Add my vote to the scratched cornea party. A day and a half of agony, which only ended when I got my hands on some Tylenol 3’s.
Burns truly are the worst. When I was a kid I had asthma and when my inhaler didn’t work my dad would boil water and I would sit over it with a towel over my head and inhale the steam. It never worked to well, but it was something. One night I was doing this and could barely breathe, so I tried to pull off the towel and tell my dad we needed to go to the emergency room. As I lifted my head the pot of boiling water landed in directly in my lap, burning from my pubic hair to the middle of my thighs. I wanted to scream but I couldn’t breathe. We went to the hospital and got a tube stuck down my throat, which was painful but nothing compared to the burns. It was a great relief when I passed out.
I don’t remember much about it, but apparently I was in a truckload of pain after my skiing accident.
OK, mine doesn’t even begin to compare to what I have seen here. If it weren’t for the fact that I am already typing, I wouldn’t even bother to share. I am totally amazed that some of you are still here.
Anyway, I’m sure that after I experience childbirth (hopefully sometime year) mine will change but for now I will have to say it was an infected ingrown toenail.
It was my big toe and the nail was ingrown on both sides and very much infected. It was bleeding almost continuously and was swollen to almost twice normal size. (My doctor could not take me for several weeks and I would not go to the ER because they could not guarantee they could totally numb my foot before doing anything.)
My young niece has some sort of pain radar. You don’t have to tell her where you hurt–she finds it with her body, usually travelling at a high rate of speed or carrying something sharp. She managed to daily step right on that toe–sometimes several times in one day! The pain was excruciating. I could not breathe for many seconds after. Depending on whether she just stepped on it or whather she jumped right on it, I would have tunnel vision also. It is amazing that she survived.
When the doctor finally removed the toenail (whatever anesthetic he used, I want some for childbirth!) I could have kissed him. For weeks I could not stand for a bed sheet to touch my toe and while I was chatting with the nurse, this man managed to cut my toenail in half and remove one side of it before I realized he had even touched my foot. He told me that it would be very sore for a few days and gave me a pain prescription. I was so relieved and happy that the pain was gone, I never noticed any soreness at all!
EWWW! Being the hater of toes that I am, evilbeth’s story takes the cake with me.
Augh, I feel sick.
especially the one that put me in the hospital for two weeks. it hurt so bad suddenly out of no where while shopping down Stienway St. i passed out from the pain i suppose. woke up with people around me and an emt shining a light in my eyes. Continued to feel the pain for 4 days before the pain turned to numbness, Codiene, Perkasets, nothing helped. Then it started to subside after the doctor shot a heapload of Propanalol into me (thats some type of blood thinning medication, usually used to prevent heart attacks), and then some Imitrex, which just knocked me out.
Man, and i would definitely not want to feel what it’s like to give birth if it’s worse then that.
Hats way off to you ladies out there. My deepest respects.
Circa 1925, my great aunt had her tonsils removed, without anesthesia.
I can’t say that anything I’ve experienced could compare to childbirth – which from the massive human sex drive I would think would be easier – but I got spiked once in the thumb by a Catfish and wound up banging my hand into the sides of my boat trying to make the agony go away until I jammed it in a cooler of ice and took a bunch of aspirin. THEN it eased up.
Second to that or right on par with it was when I had some major dental work done, where the dentist had to break up some teeth to remove them and broke a little bit of my jawbone in the process. After the Novocain wore off, I was debating on shooting my jaw off to get rid of the pain. I finally got a prescription for something like morphine, which took the pain away real nicely and placed me in la-la land for several hours until it all went away.
For me, that’s easy- getting sprayed in the face with oleoresin capsicum, or pepper spray. (No, I wasn’t attacking anybody) It was a required training element for my law enforcement duties. You get sprayed in the face, and have to keep your eyes open to fend off an attacker. Close your eyes, the attacker comes at you again. Pepper spray tends to be a little less effective the darker your complexion. So for me, with my Irish/Dutch heritage, the effects were devastating. Once it gets in the respiratory system, breathing becomes very difficult on top of the intense, searing pain to the eyes and face. It’s good the guns we used were fake, or I woulda shot myself! (kidding)
Probably alot better than childbirth, though!
C
I’m like the OP, afflicted with ear problems. I had two particularly bad episodes, both of which made me sick to my stomach, delirious and screaming with pain, and wishing for a nice, long needle to pierce my eardrum with. Conversely, the best feeling I’ve ever had was when my eardrum actually ruptured. It sounded like a lot of small bubbles popping, and it felt like ecstasy itself. I was laughing, dancing around like a looney, and loving the fact that the eardrum is thin tissue. I still have holes in both my eardrums from those ruptures. Whenever I relate that story, nobody believes that the eardrum popping like a ballon could be a pleasureable experience. I guess you’d have to have lived it, or something like it.
I would say childbirth seeing how my first son tried to exit out of my dang spine !! HOT DAMN, that was awful !! I swore I would NEVER have another one. THIS IS SICK ! Friggin Eve ! …but…I had another…didnt want to do the only child thing…but… then, I witnessed my husband have a thoracotomy/thymectomy…sawed his chest in half, the breastbone. collapsed his lungs, removed the thymus which was the size of a small baby, then told him to BREEEEATHE the next morning 
. “HE” who never felt pain, thought he would die from pain and cried like a baby. It was awful, and I will NO LONGER say a man will never know pain. He knows now. He knows pain, and I’d have to agree, anyone who has their chest saw’d in half knows pain more-so than childbirth. Fortunately the morphine made him lose his memory of that horrible operation, yet left him with permanent Muscular Dystrophy.
That my friends, is pain.
Yeah, I’ve been there. Mine wasn’t nearly as bad as yours, but I was very young and to save money, my dad was the “doctor”. Not a good choice!
I can identify with not being able to breathe, and everyone stepping on the damn thing!
Sweet Basil
Worst pain felt? Well, I have to go through the whole story…
Ending my shift on duty at the fire department. I was asleep when a call came out for a code blue (person not breathing) for a 17 year old female. We took off like a bat out of hell from the department, and got to the persons house in about a minute and a half. We went through the door, with every item of equipment we had on the truck in our arms. I came around a corner in the house to the bedroom to find an offiver holding a 3 month old baby in her arms doing CPR. This came as quite a shock as I was expecting a 17 year old girl. All of the equipment I was holding in my arms immediately became absolutely useless…Nothing I was holding would work on a 3 month old baby. I dropped all of the equipment on the floor, grabbed the baby, turned around and started to leave. I shouted at mom on the way out what hospital did she want the baby to go to and then we left. My partners quickly gathered the gear I dropped and came back to the ambulance with me. We jumped in the truck and started on our way to meet the incoming paramedics. I did CPR for about a minute or so when we met the Paramedics. I jumped from my truck to theirs and we started on our way to the hospital 20-30 minutes away. The whole way to the hospital I did CPR on the child. The paramedic put an ET (endotrachial) tube in the baby so we could breath for it more easily. The paramedic also tried to start an IV on the baby, but was unsccessful. On the way the paramedic pulled out a large needle in a blue plastic thing. I had never seen this before, had no clue what it was, but I kept doing CPR just the same. Then, I heard a loud pop. I looked over at the baby to see the needle sticking out of its leg, just below the knee. The pop I heard was the needle poking into the space inside the bone so the paramedic could give the baby fluids. I nearly threwup, I had never seen that before, only heard about it. That IV as well did not flow. Another paramedic placed another IO line in the other leg of the child. The entire time this was ongoing we were putting drugs down the ET tube to try to get the baby’s heart to start beating in any shape or form for us to work with. One time, during this activity, I was taking the BVM (Bag Valve mask, we use it to breath w/o doing mouth to mouth) off the ET tube, and the adapter came with it. I had to take the adapter off of the BVM and try to place it back on the ET tube. That was similar to trying to put a sharpened pencil into a coffee stirstick. On the 4th or 5th try we got the adapter back on so we could put drugs down it. This difficulty with the adapter happened 3 or 4 times before we got to the hospital – we were never able to get any pulse or activity from the child. We gave the child to the ER staff, watched for a moment, and then went back out to our truck…We knew the child was dead.
Then came what has been quite possibly the worst moment of my life. Aparently the family was waiting outside for news on the baby. We were just on the other side of the wall from them. We were outside when the doctor gave the family the news. I got to hear the family scream when they were told that their 3 month child was dead. That was almost 10 months ago, yet I can relive every moment of that call through my mind. I can still hear the screams of the family in my head like I was there. When I walked into the famiy house and found a 3 month old baby instead of a 17 year old girl, that was the most helpless feeling of my life. Everything I had expected, and was ready to do were all worthless. I was helpless to do anything more than CPR and get to more help…
So thats the most painful moment, well hour, of my life.
The worst pain…I’ve been pretty lucky in my life, so I’d have to say it was when I had HepA. I couldn’t touch my stomach without crying out in pain, and well…throwing up every ten minutes wasn’t much fun either. While I doubt that it was more intense than childbirth, I was like that for over two weeks, the throwing up lasted almost a month.
Side observation.
A girl I knew wanted to have a child but most boyfriends she met (including me) used protection. She’d get real sneaky about it, seducing some guys she knew after they got drunk and ‘forgetting’ to insert her contraceptive and sometimes persuading them not to use a condom and so on. She just did not get pregnant.
Finally she got knocked up. She got married after the fact and had her kid. I ran into to her some time afterwards and asked her about her desire to have several children – which was also her sappy husbands wish – and she flat informed me that there would be no more.
ONE was absolutely enough for her because the pain, discomfort and everything else involved was much more than she had expected. After the child was born, several days (?) or weeks (?) later when she could have sex again, her husband told her he was all set to start on another and she informed him that there was NOT going to be another kid coming out of her.
IT HURT!!
(DUH!!)
When they removed the packing after my hemorrhoidectomy…
Three thoughts, listed toward most painful:
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Getting shot (shin wound in the “Lost War” in my helicopter days). Annoyingly painful to skin and bone.
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Compound dislocation, right long finger. Hit on the tip by a foul-tipped fast pitch softball (I was the catcher) which drove the entire first segment (phalange?) up and onto the second, exposing the gleaming white joint and connective tissues.
-
By far, a 10 out of 10; Kidney stones. A nurse who also had them put the experience in perspective. She had also been through childbirth, and noted that labor pain and kidney pain are similar, except that you get a break between laobr contractions. No matter how you move or lay or twist, the stones HURT continuously.
Take a look here http://www.csn.net/~rigibson/jackston.jpg for why these buggers can drive you to your knees!
Chuck L
5-time kidney stone survivor.
When I was 7 I flew off my bike face-first into a brick wall. (Maybe that explains the way I look har de har har).
Basically what happened was this: I lost three of my four front teeth, split my lip, bruised my face and broke my wrist. I’m sure it was painful, but I was unconscious and don’t remember three days.
The dental work afterwards was horrible as well. Three root canals, two gum surgeries, three sets of prosthetic teeth. For those of you who have met me - that’s why my teeth are so white - they’re fake!
Being an extremely accident prone person, I’ve broken my left arm about four times - I’m used to that pain by now. I also broke my left ankle last year. That sucked.
The most recent horrible pain I had happened last August. I was horseback riding in the Catskills. We were about an hour from the ranch and galloping around a ring. My horse changed rythym just as I was readjusting my hat and I fell off. I fell correctly, but happened to land on a sharp boulder on my lower back.
Basically, I bruised my kidney and severly injured my back. I had to get back on the horse and scared it half to death with my wailing. I was unable to lift my right leg more than an inch - getting into a car was torture.
I went to the hospital and spent several days in codeine bliss.
For the record, I agree with SqrlCub that emotional pain is way worse than physical pain.
I’m with Sax and Squrl on emotional pain being the worst—but I’m with Nacho on spinal injuries being a damn close second.
I had a serious spinal injury back in '86—lost all my spinal fluid, which also left my poor little brain high & dry (which could explain a few things). Felt like a barbed-wire sword was stuck up my spine, and “headache” doesn’t even BEGIN to cover how my noggin felt. Had to be trussed up and hung by the heels from the ceiling for about a month . . . Reading wasn’t easy like that, and let’s not even get INTO other things that made it difficult to do.
For quick pain I’d have to say acid on my clit ranks right up there. (VD issues, don’t ask)
For longer duration…I’d say it’s a tossup between bursting ovarian cyst, which someone else described, and earache. Oh wait…anal fissures are pretty nasty as well.
Ahhh… life.
