Worst pain for me was post surgery on a thrice broken ankle. The reason for the horrendous pain was the fact that I was 25 weeks pregnant so no good drugs for me. I wouldn’t have wanted to take anything major for the baby’s sake but once the spinal tap they used to perform the surgery wore off the pain was unreal. Paracetamol didn’t do anything to even touch it. Thankfully once the wounds began to knit after about a day the pain was much less and the baby and I came through the experience ok.
Headaches and vomiting from a broken shunt were my worst pain, especially since it seemed to happen so frequently when I was a kid. It got to the point where it was about once a year. The latest shunt I’ve had for eighteen years, knock on wood.
I’ve had post-seizure headaches, migraines, and broken both of my arms, but nothing compares to the pain of a shunt headache.
Waking up after sinus surgery. Usually the meds work well for me, I’m not very big. When they came and asked how I was, I couldn’t even speak! But great big crocodile tears rolled down my cheeks. Three times, three shots of morphine, aaaah. The last time they removed the packing. You want to close your eyes for that part, trust me.
Round 2; 24 hrs after release from hospital, can’t keep down meds, food, water. Have had none of these for 24hrs, and am in agony. Ordered back to emerg, blood work, and then…morphine, aaaah. Kept overnight, pumped with liquids and potassium, etc.
Definitely a 9 or 10, for me.
Migraines when it gets bad enough that you start vomiting - that was pretty bad, but combining that with pulling a muscle in my neck near the base of my skull because the puking was so violent?
That was a special kind of hell, a 9 maybe?
I have a couple of ruptured discs (L3-L4 and L4-L5) and thankfully have only once tweaked it so that I had a severe, several-days-long, attack of sciatica pain. I think in general I am fairly stoic, but holy crap that burned, it was excruciating. As in sweating and writhing on the floor and contemplating calling an ambulance in the hope that someone in a white lab coat could give me something, anything, to make it stop.
But I didn’t have health insurance at the time and didn’t want to run up a big ER bill, so I didn’t.
I was stabbed and had a perforated lung once, which for several days post-surgery really hurt, but the sciatic pain was way worse.
I was asked that when I was in labor. At the time, I was in transition with a stuck, face-up baby (dear god, I will NEVER get tired of talking about that!), incapable of doing anything but lying down and moaning and wondering why it was possible to hurt so much and not pass out or have an endorphin rush or something.
I said my pain was a 9, because I’ve never had third degree burns and maybe those are worse. But it was really bad.
I got a paper cut to the eye one time. The pain was like a lightning bolt to the eye, and I’d describe it (though it was brief) as easily the worst pain I’ve ever been in. I’ll rate it at 9.8 (because there’s probably something worse, but I sure hope I never find it.)
Right up there was burning my hand in a car accident (mainly 2nd degree, with a few tiny 3rd degree spots). It took months to heal, but the worst pain was right after the accident, on the way to the hospital. I’ll rate that around a 8.5
Honorable mention would go to the anesthesiologist that did a bad job with my spinal block/epidural last year. It felt like electric sparks shooting up and down my entire body. He had to do it four times, and if you’ve ever seen an epidural needle (they are BIG BIG BIG) and have the slightest of needle-phobias (me!) then you can imagine that this was far more unpleasant than the actual C-section that it was leading up to. I’ll rate it around a 7.0
The worst instantaneous pain I’ve ever had was a really bad charley horse, though I can certainly imagine worse. I expect that childbirth is something like that, except much more protracted, and in places that you didn’t even know you had.
The worst long-term pain I’ve ever had was before I got braces, when they were putting the little spacer things in between my teeth to make room for the braces. Eating just about anything but milkshakes was too much to handle. But at least there were still milkshakes, and I didn’t have to be eating all the time.
I really don’t understand that scale. Pain is a pretty subjective thing. I’d be hesitant to rate anything I’ve been through yet as more than a 6 or 7, in terms of what I imagine I could happen and what I could endure.
The worst direct, lancing ‘pain’ I’ve had so far I guess was when I bruised (possibly fractured? My mom wouldn’t take me to the doctor when I was a kid) my calcaneus. It took over my whole body and I almost passed out (it was a ‘blinding’ pain, I couldn’t even see for a few seconds there), I cried (only time I can remember crying from pain since I was 4 or 5 - I took pride in never weeping as a child), and I couldn’t walk without pain for months. But I have a long history of severe migraines (with writhing and vomiting) and menstrual cramps/ovarian cysts/suspected endometriosis (with writing and vomiting). Both are a special kind of hell that go beyond the pains I feel in different parts of my body while I’m having an attack.
I have yet to experience labor and childbirth, large severe burns, or a traumatic injury involving crushing. I imagine any of those things could qualify for a ‘10’ (can’t imagine worse pain).
ETA: According to Hyperbole and a Half’s chart (haha!), I would say I’ve never experienced anything more than a 4-5. 
How big was it?
I’ve always thought that a 1-10 scale with 10 being the worst pain you can imagine would be close to meaningless. I am very imaginative and I have, shall we say, “interesting” tastes in reading materials :D. Other less imaginative people with more benign tastes would probably imagine something a lot milder as a 10.
If it is 1-10 with 10 being the worst pain you have ever experienced, what if you have had a perfectly healthy, cloistered life up until you get attacked by a swarm of killer bees? Is that the same “10” as your twin in all respects who just dropped a big rock on her toe?
In both cases it seems to me that asking for a number must be very undependable.
I don’t have a solution other to invent some instrument that could measure pain levels physiologically (and don’t ask me how that might be done).
When you are a kid and get the skin of your penis stuck in a zipper, you are pretty high on the list. It can get really twisted in the zipper teeth.
There was the time I was riding somebody’s brother’s bike and slipped off the seat (it was loose, I think) and landed directly on my…well, my clitoris. The pain was blinding. It was ridiculous. I think I went out of body for the first few seconds. That is a lot of very sensitive nerves located in a very small area! So far that’d be my personal 10. I’ve had surgeries and such but that was a whole different dimension of agony.
No permanent harm done, but OMG that hurt. crossing legs at the memory
I would find it difficult to even put different pains that I’ve experienced on the same scale.
Is a migraine worse than a small burn? I’d find it hard to say (no I don’t want to take part in any experiments).
I think a scale used alone would be very misleading.
Pain is a difficult concept to quantify. There is acute pain and there is chronic pain. There is physical pain and there is mental pain, and sometimes the two are very much intertwined and inseparable.
For me, the most painful thing I have ever gone through was an intractable migraine that went on for 6 days. I had intense nausea, a complete inability to eat, total insomia, horrible splitting pain in my head and dizziness and lightheadedness that not even a trip to the ER could help alleviate. I honestly wanted to die. I just wanted escape from the torture. I would rate that pain at 9.9 because no matter how bad something is, it can always be worse.
Finally, on my second trip to the ER a few days after my first I discovered the benefits of injectable Imitrex as a migraine abortive. The other forms do nothing but injecting it was a godsend.
Induced labor was an 8 or so. The botched epidural was about 10. The C-section with similarly ineffective epidural was maybe a 4 (I didn’t feel the cutting, just the jabbing of my bladder as they rearranged my innards).
The time I smashed a finger between a chair leg and the flexible plastic chair seat that was improperly fastened down… was easily a 9, but it was brief. Only time I’ve nearly thrown up from pain.
I was laughing and telling jokes when I cut my finger off. Only after everyone left and I was alone to think about how much I hurt did I start to cry. When my husband entered the room I was wailing. I did ok when they sewed it back on.
1: Occasional twinge of a guilty conscience.
2: Touch of arthritis in my right wrist, apparently related to a break I had there in 2005 (see 6).
3: Charley horse; about once a month I’ll get one in the pre-dawn hours, almost always in the left calf, for some reason. Man, I hate those things.
4: I don’t get migraines, but every once in a while I’ll get a sinus headache that has me practically pounding the wall. Fortunately, OTC painkillers almost always do the trick within 40 minutes.
5: Bee sting in the crotch while I was driving one time. I guess the telephone pole I almost hit when I went off the road would have hurt worse.
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Broken arm: I shit you not that the last time I broke one, as I lay there on the ground staring at the unnatural twist to my forearm, I said to myself, “you know, this doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as a kidney stone” (see 9).
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Impacted wisdom teeth: not. very. pleasant. Also, the oral surgeon who took them out rather botched the job and I was in a fair amount of pain for three weeks straight after the operation.
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Gout. On a drilling rig off Angola, with no particular meds available other than Tylenol (useless).
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Kidney stones, particularly the first one I ever passed, which took two freakin’ months to make a leisurely voyage to my bladder. There was actual wall-pounding involved in that one. I made at least three trips to the emergency room, and amost OD’ed at one point from a combination of anti-inflammatories and painkillers.
Oh, and 7-9 all happened during one 18-month period. If that ever happened again I might seriously consider topping myself.
- I don’t even want to know.
Several years ago, I tore my ACL clean across and then had replacement surgery a few months later. Two particular pain instances stand out from that whole thing. 1) The initial injury. Wow. That was awful. 2) The first night after the surgery, when I did not take the pain medication on schedule as I was told to do. I woke up in really terrible pain, and having to pee like a racehorse. I actually laid there for awhile, mostly incoherent, and thought about whether it was worth it to just wet the bed so I wouldn’t have to move. I finally decided I would be really sorry later, and woke my husband. He got me pain meds and then took me to the bathroom, but of course they take awhile to kick in. That was a fairly bad episode for both of us. I stayed on the meds schedule after that, like a good little patient.
I’ve had four additional surgeries in the four years since (I’ve had kind of a run of bad luck), including an emergency appendectomy. Nothing has come close to the ACL stuff. I’d call it a 9.5, reserving the half a point for something awful I don’t care to imagine. The appendix pain right before the surgery, in comparison, was probably a 6.5.
There are many surgical procedures that require the patient to be “alert”. I, unfortunately, have had to have several of these.
If I’m pouring cold sweat and dry heaving it’s a 10. If I’m rigid to the point that I am unable to speak or scream, it’s a 10. If I’m praying that I’ll die soon, it’s a 10.
Far as I’m concerned, all avoidable pain is a 10.
“Yeah doc, it’s a 10, give me something NOW”