Having arterial blood gases taken. When they stick that needle into the inside of your wrist…screaming, blinding pain. I had a few and everything inside my body curled up into the fetal position.
Starting with worst:
-Toothache - wisdom tooth. I wanted to die.
-Labor with first babe. After the epidural, I was as cool as a cucumber.
-Cracked ribs from a fall mountain biking. I couldn’t breath for what seemed like an eternity.
-Broken ulna when I was 14. The moment it happened was pretty bad.
-Kidney/back pain from a raging bladder infection.
Curiously, my worst accident was when a motorcycle hit me. I was 9 years old. One of the tires ripped the top part of my left arm open. I could see my bone, muscle…everything, but I barely felt any pain on the ride to the hospital.
Hmm, well…!
The most pain i’ve ever been in was when my IBS flared up, along with anxiety and all that fun stuff. I would sit on the toilet, and cry, and vomit, and cry some more, also quite possibly crying and vomiting simultaneously. Unfortunately for me, that’s what put me in the hospital for a week. 
But, if I were to say the most pain i’ve ever been in over a shorter period of time, was this one time I had trapped gas, and I don’t know what the hell was happening, but I found my upper body in excruciating pain, poking everywhere it felt like. I was not able to breathe. I was on the floor, crying and gasping for air. My mom said I was taking breaths, but I felt like I was suffocating! It went on for about 4-5 minutes, then stopped.
That is child’s play looking at all you guys’ stories, though! (At least, I think so?)
Gall stones. It was worst when I didn’t know what was causing it and thought death was potentially imminent. Subsequent attacks were less fraught with concern and so were just horribly inconvenient.
Dental pain, a really bad tooth that needed to be root-canalled. It was like I’d bene shot in the face.
Regrettably I appear to be almost totally immune to opiod painkillers, for some bizarre reason - I have no idea why either - so the doc giving me things like Tylenol 3 or oxycontin didn’t help in the slightest. Anti-inflammatories were enough to keep me from killing myself before I could get tothe dental surgeon.
On the fourth of July 2003, I went to Ozzfest and my pasty-white self spent the entire day, from about 8 AM until dusk, out in the southern California sun. I had forgotten to put on sunscreen whatsoever.
I was already bright red by the time I got home and turned in for the night. When I woke up the next morning, my face was actually stuck to my pillow due to the blisters that had formed overnight, popped, oozed out, and dried. It was unbearably painful to remove the pillow from my face, let alone wash my face. After a few days, the peeling started. It was about three weeks before I looked like a human being again. The blisters on my back took another month to fully subside.
The following year, I moved to the Pacific Northwest, where we don’t know what the sun is.
Kidney stone: I assumed I was dying, because clearly that sort of pain only exists to serve as a ONE OF YOUR INTERNAL ORGANS HAS JUST EXPLODED signal.
Appendicitis. From time I hit emergency room door to time I was knocked out and in surgery had to be a record. Doctors said I was lucky it hadn’t burst already, and estimated I had less than 30 minutes at best before it did rupture.
And I’ll just have to second the or third or whatever by now the “I’m sure I was dying” sentiment.
Tissue cauterization DEEP inside my nasal system. Felt like a soldering iron burning away in there, which is what it was more or less.
I left permanent death grips in the chair arms, and my shirt was wet from tears.
The day I splattered hot burning oil all up one arm comes to mind. Ooo, those blisters were scary! And gigantic!
I had a golf ball sized abscess that was bad enough that my doctor would have sent me up to the surgery wing to get it taken care of but “well, you’re pregnant, so you can’t have sedation anyway.” Then he gave me some options: leave it alone, warm compresses or whatever, and hope for the best (uhh, no…); incision and drainage but it’ll probably just happen again; excision to remove the whole thing, allow it to heal properly, and reduce recurrence. And I said, “Okay. If I can’t have sedation, what can I have?”
“Well, we’ll use lidocaine but that’s mostly useless because there’s this thick core that it won’t penetrate anyway. And you can have some morphine.”
And I thought, okay, this thing is huge and it hurts like a motherfucker and I can’t really function right now and, really, HOW BAD CAN IT BE?
Here’s the answer to that: it’s every bit as bad as you can imagine having surgery without anesthesia is, and then it’s a lot worse than that.
Helpful Nurse #2 came in after and said, “Wow, we could hear you screaming all the way down the hallway!” And I thought I was being quiet. I don’t even really remember screaming at all.
The doctor had left at one point (I let a med student do this; I let a different med student deliver the baby a few months later) and came back as it was being packed to ask if I wanted something more for the pain. Between sobs I was like, “I can’t <gasp> I don’t <gasp> oh my <gasp> motherfucker <gasp>”, my body trembling uncontrollably, tears streaming down my face, etc. And he said, “I’ll just go get you something…” YEAH, MAYBE DO THAT.
Close second: same pregnancy, delivery room. I have big babies. My previous baby was 8 lb 10 oz and estimates put this one possibly as big as 9.5 lbs (he was actually 8 lbs 4 oz). So, epidural, thanks. Except that I apparently don’t epidural easy. Forty five minutes of rolled back, which is uncomfortable all by itself, and unrelenting contractions, and being stabbed in the back while a nurse with reek ass breath gets in my face every time I cry out and says, “Sarah! Are you having a contraction?” Bitch, I am IN LABOR. WTF do you think? Then Ben, the guy behind me saying “I’m so sorry, I don’t understand what the problem is…” gave me a fentanyl shot in my spine to work at the epidural for another I don’t give a shit how long because all was right with the world again. That 45 minutes was absolute hell though. The baby is three months now and I still have a line of scars down my back from all the failed attempts.
Damn! Sounds like the surgery wing was in a Walmart.
I had the labrum and rotator cuff repaired on my right shoulder. The doc was nice enough to put in a nerve block, so between that and the drugs, for about 24 hours I didn’t feel much pain at all. Then the block wore off. Merciful Mary Margaret! Sitting up, on drugs, with the fancy compress circulating ice water on the shoulder made it almost bearable. Any movement was torture. The first time I tried to lie down elicited a scream of pain that scared my wife - and she’s a physical therapist. It took a full year before I was back to 100% from that surgery.
The absolute worst, though, was deep in the night on day 2 or 3 post surgery when I got out of the chair (painful enough in itself) to go to the restroom, tripped over a box someone had left in the hall, and fell. That scream woke up everyone in the house and brought them all running. No one said a word, probably because A) they had never seen me that way before and thought I may be dying and B) anticipating that I was going to be very mad when and if I recovered a bit and found out who left the box in the middle of the floor. Option A) certainly felt like a possibility, but I was in way too much pain to be mad.
Yep. How in the HELL did I break my big toe while sleeping 
. Or so I thought. Went to get xrays.
Persistent migraines so bad I would bang my head against the wall to redirect. It was actually less painful to whack a brick wall with my head.
Degenerative disc disease in my lower back. Much of the time death would have been preferable.
Laser eye surgery a year ago. Fucking surgeon didn’t warn me it would hurt. I wanted to scream but couldn’t get a chestful of air to do so. Had I known, I would’ve taken a handful of Vicodan and been fine. I called him nasty names afterward. At my checkup appt, I called the eye specialist nasty names, too. Hell will freeze over before I ever go back that office.
i did that, too. all over my legs. thank og i was wearing shorts at the time. awesome blisters. :eek:
Do you mean the vision correction one? Lasik? They must have really done something wrong. I didn’t feel a thing. Hope it turned out OK.
I had a spinal tap once, and it did not hurt. But the headache for the next 2 or 3 days from it, that made me want to kill myself.
Come to think of it, they were offering rollback prices on amoxicillin…
That scale needs an entry at the far right showing a skull screaming and dripping blood.