My sister had a baby tooth drilled unanesthetized; turns out our dentist didn’t think that was needed for baby teeth. My mom didn’t know until her crying child emerged from the treatment room. Yeah, we found a new one.
My worst migraine was probably an 8, maybe 9. I felt it come on while driving - fortunately my husband was in the car and we were in an area where it was easy for me to pull over into a store parking lot. I crawled into the passenger seat, and within 30 seconds or so of pulling over, I was curled into the fetal position, covering my closed eyes with my hands because my eyelids were letting in too much light, and sobbing, tears pouring down my cheeks. I’m awful at swallowing pills without water but managed to get into the glove compartment, pour 4 Aleve out of a bottle I kept there for emergencies, and swallowed all 4 without anything to wash them down. My husband wanted to take me to the ER but all I could think of at that point was how bright it would be, and just wanted to go home to hide under the covers. (If I was definitely a 9 or 10, I would have said yes, ER now.)
I’ve picked 10 before because of migrane pain, but I was actually throwing up it was so bad. I can’t imagine anything worse than that, and frankly, I don’t want to.
Fortunately, I don’t get headaches like that very often.
A few weeks ago my left leg was feeling kind of weak, so I locked it as I was walking down to the auditorium; I had never experienced anything bad from that before.
For the next hour and a half or so, I muttered “Oh God” every few seconds from the pain in my back and hip. I muffled screams more than a few times. Finally, one of my friends with medication finished rehearsal, got me some Aleve (or something to that effect), and my pain was relieved enough to be able to drive home without risk.
For sheer length, not to mention not knowing if it would ever end, that would have to be at least a 7.
I’ve posted before about my occasional gout attacks. All I can say now is Thank God for Indomethacin.
Tell ya what, though…my worst gout attack seemed like a birthday party compared to my one and hopefully only kidney stone. I waited an entire Memorial Day weekend for it to pass. It didn’t. They had to go get it. Bloody penis ensued.
Still, I can only give that a strong 8. I imagine being spit-roasted would hurt worse. Or maybe being gnawed by badgers in a burlap sack.
Back. Messed it up something fierce when I was in the Army back in '01.
Some of my lumbars were cracked and moving the wrong way, discs popping out, and nerves pinched. Had surgery to fuse the lumbars, but surgeon still damaged my leg muscles.
It always hurts, but when it hurts, it doesn’t fuck around. When it’s really bad, I can’t walk and usually need help moving from whatever position I’m curled up in shaking away. Whenever it’s bad, I call it a good 8-9, which thankfully only happens about once a month if I’m lucky.
Walking through the grocery store the other day pain shot through my knee from my back that made me scream, and I was rather pleased to see there are people nice enough in the world to ask if I was OK and needed help.
None of this compares to the one test they did on me to verify the damage in there (L4-S1 region).
Like in a spinal tap, they wanted to insert a giant needle. Unlike a tap, they injected dye that could be seen on a scan to highlight problem spots. That wasn’t enough though: They needed me to tell them where the pain was worst, so they could concentrate on that spot.
A half-dozen times, I think, they jammed that gimongous needle into my broken back bits, jetted in fluids, and expecting me to compare the pain with the last and next.
I have no idea how clear I was actually being. My wife said she could hear me screaming from the waiting room.
When I was 20 or so, I had a dentist appointment mid-morning, and went home to take a nap because I was working second-shift that morning. Apparently the novacaine hadn’t quite worn off before I went to work.
You know that expression “Blinding pain”? I thought it was just a figure of speech. But it turns out that you can get a white-hot bolt of pain that obliverates your sight! After that happening intermittently a few times, I waited for a lull and went home. Oops said the dentist when I called him. He thought he might have hit a nerve, but wasn’t sure. Thankfully it went away after some tylenol with codeine. I’d say that was probably a 7.5 or 8.
Other than that…I had a headache for 3-4 days a couple years ago that was a solid 7 the entire time. I couldn’t think, I didn’t sleep for 48 hours… I cried a lot over not being able to sleep, too, and I don’t cry very often. Thankfully I was able to figure out the cause and only had one (milder) repeat that clued me in.
I’ve never been asked to rate pain, but if you’re really at a 9 or 10, I’d imagine you would have a real problem actually being coherent enough to understand the question. And if you managed to understand your reply would be a scream. I’m talking puking in shock and passing out levels of pain.
I’ve not had any internal injuries or spinal injuries, which I’m sure are about the worst levels of pain around. I broke and dislocated both my wrists a few years ago; Colles fracture, the ends of both ulnas were broken into little bits. When they reduced my wrists in the emergency room they hadn’t given me any medication and the shock had mostly worn off. That made me grit my teeth and cuss. I tried not to pull away since that wouldn’t do me any good in the long run and I probably could have thrown both the nurses and the doctor across the room if I’d really exerted myself. I guess I’d give that about a 5–6.
The broken nose wasn’t quite as bad, though it’s distressing to actually feel your face stretch and move when he sets it. Besides, he squirted some kind of ~aine up there before shoving in the probes, so it wasn’t that raw anyway. I probably should have asked him to give it another go since he didn’t set it exactly straight.
I probably would have given 7 or 8 as the highest I’d ever personally experienced. That was when I carried home groceries in the week between getting my casts off and getting the pins pulled out of my bones. Physical therapy hurt enough. (I have no idea why they made me do therapy with pins still in. It felt like they were getting in the way of full motion and digging around in the surrounding flesh when I moved) but that day I managed to put stress on the more badly injured left wrist in such a way that it felt like the end of one of the pins caught on something inside the joint.
That was bad enough to make me drop the bag, put my head between my knees to keep from passing out, and fight a suddenly queasy stomach. I would have had to work at it to answer a pain question during those few nasty seconds. It was hard enough to catch my breath for a while after the pain hit. It was way worse than when they pulled out the pins, even though the only pain medication was some local anesthetic squirted into the opening before proceeding to yank them out with pliers.
So, for me, I guess a 9 would be screaming, willing myself to die, barely able to imagine a world outside my agony, willing to kill for a shot pain. If I’m at 10, the doctors aren’t going to have to ask for a rating. They are going to have to restrain me, assuming I haven’t already passed out.
I agree with the above poster whose name I am too lazy to look up–I think probably a blown joint hurts about as much as anything can hurt. In college, I demolished my left ankle playing soccer, and I think suffering a pain greater than that would require the intervention of Dr. Evil’s Mad Scientist Assistant.
Also, the point about a moderate pain becoming unbearable after time (again, too lazy to look up who mentioned it). This is the bitch about migraines. A migraine is in itself severe–mine typically run around a 5 or so. But after 12 fucking hours without relief, it feels more like a 20 on the pain scale–you are exhausted, and your tolerance is shot, and you just can’t take it anymore and you want to die.
I’m realizing as I read this, how many of these experiences I’ve had but didn’t think about…
Blown eardrum, again and again over a period of weeks before the infection could be brought under control - check
Cluster migraines - check
Totally blown out joint - check, no ligaments left standing there
Kidney stones - yes, check
In retrospect, only the blown eardrum sucked really badly, I vaguely remember screaming and screaming and screaming in delirium.
I suppose if it’s got to happen to somebody, it might as well be me, 'cause I can handle it okay.
I really have no clue why I didn’t start screaming. It was probably a combination of me thinking it’d be over soon (seconds feel like hours when you’re in pain though, eh?) and I guess I didn’t want to make waves. I definitely learned my lesson with that one, though. I will not let him come near my cavities next time unless I am well knocked up on numbing agents!
It was also my first time getting a cavity filled there. We had just switched from our old dentist to this one. Despite the cavity incident, the new dentist is a hundred times nicer and gentler than my older one. I remember the older one yelling at me, telling me not to be a baby when I was getting cavities filled as a kid!
I have a scar on my knee cap from where I took a fall and a dime-sized chunk of flesh about 1/4 inch deep was scooped out. The wound got infected, I had some antibiotics that cured the infection, and so I never saw a doctor. (This was before the crisis in antibiotic treatment/flesh-eating bacteria; believe me, I’d take it all much more seriously now).
Anyway, I don’t know what bone/cartilage was permanently damaged in my kneecap as a result of that episode, but once I banged the knee in the exact spot where the scar is, and was reduced to gasping for breath – absolutely unexpected, unbelievable agonizing pain. Right up there with the scratched corneas (oh, those HURT), one particularly nasty migraine, and the intimation of pain to come that I had from childbirth contractions, just before the epidural.
All about a 6 or 7, maybe? I mean, it all really hurt, but I still felt like “I can be brave and hold it together for the benefit of others if I have to” – not act pain-free, but act grown up. (Although I couldn’t hold my eyes open for the drops when I scratched my corneas, and that was embarrassing.)
I have a vague sense that yes, I have experienced worse pain, but have forgotten it. They say that one does forget really bad experiences, though obviously if I had been in a car accident or something I would know about it, even if I didn’t remember it.
Supposedly redheads feel pain worse than everyone else? (I’m not a redhead.)
10 Going through a wood chipper may be more painful, I hope not to find out. My entire body would swell and every part of my body felt like when your body part that fell asleep was just regaining circulation. I had this Charlie Horse thing happen to different musle groups at the same time. This was streched over a few years. I’ve blocked most of what it was like from my mind in the last year and a half. I still have problems, just not to that extreme. A pain scale is self adjusting. You can only rate pain on what you have experienced. I had no problem laying there as they inserted wires a coup-le inches into the muscles. The doctor comment that nobody else had been so calm about it. I told him that the pain I have to deal with all the time was way above anything he produced, so enjoy a easy patient. People I knew that had this done for checking carpel tunnel damage, said it was extremely painful, but it really amounted to nothing for me, and I had the whole body checked.
My allergic reaction to Sulfa as a teenager had me begging God to either cure me, or take my life. I was puking every fifteen minutes, (this figure was arrived at by the doctor asking me how many times I’d vomited, and then ascertaining how long I’d been in the room waiting to see him) and it hurt to breathe. That, or the blistered burns I got on the bottoms of my feet from stepping on hot metal in summer heat as a kid are what I hold my pain up for comparison to. The cramps I’d get from my period as a young teen also rank up there, they were bad enough that the doctor initially thought I had appendicitis just before my first menses. It didn’t help that my white blood cell count was high, either. I was six hours away from sugery when my flow started.
I had swimmers ear that went untreated for a few weeks due to the shitty NHS. When I was younger, I split my leg open to the bone so it was opening like a mouth. I’d sooner split my leg open again than get swimmers ear.
I always have trouble with the idea of 10 being “the worst pain imaginable”, because that’s really the main thing that bothers me about pain - my ability to imagine that it might get worse. Once I come to grips with whatever level of pain I am experiencing, I can deal with it. Or if something is really really painful, but you know it is going to pass - I can handle that. What bothers me most is at the early stages of an injury when I’m not really sure if it has maxed out or whether it will get worse.
IME, about 6-10 hours in some broken bones seem to throb in a way that really gets to me.
I’ve heard this as well, and I am a redhead. I do know that I bruise easy and doctors are always worried that I’ll react weird to stuff.
I have a high tolerance for chronic pain–the continual burning in my gut; the longterm pain in my back when I throw out a hip; the ache in my bad knee. But acute pain can really bring me down.
Another bad pain for me–this one rated 10 for a while and then 8 for the day, tapering down through the pain scale, very gradually working its way down to a steady 3-5 for weeks.
A few years ago I had the most embarrassing on-the-job accident–I fainted in my motel room while travelling for work. When I fainted, I apparently hit the wall with my left shoulder. When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. When I moved, I discovered my shoulder injury and fainted again. When I woke up again, I crawled to the bed and laid there for a while to keep from throwing up and fainted a couple more times.
Finally I was able to go to the training I was supposed to attend, where I almost fainted several times. Then I drove home–200 miles, pulling over frequently to keep from passing out. Went to the doctor the next day–I had screwed up my ribs and shoulder and it took months of physical therapy to repair. The bruising was spectacular–about 9 inches around on both the front and back of my left shoulder/chest area.
I feel for you brother, I was hit by a car head-on at 50 MPH, sailed over it and hit the street rolling about 20 feet behind it. Cracked my pelvis in two, shattered a femur, snapped my tibia, crushed a hand, scraped off a lot of flesh and bit my tongue.
On the ambulance ride I was screaming so much and begging for God to let me pass out that the EMT told me to “cool it!” It worked! At that point I just started crying and moaning.
The funny thing was that it sounded just like my mom telling me to stop crying or I’m not going to grandma’s. as if the ambulance driver would turn around and not take me to the hospital.
I’d say that it was a solid 10.
Months later they took the hoffman external fixation pelvic clamp pins out of my iliac crest.
I don’t think the idea is feel pain worse, but that pain killers don’t work on us the same as they do everyone else. I certainly don’t think I feel worse pain than you, anyway.
Googling it you get that either: we feel worse pain OR we cope with pain better. Though I suppose they’re not mutually exclusive, and hey, if the former is true, it’d be good if the latter was as well!