Unfortunately, I have a hard time saying which event caused me the most pain but I would say it was probably a bout of pleurisy ( off the chart pain!) ,then a bout of trigeminal neuralgia, again, pretty much off the chart.
I have always had migraines and those rate pretty high up, fortunately I’ve been blessed to have meds on hand to stop the pain or currently taking a preventative. But migraines can be so bad you literally would agree to someone knocking you out if the pain would stop.
Og, I sound like such a whiner but you asked
Sciatica when it flares up can be bad.
Giving birth naturally with no kind of meds would rate low compared to the first two I mentioned. And I was sure I was going to die both times I gave birth ! lol
Ah, this reminds me. I had two cats, and the elder used to sort of bully the younger, albeit with psychological domination, as she was rather scrawny herself, actually. Anyway, the kitten, having grown up some, one day went after the adult, I tried to intervene and the no-longer-a-kitten-not-yet-a-cat dug into my hand with his teeth quite ferociously and tenaciously. I may even have a tiny bit of scar left still. We got along perfectly well, this young cat and I, with this one striking exception.
I was ejected from a van after being struck by a car doing 110 mph. A state trooper was chasing it that came to see me in the hospital, that’s where the details come from.
I broke both legs, twisted both ankles, stripped the muscle from my back, cracked 6 ribs, a severe concussion, dislocated my shoulder, got embedded gravel all over my body, cracked my spine, deep bruising over 75% of my body, and my heart stopped.
This accident is my gauge for pain. I once woke up with my wrist being cut into during surgery and felt every bit of the pain and I was able to handle it because it paled to just the memory of that day.
Well, labour pain. Sounds too obvious, but labour pain is not always the worst pain ever; thankfully, some people don’t even feel that much pain at all.
I guess it was mostly that it was a bad labour - 48 hours of established labour (as in contractions 3 minutes apart) and 2 hours of pushing resulting in intervention, a nearly-full tear and a grey baby (who survived, thankfully!)
It really was nothing like any other pain I’ve ever experienced. Wrist smashed to pieces? Really didn’t hurt. Toenail ripped off by a stiletto heel? Absolutely no pain at all. Knuckle lacerated to the fat? Stitched it myself. Seriously. My pain threshold is not low.
These days I have pain from arthritis all the time and have to grade it from one to ten with ten being the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. I try to view this as being more useful if I treat pain like economists often treat income, and discount the labour pain as an outlier not to be counted. Otherwise my current pain would never get above a two, even if it makes me collapse, because nothing will ever approach labour pain for me.
Sounds like the doctor was performing a standard bimanual exam to confirm that it was an ovarian cyst, and the cyst popped as she was doing the exam even though that wasn’t the doctor’s intention. This can happen if the cyst is near popping or the doctor uses a lot of pressure (to be fair, it can take a LOT of digging around to definitively palpate the ovaries).
After my second back surgery that fused L3 to L4. Up to that time I was still experiencing naive pain from my back injury and had been on opioid pain killers for a long time. After the surgery (opened up along the spine) the doctor had me on a morphine drop to control the pain. What he didn’t take into account was the fact that I had become tolerant to the effects of morphine. I was on the strangers amount of morphine for someone of my weight and it had absolutely zero effect. I essentially woke up from major invasive surgery with nothing for the pain.
I was in so much pain that I asked the nursing staff for a priest so I could receive Last Rites. I seriously thought I was going to die. It took the staff about for hours of me screaming to finally increase my dosage of morphine. I think they only figured out I was not joking when I dialed 911 from my bed and begged for an ambulance to take me to another hospital.
Necrotizing fasciitis. 4 years ago. Caused an abscess above my penis with infection reaching into my scrotum that required emergency surgery, seven follow-up debridements, 5 weeks in a burn ICU with an open wound I could fit both fists into. When I wasn’t very heavily medicated with IV morphine and percocet alternating every 2 hours, I was just short of screaming.
I have a very high tolerance for pain because-
A ruptured disc in my back, complicated by congenital spinal stenosis when I was 19. Never repaired surgically and now complicated further by degenerative disc diseases, arthritis and aging (I’m now 45). I live with the pain from this every day. Sometimes suicide seems a viable option.
The single greatest instant of pain was probably when the tech performing my first myelogram jabbed me directly in the spine. An honest-to-god lightning bolt of pain caused me to arch so severely that only my hips still touched the gurney.
Jesus Christ. I got about halfway through this paragraph before my brain shut down and refused to process anymore because it sounds so horrible. And I have neither a penis nor scrotum. You’ve been through a lot, sir.
(Mild) Heart attack, manifesting as pain in my wrist and forearm. I had not felt pain like it before.
Groin strain from playing badminton and not warming up properly, walked like Robert Mitcham for a few days.
Ulcerated uvula. Very painful. Only co-codamol even took the edge off it. Hardly slept for three days. Eventually rediscovered TCP and gargled. Blessed relief.
My sympathy to Ryan it sounds like you have really suffered and are still suffering. Hope the pain ceases or at least reduces to a manageable level.
Mine seems so small when compared to Ryan’s - seriously, DUDE! I hate it when my migraines get bad enough that all I can do is scream and puke. Puking with a migraine is a special kind of pain. I am a bad puker, which I did not know until recently. Apparently, some people can puke with almost no effort. One little heave and they are done.
I on the other hand, sound like I am trying to throw up my toenails. Combined with a migraine and it’s an all-encompassing, screaming agony.
I had all four wisdom teeth taken out with only local anesthetic. The procedure was only supposed to last an hour, but ended up taking more than four because the teeth were so firmly rooted in my jaw. Because it took four hours, it ran over the time my dentist had put aside for my appointment. Instead of canceling his other appointments, he worked them alongside my procedure; i.e., he left me sitting in the chair for twenty, thirty minutes while he filled a cavity or scraped gums in the room next door.
Around hour three, I could no longer vocalize or move my jaw to indicate the anesthesia was wearing off. The only indication the dentist had that I needed another shot were the tears streaming down my face. By the time the procedure was finished, he’d had to cut my jaw bone in five locations and I had twelve or thirteen stitches.
I stumbled out of the office afterward and was so out of it with pain that I couldn’t think straight. My wife quickly drove to the nearest pharmacy, which was fifteen minutes away. I’m resistant to dental anesthetics, so any lingering numbness I’d had from the procedure had worn off within five minutes. I started to panic as the pain increased and didn’t stop increasing for the entire drive to the pharmacy. By the time we got there, I couldn’t see straight, and it took me three attempts to find the coordination to swallow the oxy I’d been prescribed.
For context, three or four days later I ended up with two dry sockets, which hurt like hell, but were absolutely nothing compared to the pain I’d felt in the thirty or so minutes following the end of the extraction.
I was lucky. Another couple hrs and the infection would’ve required removal of some bits I’m quite fond of, if it hadn’t killed me outright. The ER surgeon was appropriately blunt “You need surgery today or you’re going to die.”
The speed of the infection was remarkable. I went from “healthy” to literally deathly ill in 2 days.
I’ve got some really remarkable scars and a permanent “dent” where tissue was removed below the belt but everything important is still there and mechanically sound. I’m probably sterile but as I’m single, in my 40’s and never wanted kids I haven’t bothered to find out for sure.
I had an ingrown toenail at about 4 years that evidently required surgery. I was to have had 6 numbing shots before the digging was to ensue. Evidently some/all nerves were missed and there was little numbing. I don’t remeber the pain but I had an ungodly (scream like a female horror movie) reaction to needles until boot camp. The fear of Drill Instructors overrode the fear of needles.
Did you all know that if you search “necrotizing fasciitis”, the search results show pictures on the front page, even if you didn’t do an image search?
Ryan, do they know how you contracted that? I feel like such a candy-ass next to you, what with my “suicide disease” and all. (I’m not in the kind of pain tonight that I was in around noon. I can laugh about this, actually…)
Well, I didn’t go swimming in the Amazon with an open wound
The doctors best guess was most likely a torn muscle, contributing risk factors including diabetes and prescription steroids (for asthma) and the misfortune to have the correct combination of bacteria in my system to combine and run wild.
Yeah, those are some deeply disturbing images that come up on a non-image search.
Don’t sell yourself short lorene. All pain is relative to what we’ve had to deal with in our pasts. I was just unlucky enough to have had to deal with a lot of serious pain before this happened.
The first few seconds of coming to after breast reduction surgery. Two eight inch long incisions, one on each side going from my breast bone to my arm pit. Several pounds of breast tissue removed. I felt like I was on* fire*. Thankfully, the nurse must have hit the morphine pump or something because I went right back under very shortly after I moaned and whimpered in pain.
