I once heard someone describe an orgasm as “a monumental sneeze between your legs”. It’s actually the closest description I’ve ever heard.
Stepping onto a large nail (about 3-4 inches). Like getting a shot at the doctor.
You won’t even feel it going in, or out, but then you’ll get to feel it for the next month.
It’s funny, because stepping onto a tac or staple seems to always get my heart racing.
Crushing your finger into the back part of the door (you know, where all that leverage is). It’s like letting someone take a hammer and “drop” it onto the top part of your thumb from about 15 inches high. Note: This will hurt, but only temporarily. Followed that “white” stuff that hide under your nail until it grows out.
Getting punched in the face and breaking your nose. Only happened once, while sparing with a much larger friend of mine. I did go down after the punch. It sort of feels like getting a tooth pulled when that Novocaine hasn’t kicked in yet, followed by successive bleeding.
A ruptured appendix. It’s literally like someone has taken you hostage, tied you up in a sauna, turns the heat all the way up, comes back every 15 minutes to stab you repeatedly in the stomach in 5 minute intervals.
Having a bowel obstruction due to excessive interior scar tissue is feels just like the ruptured appendix, but there are 2 people doing the stabbing. Plus, the added depression of this falling onto the day of my 15th B-day.
That is a remarkable description Mangetout, and one that makes me thankful every day that I’m not endowed with testicles.
:eek:
Mine would be really remarkable moments from my travel experiences. Moments when it seems the planets align, the sun shimmers and time takes on a certain eeriness. I don’t know if it’s serendipity, or synchronicity, or pixie dust, but it enchants in a way that’s hard to describe.
Coming into reunion with a daughter I surrendered to adoption almost 30 years ago. Holding her in my arms the first time. Understandably, people are interested in this aspect of the story. “How did it feel?” I don’t think there are words. It’s a tsunami of emotion and a physical sensation all at once. People seem to understand, often saying, “I can’t imagine how that felt.” It is one of the few things, I’d have to say, in life that you have to experience to really comprehend how it feels.
Coming into reunion with a daughter I surrendered to adoption almost 30 years ago. Holding her in my arms the first time. Understandably, people are interested in this aspect of the story. “How did it feel?” I don’t think there are words. It’s a tsunami of emotion and a physical sensation all at once. People seem to understand, often saying, “I can’t imagine how that felt.” It is one of the few things, I’d have to say, in life that you have to experience to really comprehend how it feels.
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That sounds really crazy. Similar to the feeling I had the first time I met my real dad when I was almost to the age of 21. I was scared less more than anything… Paranoia at it’s peak.
I wouldn’t be without them - they just need a bit of careful handling, is all.
Don’t worry, I promise that I’ll never kick you in the nads.
Well, that’s the challenge! 
But I never meant for this to be limited to painful experiences, that was just all I could think of at the time. I really liked SSG Schwartz’s description of ejecting (jumping?) from an aircraft, for example. Stuff that doesn’t happen to everyone.
ETA: Not that there’s anything wrong with stuff that happens to (almost) everyone. The giving birth/kicked in the testicles descriptions are no less fascinating, but feel free to think outside the pain box.
I tell mine that it’s having a spine made of crystal, and then having a goblin with a little hammer and chisel come and work on my crystal spine.
Going under general anesthesia before a major operation: “I’m not sleepy. Doc, it isn’t working. I’m wide awake. I think I’ll go for a jog. Where the fuck am I, and how did I get here, and why do I feel so guilty about it?”
Being on the MV ferry and turning the corner around West Chop and seeing VH Harbor: Like falling in love. Like waking from a bad dream and going into a good dream. Like leaving home and arriving home at the same time. Utter excitement and deep relaxation simultaneously.
My usual migraine descriptions.
- “Y’ever get ice cream headaches?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Just imagine an ice cream headache that doesn’t go away, lasts for hours or days, and makes you vomit. While you get tunnel vision and other visual distortions.”
- Relative pain comparison: (to women who have given birth) “Every woman I know who has had both migraines and painful childbirths finds the migraines to be more painful.”
Tongue pierce: “Ever bite your tongue? Imagine pinching your tongue in a pair of Vise-Grips and then biting all the way through.”
Tattoos, as they’re healing: “Really tender sunburn.”
Menstrual cramps are like having a fist sweeze your uterus. I image labor feels like that too.
I once managed to slip on the ice and land on my crotch with my legs spread eagle. I image that is what a guy feels when hit in the nads.
I’ll describe something a little less physical, because people who’ve never felt it can’t really wrap their heads around it.
Depression.
It’s like being halfway between awake and asleep all the time. That stage of falling asleep where you can hear what your brain is thinking and it’s like the world exists solely inside your own head. Gravity is stronger than usual and it slows you down because everything takes more effort, more work, down to switching on a light or deciding what to have for lunch, because gravity even weighs your thoughts down like they’re made of lead. It’s a feeling like being unplugged, like your mind isn’t connected to anything anymore, and you’re watching yourself from the outside somehow, and as much as your rational mind knows you’re doing something stupid, and are acting like an idiot, and that your thinking isn’t straight, the rational mind can’t get through to the part of you that’s acting.
It’s like a sensory deprivation chamber, in a way. Your senses are numbed, and while you’re vaguely aware that there’s a world out there, you’re isolated from it.
Oh, and a kidney stone is like trying to pee out a hedgehog, backwards.
My brother said his felt like heartburn but it wouldn’t go away so he finally went in. Of course that one may have been minor?? He was going to get released from it within a day or two but then had acute heart failure. He doesn’t remember what that was like since he was sedated and all that. Almost two years ago…hang in there bro.
Not a bad description.
Getting your finger cut off up to the first knuckle on a jointer in woodshop class in 9th grade because you were too much of a moron to use a push stick like you were told every FRIGGIN’ day of the year by your teacher who wasn’t missing ANY of his fingers - I was looking away with a board just enough in the jointer to expose the drum, and my hand tapped it. It felt like someone grabbed my hand and gave it a sharp tug. I instinctively pulled back, and grabbed my finger at the base, but didn’t look at it. I felt absolutely nothing at all. Then I looked at it. And that’s when it started hurting.
I got a D in the class.
Getting punched in the liver is like getting kicked in the balls in your abdomen you didn’t know you had.
Studying for the bar exam is like trying to jam a library in your ear.
Not mine, but accurate: the first semester of law school is like learning how to drive by suddenly being put behind the wheel of a car in rush hour traffic with no instructions.
Convalescing after major abdominal surgery while painkillers wear off: like having a dull buzzsaw in your gut, slowly picking up speed.
No, the railroad spike is driven through one eye and out the back of the head. At least, that’s how most of mine go. Then there are the other kind, like the one I described as “black and gritty” recently. Student Driver’s ice-cream-headache comparison is also excellent.
Panic attacks… like standing in a tunnel with a train coming towards you, except that there is no train, and you know that dying will not release you from the terror.
Sudden onset of altitude sickness (14.7k) - I’ve always described it like the migraine folks; take a big sharp spike and have it jammed into your forehead right between the eyes.
As expected it hurts like hell and you suddenly don’t want to stand up so you sit down hard.
That’s when the awful stomach flu hits and you begin puking.
I’m not sure how to describe the state of mind when you realize that the only way it is going to get better is to get down to lower altitude which means 11 miles of rugged hiking, and you are going to have to do it all on your own two feet. “Well, sheeyit” comes close.