Pathological myopia and retinal degeneration, which so far have been managed successfully.
Dengue fever.
Last Easter weekend I shot a air nailer nail through my finger, just missing the knuckle of my bird finger but hitting the bone dead center and splitting it. Ended up nailed to the bench (attached to privacy fence) I was building and didn’t have my cell phone on me.:smack:
Cancer. Melanoma that got up to stage 3c. The worst pain I’ve ever felt was side effects of the successful treatments (catheter after surgery, throat burning after radiation). The fatigue from interferon treatment was far worse than mono, which had years before.
Injury? I broke my little toe chasing the dog around the coffee table. I also blew out my eardrum scuba diving.
Mystery virus when I was little. Hospitalized twice, couldn’t keep any food or anything in me, so I lost a ton of weight. The doctors told my parents to be ready for me to die since nothing they did seemed to help. I just suddenly got better.
I was attacked by a mastiff cross while out walking and the dog tore a chunk of out of my arm. The wound was cleaned and I was put on Amoxy-clav for antibiotics for ten days. On the tenth day, I woke up with hot, swollen and itchy patches everywhere. I couldn’t bend my wrist or make a fist since my joints were so puffy. A quick round of prednisone and I thought all was well…
but I was SO tired, couldn’t lose weight, and caught every cold/virus anything that came around. My skin was breaking out and I felt like absolute crap. Went to the doctor for Accutane (skin was so bad) and they called me in a bit of a panic over my elevated liver enzymes. Wilson’s disease, cancer, lupus, they tossed around so many diagnoses. Auto-immune hepatitis. Basically, my liver just went crazy. It was a year before it resolved, by itself, thankfully just weeks before a scheduled biopsy.
Fun times.
Renal failure is what I can remember, didn’t happen all that long ago. At just a couple of months old I had a lung infection that nearly killed me, but I have no memory of it.
I had a tonsillectomy/adenoidectomy as an adult. It wasn’t serious, no complications, or anything, but my gawd was it painful. I have had a broken ankle and a c-section, and been in labor, and nothing compares in pain to the recovery from that tonsillectomy. There are so many nerve endings in your mouth, throat, and the base of your tongue.
The stupid doctor gave me pills instead of liquid pain medication. I had to crush them and take them on babyfood pudding, which I could swallow only after spraying my throat down with a numbing agent. The only thing I could “eat” was Ensure over ice and Popsicles for the first 48 hours. I was still eating babyfood and pudding at the end of the first week.
Fortunately, I did heal perfectly, and the surgery accomplished everything it was supposed to accomplished, resulting in improved quality of life, so I would do it again if I had the choice to make over, but I warn anyone who asks that while it is worth it once it’s over, it is very, very painful.
Small children seem to bounce back from tonsillectomies pretty quickly, and since my husband and I both needed them, and my son gets all kinds of throat and upper respiratory infections, we tried to talk the doctor into recommending our son for one when he was little, but no luck.
The most traumatic was a breech birth and no doctor was available. I was screaming like Jaime Lee Curtis in the movie Halloween. This delivery ripped me up and I went into shock. At a hospital they stitched what was torn, and it was too painful to walk for a week. Then a week after that, I hemorrhaged at home, was sent to the emergency room, and was told I’d lost so much blood my veins had collapsed. I spent a week at that hospital hooked up to a bottle that dripped directly into my artery. Then when released, was instructed to stay on 100% complete bed rest (had to use a bed pan) for 2 weeks. Several years ago I had a heart attack and they put in 2 stents. That whole episode was a breeze compared to the breech birth.
Marlene, is that you?
Fractured skull and concussion, age 10. Horseback riding accident.
My appendix burst two weeks after my son was born.
I remember nursing him, then going back to sleep. I was so cold, I turned on the heat in the apartment. In August. In Florida.
The phone rang and it was my husband calling from San Diego (he was in the Navy at the time.) I couldn’t stand up straight, so I hobbled bent over to get to the phone.
Once he knew something was wrong, he immediately sent his mother and sister over to help me. I landed in the hospital for two weeks and they did what they called band-aid surgery, basically sticking a needle in my abdomen and sucking out the pus. They said my appendix had burst and sealed itself off.
However.
Fast forward 25+ years to the surgery photos after my hysterectomy and there’s my appendix, apparently whole and hardy. Did it heal itself? Was I misdiagnosed? Who knows.
Injury-wise, I have had three broken arms (not at the same time, I would point out) but outside of a broken toe, I have remained pretty whole.
Illness included a bad gall bladder (which was removed) and measles/chicken pox when I was a young child (and I mean 5-6 y.o., so I don’t remember much about them). Sickest I’ve been that I remember was running a 104F temperature while sick with strept throat, but in general I have been lucky in terms of health.
An idiopathic gash in my stomach lining which lead to severe hematemesis and accompanying hypovolemic shock when I was 16. I collapsed in the bathroom and might very likely have died had my mother not come home early from work and found me. After being admitted to the ER, I was told they estimated I had vomited somewhere between 1.5-2 litres of blood.
Insulin-dependent diabetic for the last 30 years. Hospitalized once (very recently) with a diabetic complication from an extreme bout of the flu.
I have had my right elbow and both shoulders operated on.
Aside from that, I’m the picture of health!
I’ve had a broken collarbone ( fell of a swing on my tenth birthday party), a pregnancy, a cesaeran, and a gastric bypass.
But the most severe illness must have been my overworkedness. I’m recovering from that, and if i make a full recovery, it will have cost me about six years of my life. Six years sapped of relaxation, filled with stress, and full of stress related complaints. Like the many times sudden lower back pain made walking painful. The attacks of debilitating dizzyness. And the most most scary was an sudden acid reflux attack at night. Imagine waking up in a panic, suffocating, unable to breathe, with your throat on fire, feeling like you mistakingly drank sulphuric acid and it got to your lungs, too. Now I know I only have to calm down and take liquid anti acidic stuff, but the first times I thought I would die horribly.
The sickest I have ever felt was when I had the flu, was getting better, and then got strep throat.
As for injuries, the worst was when I was two years old. I still remember it. It was in the summer, and hot. My mom was in the kitchen and I was in the living room, looking at a little picture book. My hands got sweaty, so I went over to the window fan and placed my hands against the grill. My left ring finger met the blade. The next thing I remember, I was lying down in a dark place and I could see flashing lights outside a window (I was in the ambulance). I screamed for my mother and I heard her voice beside me say “I’m here”. The finger was just holding on by a shred of skin, and lucky for me they were able to reattach it. There was another surgery when I was 5 to take a tendon out of my wrist to make the second joint functional. Works fine, and I am lucky.
Other than that, I broke my arm when I was 7. First weekend my parents tried to go off for a little trip on their own and they left me and my sisters with an aunt. My older cousin took us to the playground, and I tried to stand on a teeter totter and balance. Bad idea. My poor parents got the message when they arrived at their hotel, and had to turn around and come right back home.
A few years ago, I broke my next-to-pinkie toe tripping over a bathroom scale. Oh, that hurt. As if I didn’t already have sufficient reason to hate that goddamned thing!
There were a few others but that’s probably enough pain and sorrow for one post!
Scratched by a lathe.
My first time saying it – I see what you did there!
My life has been boring and serious-illness-free. The worst was a bad stomach bug where I got dehydrated and had to go to the hospital and be rehydrated. The worst pain I’ve felt is dropping a full liter bottle on the base of my big toenail.
As I’ve mentioned before, I was born with “some assembly required.”
Surgeons have made several ventures into me to repair things over the years. The most notable was some sort of burst blood vessel* that required a really fast surgery to fix. It left me with a sternum to crotch scar (they were in a hurry I guess), and enough “surviving the autopsy” jokes to last a lifetime. :rolleyes: If memory serves, I’ve had about 7 surgeries so far for various reasons. None were pleasant affairs.
Also got knocked unconscious from a blow to the head while working oil rigs. A cable parted under tension and whipped across the top of my head. I was wearing a hardhat but it still hit me hard enough I was unconscious for several minutes. I also lost several of my front teeth (oddly enough, only the bottom row, the top ones were fine). This might have been due to the ensuing fall instead of the cable. The only long term effects are mild shakes in my hands, and losing most of my sense of smell.
I got attacked in a restaurant parking lot, and the perp managed a few blows to my noggin. Doc said mild concussion in this case, no serious damage (hurt like hell though).
I guess the only other notable injury was a bad waterskiing fall during a contest. I tangled with my ski somehow and ended up with several stitches in my scalp.
Here’s the weird part. Even with all these injuries I’ve never broken a bone.
*I was a kid, I’m not sure exactly what it was.
In 2008, I had double pneumonia and strep throat. At the same time. And no insurance. I was running a fever that was averaging 102 and spiked to 104 several times. I kept putting off going to the doctor because of the no insurance thing. Finally broke down and went to the emergency room. They wanted to keep me but I refused. Got meds and went home. It took forever for me to recover from that.
Worst injury was in 1986. Tossed from my horse and broke my right arm and chipped my right hip bone. The hip still bothers me.
A cross between a scratch and a scrape.
For me, it was having to have a stent inserted in a coronary artery to unblock it before it could develop into a heart attack. They came in through the groin and worked it all the way up. I was using VA medical benefits, and went to the Sacramento VA hospital. They did a camera run up from my groin and looked around, and decided that I needed to have the stent put in, but the Sacramento/Mather hospital didn’t have the capability to do that, so they transported me via ambulance to the San Francisco VA hospital. I got there like 15 minutes before they were closing up the operating room for the day (except for emergencies), but they were able to get me in, then I spent the night in the hospital, then sent home the next day.
Dislocated both knee and one ankle (at different times) playing basketball and still the worst pain ever was tearing my hamstring playing football.
They all still hurt sometimes. Ten+ years gone.