For me the worst pain was back spasms. I bent to pick up a shovel in my driveway and spent the next week in agony. The worst part was the nurses in the ER seemed never to have heard of back spasms before, after a couple hours one of them was getting upset saying ‘your discharged now so get off the stretcher’. I tried but couldn’t and she was really bothered. She was complaining to my wife asking, “why doesn’t he just get up?” I had no idea how to deal with that; everyone else was really nice though, the paramedics and the triage nurse, they helped me in and laid me in a position where the pain was at least tolerable. The doctor prescribed Dilaudid which other people have told me is quite strong but it didn’t do much for my pain, I was able to sleep though so I was happy with that (I think I dreamt for two days straight, vivid bizarre dreams). My wife was really good about not helping me too much so I had to get up and get moving to get food, etc. I definitely don’t ever want to go through that again.
My sympathies to those who’ve suffered from kidney stones, they sound even worse.
Although I suffer frequently from ear infections, regularly have blinding (literally) migraines, and have given birth with no painkillers, there is one thing that, for me, beat the pain of those hands down.
I broke my ankle while on holiday in San Diego. The actual break wasn’t painful at all initially, although it did start to throb while I waited in Emergency. The real pain was when the doctors reduced the dislocation. I don’t know what they did wrong (pinched a nerve, maybe?) but the pain was unbelievable.
I don’t actually remember much of it, as I guess I started blacking out, but my family says that I started to scream and beg the doctors to just cut my foot off. Eventually they increased my morphine, but it wasn’t until they redid the reduction until any real relief came. Even after they redid it, I was still on enough morphine that I stopped breathing repeatedly all night long, but at least I didn’t want them to amputate any more.
I have AV-node reentrant tachycardia and the fastest my heart has been “clocked” at is 250 bpm. At this speed it doesn’t actually beat, it just sort of flutters, but it’s never been painful. I’m willing to bet the pain was more a result of the drugs
JMHO
I’ve found that I have a pretty high threshold for pain, but probably the most startlingly painful thing I ever experienced was the time I was awakened at 3 am by the most pain and pressure in my right eye that I was positive it would rupture right then and there. It felt like a hot poker inside my head was trying to force its way out. It lasted for over a minute, and I ran into the bathroom to make sure my eye wasn’t actually splitting in half.
I never figured out what it was, but it went away eventually.
one was an attack of undiagnosed abdominal pain; probably either a kidney stone or a twisted testicle. Never had a repeat.
The other is the three bouts of back/shoulder pain I had. In the shoulder one, I woke up one morning to discover I’d lain on the same shoulder all night, and something in there died from lack of blood. That took a solid month to heal.
The two sprained backs demonstrated God’s wisdom in putting sensitive spinal nerves right next to sprain-prone muscles. Granted that I am a self-pitying wuss, but during one of the sprained backs I told my wife that if I hadn’t had some reasonable hope that it would go away in a few days, I would have killed myself. During the other I literally cursed God to his face, telling Him that the only thing I was capable of wanting or caring about was for the pain to go away, and if God wouldn’t or couldn’t make it go away I had nothing further to say to him.
Tho worst part about sprained backs? The absolute LIE your back tells you that it would stop hurting if you could find just the right position.
In high school I worked at a bowling alley keeping the pin setting machines running reasonably well. One night I was in back during the league clearing a pin on one machine. While I was my foot slipped back and went right between the two parallel bars that raise and lower the deck.
I’m not sure how but I reached back above my foot and turned the machine off.
I then proceeded to alternate between yelling “Help” and profanities.
When the owner came back neither of us could remember which way to turn the hand crank.
He turned it the wrong way.
You know that feeling when you’re breaking a stick and it quivers for just a second before it snaps.
That was what my ankle felt like. Fortunately my yelling convinced him to go the other way in time.
When I got my foot out those two little bumps on the side of your ankle were each crushed in about half an inch. Had bruises for years. But I did finish the shift.
Two babies with no pain meds either time. The first one went from zero to I NEED TO PUSH NOW!!! in the span of one contraction. The second one had to be born very quickly because his heart tones were down.
But the worst pain was during my first delivery and my son was turned around inside, so it was back labor. It was so beyond excruciating that I could barely breathe and prayed for unconsciousness.
This happened to one of my co-workers in a bowling alley. He was in his 40s, I was 19 or 20. A metal pin went through his boot and was sticking out the other side. He refused to go to the hospital, he said he had never missed work and wasn’t going to start then. He worked another 3 hours or so and then went to the hospital where they cut his boot off.
I hope I never get to expirience that, I’ve become “heart obssesed”. If my heart went that fast for more than 10 minutes, I’d either consume 4 xanax or I’d just shoot myself.
Either: biting down on a date pit in some dry granola I was eating, splitting a lower molar into three pieces;
Or: taking a fall in my home and catching my left forearm just right [just wrong] on the edge of the computer desk so as to snap both the radius and ulna; then I had to wait 2 days to get it cared for and during that period felt the bone ends kind of grinding against each other whenever I moved my arm. That was a very strange, and most unpleasant, sensation!
Hemmorrhaging ovarian cyst. Sure, my abdomen hurt pretty badly, but the serious pain? The shoulder spasms it gave me. Any time I would attempt to approach any sort of horizontal position, it induced screaming pain. I don’t know how in the hell an ovarian cyst did that, but when the ER staff pushed me down onto the hospital bed because I could not lay down myself, I fainted with the pain. When I regained consciousness, I was screaming so loudly that my room was suddenly full of hospital staff checking to see what was going on (small hospital!). At least that’s the fastest I’ve ever made it through triage.
I’ve been sliced up and broken in a number of ways, but that was definitely the worst.
I can’t imagine anything hurting worse. After the first attack, in the ER, I couldn’t get painkillers until I’d been X-rayed, blood tested and all that. I finally, for the first time in my life, got Demerol, and it felt like heaven. One just doesn’t know how good the absence of pain feels.
Well, we discovered it when I was about 8 years old. It’s been part of my life for so long, that I barely think about it. I was on medication for a while, had ablation surgery once to cauterize one of the AV nodes. The second (of 3 I was born with), matured (like they said it wouldn’t) and the problem is back now. Until it starts causing problems again, rather than random episodes of rapid heart rate and low blood pressure, I don’t get concerned about it.
It’s gone on for extended periods of time though. Usually I get a little dizzy, sleepy, I yawn a lot until it skips a beat and goes back to normal. I have a blood pressure / heart rate machine at work that I like to sit in when it goes really fast, just so I can leave my scores on it (highest was around 90/60, pulse 178)
Abdominal hernia, right down the centre where the two sides of the abdominal muscles join. (Longish piece of fascia tissue called the ‘Linea Alba’ - I don’t seem to have one) First repair on it was the least invasive surgery the doctors could perform, because I’m a singer. It didn’t hold; 2 years later, second surgery, same spot but this time the most invasive repair job possible. 6 weeks of lifting nothing heavier than 5 pounds, lots of sitting around.
The painful part was the cold I caught in the hospital - once I got home, every coughing spasm, even when grabbing a pillow and holding it to my chest, was excruciating. THAT was when I wished I had the morphine…
Having a metal rod shoved through my cervix to open it up and determine the depth of my uterus before getting an IUD. It was alternately like a icy, ragged trowel was clawing my uterus and ripping it out of my body, and at the same time like someone had shot molten lava right into the center of everything that was me. I involuntarily jumped straight up off the table and briefly passed out from shock.
Not that this should discourage anyone from getting an IUD, though. Most people don’t have as hard a time of it as I did. I’d do it again in a heartbeat (and likely will in 10 years when I need to have it replaced).
As a teenager in the late '70’s, before the reengineering of catcher’s masks, I took a foul ball from the fastest pitcher in the state right in the Adam’s Apple. In addition to the incredible pain, I couldn’t breathe for about a minute. I seriously thought I was going to die. Apparantly I was twirling in circles and throwing punches at anyone who tried to approach me.
