Basis training.
Rappelling down the outside of a 6 story fire tower (one of those “teambuilding” days). Glad I did it, don’t need to do it again.
C-section. Anesthesia not working so good. No need to repeat that one either.
Amniocentesis. Not an awful experience… just Very, Very Unnerving. You’re not supposed to feel pinching >>>there<<< (meaning "some vague spot in your innards).
Oh yeah:
Combination of nerve conductance test and electromyelogram. I forget which is which, but one involves inserting a needle into the muscle in a couple places and measuring electrical flow. The other involves touching a probe to one spot on the limb and zapping it.
Then doing it again, with more juice.
And again, with more juice.
And again, with more juice.
etc.
And if you’re having it done on two limbs? Then they do the other one.
Interesting process. Not eager to do it again. Not sure what war crimes I’d confess to the next time.
Spontaneous pneumothorax when I was nineteen; hurt to beat hell.
Multiple migraines and there are more to come.
Having half my scalp peeled back as a result of a skin cancer removal; closing the wound was a five week process. I hope to never have such an experience again.
Penile/scrotal surgery: unbelievable pain during recovery.
You must be joking. Nuclear Power School was challenging, but far from traumatic.
Divorce.
Well, OK and that one time I drank so much whiskey I had to be hospitalized. I had a .17 when I got the hospital two hours after the ambulance had been called.
Bah hell with it, I found an old post on a homebrewing forum of me telling the tale:
here is how my St. Patricks day went. Mind you, it went great up to about this point…
I was mostly blacked out for this, so I really don’t remember that much. Apparently I was in the bathroom for about an hour throwing up and moaning. Then, I started wishing I was dead and proclaimed it rather loudly. I had my head on the bowl so long I bruised my forehead. I asked wife-at-the-time to call for an ambulance, and she did. Only, not just one paramedic showed up,but eight paramedics, two cops, some firemen, and probably the mayor. There was a cop car, two ambulances and a firetruck all outside our house! I’m wondering if they assumed there was a huge party going on and we were all sick, or maybe it was just a boring night out in our neck of the woods. They put me on a stretcher and gave me an IV and two shots of something. No not booze, injections. They took me to Providance of all places because Legacy and Emmanual were supposedly full. They took Division most of the way, and came across a car wreck. They stopped to get out and help, then they hauled ass to drop me off at the hospital so they could go back to the wreck.
They wheeled me in, and tried to make me pee. I refused to pee for some reason so they gave me a catheter. Thankfully, I have no memory of that, although it hurt to pee the first time I went the next day. They took a blood sample and said I had a BAC of .17. So when the EMTs first got there, I’d probably had .2 or something close to that. They gave me another IV and two more shots. They walked me around the hospital trying to keep me awake, and I had no recollection of even doing that. I threw up a few more times in the ambulance and at the hospital. I threw up on myself and my saint of a wife washed my shirt for me in the sink. Once they said I would be OK and not die, she wheeled me out and put me in the car. Now, wife-at-the-time is horrible with directions and I kept passing out while she was trying to find her way home. Irritated, I yelled at her that I didn’t even know where we were so how was I supposed to help her find her way home!?! That was the only time I’d made her mad at me the entire night.
I woke up the next day tired and thirsty, and had this horrible dream that I’d been in the hospital. That was when, with the slow realization of horror, I noticed the hospital bands and the four things of tape holding down where they stuck me with needles. I also had pain in my solar plexus really bad too. Apparantly that happened when they stuck the catheter in, I kept sitting up in pain. Wife-at-the-time held me down right in that spot, and she pressed a little too hard.
And Autumn took pictures of me throwing up. How nice of her! Those pictures wouldn’t be blackmail material though. For one, I had six of my coworkers at the party that saw the whole thing. For two, one of my other coworkers was throwing a massive birthday party the next day, and many of my comrades at work were at that party the next day.
Word spread.
Two days later, I go in to work, and there’s only 3 people that haven’t heard about my shenanigans the Saturday before. Oh, did I mention that we’re a 24/7 call center and everyone has different days off?
Oh yea, I think it’ll be awhile before I can drink hard alcohol again. It’s two years later and I still get queasy at the smell of liquor. Luckily I mostly stick to beer and I think that was my undoing. I’m not used to so much alcohol in such a tiny glass!
This is actually something I don’t tell almost anyone, but for some reason the (relative) anonymous nature of this medium makes it easy.
I was living abroad (still am) while my sister gave birth to her first boy, a son. There were complications and long story short, it was necessary to place him on life support and it was found that he was brain dead. They waited to pull the plug until I flew all the way home, which took about 24 hours. I felt like the angel of death for this innocent child. The whole thing was so surreal. I held it together for my family and forced myself to smile when I saw my first nephew.
My sister said and did a couple things that utterly destroyed me. First, she said “I’m trying to memorize every inch of him, I need to remember what he look’s like.” Then she took her baby’s tiny hand in hers and said “You’re going on a great journey now.” I said I had to go to the bathroom and barely made it to the bathroom, where I collapsed on the cold hard tile, blubbering like I don’t think I had since I was a child. I cried for my sister, for her dead baby, for my parents, for myself, for my other sister, for my extended family. He was my parent’s first grandchild and I feared it was more than they could bear.
THAT i don’t need to experience again…
Not the most painful thing that I’ve experience, but one of the most bizarrely unpleasant. This gets TMI, y’all, just saying:
One morning, while getting ready for school, my nose started to bleed. Nothing got on my clothes, so I pinched, held, and waited. And waited. And waited. Sometimes I’d unpinch and check progress. It was like a fountain. I’d never bled like that in my life.
Twenty minutes into it, I called my mom. “It’s not stopping! I’m gonna be late for class! Or bleed to death!” She yelled for me to hurry up, so I wouldn’t be late. Thanks, mom.
Thirty minutes in, it happened. I’d had a nasty sinus infection the entire week, so maybe I should have seen it coming. I unpinched my nose to see if the bleeding had at least slowed, and to give my stomach a break. What came out – I have a hard time describing it. A solid cylinder of snot, about the size of my thumb, squeezed out of my nostril. It was as if my nose was giving birth to a tentacle monster. It landed in the sink with a wet “thwack” and wriggled down the drain, like a worm. Horrified, I re-pinched my nose, and then the terrible, bloody snot grubs started slithering down my throat. I coughed, sputtered blood onto my clothes, and stifled my gag reflex. Then I un-pinched my nose again – anything left was taking the fucking front exit, thank you.
All said and done, I bled for almost an hour, and expelled five snot grubs, nose and throat. I then went downstairs and told my mother that I was skipping first class.
chemical plant fire. An acetylene plant, to be exact. About 50-100 tanks caught fire and blew their fuse plugs to become either blowtorches or unguided rockets. There were probably close to a thousand acetylene tanks in the vicinity. We had to evacuate pronto as we were in the plant next door that had an 8000 gallon LOX tank in it, among many other chemical storage vessels.
I don’t think the fire dept was happy at all when they showed up, but they did one HELL of a job, and with plant employees got things under control in about a half hour.
I’ve had it relatively easy, but have had two recent experiences I definitely don’t want repeated:
#1 - Having several of the side effects from a prescription beta blocker (atenolol) I was given for borderline hypertension. Those side effects included: Unusual dreams, aches in my legs, difficulty sleeping (due largely to those first two effects, I think), no appetite, limbs feeling cold, no energy, and just generally feeling completely miserable. My doctor quickly agreed I should discontinue taking the medication when I called to report these effects.
2 - Very soon after those side effects went away I developed prostatitis. Oh man, did that ever cause me distress. But once the staff at the urgent care office I went to made the diagnosis and gave me the needed initial medications, the relief was glorious.
The most painful experience for me would have to be when my root canal failed. Before then, I didn’t know that root canals could fail. All I knew was that my crown hurt and that it really shouldn’t. The worst part though was that my own mother didn’t believe me. Well, that and having to work at McDonalds with a swollen face.
Another experience I would never want to relive was when I got hurt at school in junior high PE. I knocked myself out by falling head-first into a wall. I couldn’t move or see but I was painfully aware of everything that was happening, including being dragged into a wheelchair and rushed to the nurses office. My mother was unhappy with the school to say the least and she took me to the hospital where I waited on a gurney in a hallway for what felt like hours. I got horribly sick and they took about 30 x-rays of my neck to make sure I hadn’t broken anything. I spent the next week of my winter break (I did this the last day of school before winter break) in bed with a headache and a sore neck.
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Having my cervix frozen. It was like a horrible ice cream headache. Down there.
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Food poisoning. Ugh. My entire body was in agony, and I kept going back and forth between freezing cold and dripping with sweat. I puked and had diarrhea for hours. I felt like I was going to die, and after the first few hours, dying seemed kind of okay. My diarrhea was so severe that it ran clear by dawn. Afterward I was so cleaned out, I didn’t poo for five days.
Watching 3 of my friends get stabbed. Yes, at the same time. No, not fatally (thank goodness!)