was back in West Texas. The doctor said appendicitis commonly manifested itself as stomach pains.
Did they ever find that girl?