Childbirth was nothing compared to kidney stones. I popped a 10 lb baby and altho it was painful, it was a joyous pain. I popped out 4 kidney stones after excruciating pain, definitely not joyous. I think i’d rather have five 10 lbers over that any day.
Childbirth was easy compared to the pain I felt August 7, 1997! I was 8 months pregnant with my first child. I came home from school and my husband (ex-husband now) was getting ready to go to work. He left and I sat on the couch and started watching t.v. A few minutes later I sneezed, a really hard sneeze!! My nose started bleeding after I sneezed (I had nose bleeds quite often due to my pregnancy). My nose would not quit bleeding. It was literally running out of my nose. I stood over the bathroom sink for about 5 minutes straight and it just ran out of me and wouldn’t stop. I grabbed a towel and held it to my face and called my mom at work to see if she knew anyone who could help me. She ended up calling an ambulance to come out to my house. The ambulance got there and my mom got there a few minutes later. They put an ice pack on the back of my neck and pinched my nose together. I couldn’t tip my head back because I kept swallowing all the blood and choking on the blood clots that would form and slip down my throat. They finally got it to stop, stayed for 10 more minutes and then left. About 2 minutes after they left, it started again. By this time my dad was at my house and he took me to the emergency room. I had already soaked up one towel with blood and started soaking up another one.
The doctor ended up putting liquid cocaine (not that kind!) on a q-tip and putting it in my nose. He then packed my nose with a huge cotton plug about 1" - 1 1/2" long. He shoved that f**ker up my nose and, damn, it hurt bad!! I had to sleep upright that night and had to keep that thing in the entire next day and night. I went to the doctor’s office to get it taken out after 1 1/2 days. The doctor pulled that thing out of my nose and I felt pain like I have never felt before!! It hurt sooooo bad! I was literally seeing stars! After he took it out I had to go to another doctor and he cauterized the blood vessels in the back of my nose.
My nose wouldn’t stop bleeding because one of my vessels burst and it was right at the point where your nose curves to meet your throat and it would start to clot and the clot would run down my throat because it was at that curve. That was the worst 2 days of my life!! Plus the fact that I was pregnant and scared to death something was really awful was gonna happen to me because my nose wouldn’t stop bleeding. I thought I was gonna bleed to death!
I’ll take childbirth anyday over that doctor pulling that plug out of my nose!!
This is too easy. The worst pain I ever felt was when I was a little over a month after I turned 16 and the police came to my door early in the morning asking for my father. I came out groggily that Good Friday morning and said, “what did Debbie do this time?” Well, the police made my father sit down and told him that she had killed herself and he had to go identify her body. Talk about turning your psyche inside out. I don’t remember the next several days clearly except that I had some dreams and I couldn’t stop crying. I remember being at my grandmothers house at Easter and helping my niece hunt for Easter eggs but that was about it. It was completely awful. Now when people in my family die it is not really sad in comparison because hers was so hurtful. Usually I am happy to see that they have passed peacefully. FTR, she shot herself in her head somewhere. The bullet either entered or exited through her left eye, I am not sure which but it was very mangled looking in the coffin.
Sigh. I remember the day April 12th but my only association with it is Good Friday.
HUGS!
Sqrl
Sorry, I read the op and had to respond right away. Physical pain is transitory. I have had so many broken bones and other things like that, that I don’t even think about it anymore. Mental/emotional pain is so much worse.
HUGS!
Sqrl
The worst pain I remember feeling was getting my thumb smashed between two cinderblocks when I was a kid. Not all that high on the pain scale, I know. What I want to share is the worst pain I ever heard about.
A friend of my wife’s had to have some serious surgery on some hemorrhoids that had gone extremely bad. She had to get an anaesthetic shot directly into her rectal sphincter. That’s pain I can’t even begin to imagine.
This happened to me too, when I was 8 or 9. Except in my case, I wasn’t getting teeth drilled; I was having them PULLED. Four of them. Imagine the scene:
Me: “I’m not numb.”
DDS: “I’ve given you three shots.”
Me: “Well, I’m not numb.”
DDS: “It’ll kick in in a minute. Open your mouth.”
<time passes, his hands in my open mouth>
DDS (to assistant): “Give me the…” <looks like a wrench>
Me: “Nngg! Noh nung!”
DDS: “Okay…”
<wrench in mouth>
Me: “NNGG! NOH NUNG! NOH NUNG!”
<CRACK>
Me: “NNNNGGGGGGGG”
DDS (to assistant): “Please, hold his arms…”
<repeat three more times>
Lovely, huh?
…But that’s not the worst pain I’ve ever felt. Easily the worst physical pain experience of my life was when I had part of my lung removed when I was 19. They had to break a rib to get at it, and cut open my back muscles. It’s a really long story, but suffice to say, when I woke up in intensive care, I sobbed for a day and a half straight. And I would cry for hours every time they did something: made me sit forward for the portable x-ray, poked or prodded the incision, or adjusted the chest tubes. Basically I did nothing but weep for a week, in total agony: I’m talking bright lights around the edges of your vision agony. My grandmother came to visit me but couldn’t stay more than five minutes because she was so freaked out looking at me sobbing.
Boy, was that fun…
I’ve had two accidents that were about equal in pain.
The first, I smashed my right big toe between the frame of my bike, and a wooden fence post. I was going to visit a friend, went to get on the sidewalk, and the curb part that went down, stull had about an inch and a half edge to it. The wheel turned the wrong way, and I went right into the fence. it hurt so badly, i was limping the rest of the day. It even killed the toe nail.
The second was I was riging my bike home from school, and i thought the gear shift could go further. My mistake. I ended up snapping off the switch, going forward over the handle bars,and I got wrapped up in the bike as it went down. My left knee slid into the pavement, and it actually wore a 3 inch hole through my pants where there was none. It scraped it so badly it looked like I had been dragged on my left knee along the road. I actually didnt really feel anything 'til I got home and looked at it. When I did I started shaking and sobbing. I have a scar still from it. The scar doesn’t have any feeling either (that’s how badly i scraped my knee up).
Kidney stones. Holy smokes, that hurts. “They” say it’s worse than childbirth. Getting teeth pulled was no problem compared to that.
A close second was the toture known as “getting your braces taken off.” Maybe it’s not hell for all people, but I was actually crying in that chair. And he kept pulling, and pulling, and pulling…oh the horror.
Being partially spayed and released 10 hours after surgery with no painkillers cuz the wards were overfilled with seniors with Influenza.
GAWD that hurt.
Oh, that and being beaten to a pulp by a guy who thought I was a punching bag rather than a human being. shrug
I think i can handle childbirth. 
E.
pluto, you win.
[slight hijack] Cher3
Uhm, except when I had my wisdom teeth removed (which had to be done under general anesthetic in the hospital), I don’t even allow them anywhere near my mouth with that novacaine needle. Uh-uh. No freaking way.
Last time I had to have cavities filled, I asked the dentist (a new one to me) if they would agree to do it without the novacaine - otherwise I would not make the appointment - I’d find another dentist. They said sure, no problem. I guess they thought I was kidding, because when the day came, here they come at me with that freaking needle. Absolutely not, I insisted.
The poor girl who was drilling my teeth was completely freaked out. She’d never drilled anyone without numbing them first and she was terrified she was going to hurt me. She kept stopping and asking if I was sure I was alright, and commenting about how blown away she was that I didn’t even so much as flinch.
The great thing about doing it without novacaine is that if you have one on each side of your mouth (which I did), you can have them both done in the same visit![/hijack]
Back to the OP - the worst pain I’ve ever felt was when I got 3rd degree burns on my left hand from getting boiling Karo syrup all over it (I was making peanut brittle). At the emergency room, the doctor told me that one of the primary reasons burn patients die is because their bodies can’t handle the pain. If it weren’t for that, the skin would heal (even if scarred) and they’d be fine.
I’ve had my wisdom teeth out, sinus and tonsil surgery, kidney infections and a broken arm, and nothing even came close - in fact you could combine all those together and it wouldn’t come close - to the pain from that burn. It’s impossible to describe how excrutiating it is when it sends shooting pain throughout every nerve ending in your body. You really do want to die.
One summer while I was in college I was working in a factory that made office furniture. One day they had me work on a machine I didn’t normally work on. It put together those office dividers that anyone who ever worked in a cubicle is familiar with. Somehow the machine jammed, and the only way to free it up was to actually climb down inside it and break up the frame that had jammed inside it.
These frames are made of particle board, and the pieces are glued together rather than nailed. When I broke the frame, a piece of the particle board flew up and I caught it, and in the process managed to coat a sizable percentage of my left hand with the glue.
Did I mention they use HOT glue? something like 350 degrees. It didn’t start hurting right away, then it hit in a wave. And another wave. And another. Like every time my heart beat.
Burns hurt!
Dentist horror stories give me the creeps - when I was a
kid, sitting in the chair, the dentist would come in [strong
ressemblance to Dennis Hooper in Blue Velvet] rubbing his
hands together… can’t deal with it.
SqrlCub: I didn’t think about the impact of a friend/lover/family member’s suicide. You are right that
the physical pain is almost as bad as the emotional pain;
there’s no drug, cure, fix it to make it better. It’s truly one of life’s saddest experiences. I use to think that everyone had the right to do it; but now I can’t see what right some one has to cause such trauma. Enough said on this thread - it’s too sad.
My ovarian cysts hurt even more than having my children, because I wasn’t prepared for it and I wasn’t surrounded by people who were there to help me.
I started feeling nauseous in the morning, and then the pain spread through my entire abdomen. I dragged myself into the bathroom to puke, couldn’t, lay down beside the toilet and took all my clothes off except for the undershirt I wear to bed.
Nausea was racking my whole body and abdominal pains were crashing over me like waves, one after the other, making me vomit into the bathtub. Other things were happening to me that no one here wants to hear about (let’s just say that perstalsis was going both ways).
My mom found me sitting on the commode, sobbing. I didn’t know what was happening to me, my uterus was contracting violently, I couldn’t stop gagging, and my whole body was shaking uncontrollably. When my body had purged everything it could, I was carried to my bed. The pain subsided after about four hours and a couple of Tylenol.
Later I had an ultrasound and discovered that a big cyst on my ovary had ruptured. The fluid inside was released into my abdominal cavity, irritating the organs and tissues. My body had poisoned itself from the inside.
The fact that I didn’t know why my body was revolting so dramatically, made it worse.
FWIW, the dentist I went to as a kid never used novacaine. He was a sadist. Yep, he drilled out 4 of my back molars, w/o anything to numb the pain. It hurt more than I can describe.
I didn’t have novacaine until I was 21 yrs old. Actually, going to the dentist now is a breeze. (Fortunately I have excellent teeth.) But hey, no problem with the magic needle.
But the worst pain was—around last Christmas, actually. I was playing w/ the dog and–my fault–she accidentally raked a claw straight across the center of my left eye.
At first it just felt generally bad, but just got worse and worse and worse. By the next day it was active agony. I went to the emergency room, and they gave me antibiotics, but nothing that muted the pain. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t see, just doubled over, tears down the face.
Fortunately my eye doctor got me in the day after that. She got the eye well treated and blessedly gave me some drops that blunted the pain. But for almost 3 days it felt like someone dragging a straight razor across the front of my eye. Surgery, etc.; nothing ever came close to that for pure, piercing, unending pain.
::shudder::
Veb
I’ve done that twice before, Veb. Once was with a mascara wand and once a closed palm frond as I was bending over to pick something up off the floor near the plant. The agony of a scratched cornea is beyond description. It hurts to have your eye open and it hurts worse to close it. Razor blades in your eye is a perfect description. The only relief is when they do give you the numbing drops and bandage over your eye for a few days until it heals.
That said, it still didn’t come close to the pain from the burn. {shudder}
Childbirth is easy, and yes, I had drugs.
It’s every dead end conversation I have with my 74 year old mother who refuses to put my severely disabled and severely depressed brother into a group home where he belongs and get on with her life (what is left of it.) She’s killing herself.
Thanks, Shayna! After posting I felt like a complete weenie trying to describe an itty-bitty eye scratch in relation to breaks, childbirth, etc.
Want a real horror story? My mom was at the stove frying something when hot grease popped and hit her squarely in the eye. I mainly remember shutting off the stove, running next door for help and my stoic mom collapsed in pain for days.
Happened when I was a kid, but makes me glad I wear specs. I can’t imagine anything more excruciating than a burn on the eye.
Just thought I’d share that…
Veb
Veb
There’s nothing itty-bitty about a scratch in one’s cornea, Veb. It is truly agonizing. You are most definitely not a weenie. And even though I think the burn was worse, I’d definitely rank the eye scratching 2nd worst ever, even compared to surgery I’ve had.
Sounds like your mom got the worst of both of them combined. A burn and in the eye. Yikes! She definitely wins this one. I sure hope it healed ok!
Okay…so it was just a stupid sore throat from tonsilitis…but dammit I didn’t eat, drink, or even swallow my own saliva for three days.
Ugh, and I had an allergic reaction to seafood a few months back…I know it isn’t childbirth or anything, but damn I thought my insides were rupturing!
Okay, okay…I am going…ow, stop throwing things at me! That stuff hurt!!
When I was about 12, I spilled boiling water on myself, 2nd-degree burns on one hand/wrist and both legs. That hurt a lot. Worse though, was when they removed the dead skin from the burns with tweezer thingies. They did one leg one day, one the next day and the wrist on a third day (by that day I was screaming and whining and begging them not to do it).
[slight detour]My mother has said that if you take labor and multiply it by 10, you get kidney stones (painwise).[/slight detour]