As a college freshman, me and a few girls I took ballet with were playing extreme leap frog. Dance studios have floors that are forgiving for high leaping and using feet repetitively. So we young, strong dancers had thighs that were made for jumping. We stood at regular height and the Leaper jumped over you by bouncing off the floor and putting their hands on your shoulders or head and flying through the air and sticking the landing, softly. One girl flew over my head and landed on the side of her ankle. The break was audible. She writhed around the floor puking and screaming at the same time. She had a seizure before EMTs got there. It was bad. She had 2 surgeries to fix it just to walk. Of course she never danced ballet again. That’s the worst pain I ever saw anyone in.
“Answers to the name of ‘Lucky.’”
Broken and dislocated shoulder, about a 9 at first. When I got into the wheelchair at the ER, I felt my shoulder slide back into the socket sickeningly, which took it back down to about a 7.
I don’t think I have a 10. At some point, I just dissociate, and that’s a really comfortable thing. But before that happens, I also have a higher threshold than most for pain, apparently. (I think I enjoy things others find painful or shy away from.)
I think maybe my intolerance for sound (hearing repetitious noises causes extreme mental agony) and having a really really bad ear infection would rate around a 7.
I can’t think of anything I experienced that was intense enough to merit even an 8. (And I have been through some serious shit.)
Well, if we are talking about mental or emotional pain, I am about 12 unless I am asleep then it’s only 9 or so.
Have I told you I am a emotional wreck?
I broke my L-3 vertibra wide open in a ladder fall in 2000. I can comfortably assign an 8-9 to that event and the ensuing months.
I just had a total hip replacement a month ago. The months leading up to the surgery were 24/7 pain levels in the 7-8 range, and if I stumbled and jammed my right leg upwards ( a misstep off of a curb, etc ) it flashed for a moment right to 9.
I do not believe I’ve felt a 10 and hope I never do.
I shed the Dilaudid after about 2 weeks, with the 2nd week being a tapering-off period. Now Tylenol is my friend and the pain from the surgery is mostly gone.
That said, I still live with perhaps a 2 level in the L3 area. It’s a low-level noise in my head that never goes away, never ever. Not since the moment I had the ladder slide out from under me. Depending on a seating situation, my back alone can float around a 4 sometimes. ( Hard bench for hours in 14º weather in Lincoln, Nebraska for a football game, etc etc. )
I have a lot of respect for people who endure truly high-level chronic pain for years. It screws with the personality, quality of life, work relationships, everything. I more than understand becoming dependent upon painkillers in that situation. Sad, but true.
I have known people in chronic pain. They are really strong people to deal with that. I would be a blubbering idiot in a week. I don’t have a real problem with someone who needs it, being addicted to pain killers. The street junkie has ruined it for people who need the pain relief for real.
Many street junkies started out as legitimate patients taking prescriptions for pain. (Not trying to be confrontational.) And yes, it is a problem. Not sure what needs to happen at this point. Hrm.
And yet there are millions of people who properly manage their pain medication every day and never fall victim to addiction. Hrm.
After recent wrist surgery, maybe a 4 overall. It shot up to about 8 if I did anything crazy like trying to move: the splinting they did wasn’t sufficient to support the wrist properly, so any attempt to move caused really, really painful jostling.
I expected to be painful, it was basically a broken bone after all, but I was surprised that the pain was so bad for so long. Any other time I’ve been given narcotic pain relievers, I’ve used them for three or four days and then been done. This time, I was actually seriously worried about running out before the pain improved enough to do without them. I did make it through without getting a refill – though just barely. There were two tablets left. By comparison, I found the bottle of pills left over from my gallbladder surgery eight years ago, more than half full, stashed somewhere in the back of my closet.
The ruptured tendon that led to the need for the surgery, rated only at about a 6 or so, but in some ways it was worse. The suddenness and the weird location somehow combined in such a way that for the second time in my life, the pain made me feel like I was going to throw up.
I’ve told this here before, but: I was writhing in pain on a hospital gurney with a big kidney stone at 3AM, and…
Nurse: what’s your level of pain on a scale of 1-10, based on the worst pain you can imagine?
Me: 4
Nurse: 4?? Are you kidding?
Me: I have a lot of imagination!*
- NOW GIVE ME SOMETHING ANYWAY
I just spotted this, six years after you first posted. Did anyone ever suggest that the IBS symptoms were possibly due to wandering endometrial tissue? That tissue can get all sorts of strange places and cause all sorts of mischief when your hormones are doing their thing. So it actually doesn’t sound that crazy that treatment for endometriosis improved your bowel symptoms.
Maybe an 8 when I woke up with an extreme pain mid-thigh. I could not even get out of bed or move. The EMTs thought I was either high or joking. I screamed obscenities for quite a while in the ER.
Three days in the hospital, and they never figured out what it was. It gradually went away, although it took a year of therapy to make it disappear altogether. Weird.
I think this one’s for you:
Tearing and rupturing my ACLs I THOUGHT was my 10. And then I had my first sciatica attack, I thought I was dying. I could not left my leg, I could not sit, I could not stand, I could not walk, I could not couldn’t even breath. I had to call my husband to pick me up from work because I could not make it to the train station. The leg could not bear weight and was shaking and trembling. Man, that was, like, 12 on the scale.