Yeah, I stopped reading this after about ten items. Eek.
I may know. But I’ll never forget that pain.
Yowch! How did the cowboys in the Old West ever manage to spend so much of their time on those horsies?
Hairy Balls, huh?
Hmmm … I think I will have to try to use that as a name on some other message board at some other time. Maybe I’ll change it to “Harry Balls”. Think that would have a better chance to be accepted than “Hairy Balls”?
In addition to migraines, I have trigeminal neuralgia. It is called the suicide disease.
Mine feels wussy after reading all of these agonizing stories but I will never forget it.
A few years ago, I made the decision I get hair extensions. I’ve had fine, thin hair my whole life and it made me miserable. Hair stylist assured me this new style of extensions would be PERFECT for me. They were designed with little metal beads so they didn’t have to be sewn or glued in. Just thread my hair through, slide em up and clamp the metal beads down to secure them. Except my hair is so fine that it wouldn’t hold the weight of the extensions. So she added a drop of glue inside each bead. No biggie, she assured me, the glue would break down and by the time I was due to have the extensions slid up it would be gone. Hours in the chair and lotsa money later, I looked ridiculous. She didn’t plan for the fact that my hair is so fine that it wouldn’t hide the top row of beaded extensions and what I was left with was simply awful. I put a hat on, went to work, and cried a lot that night.
Next day I go back, consult with hair stylist and we both realize there is no fixing this, the extensions have to come out. My scalp was sensitive from the work the day before and a whole day of walking around with these heavy things pulling at it, and when she started prying the beads out I was uncomfortable. When she began combing the glue out of my hair? Dear god. I gripped the arms of the chair so hard I bent a nail back and was shaking and sweating by the end.
The bright side is, another stylist in the salon saw what was happening, swooped in and fixed my head after the sadist was done with me. I am so grateful to her that I have followed her to 4 salons and will never go to anyone else despite her poor time management and the difficulty in booking with her.
You get used to it. I was a trail guide for a summer, following a year or so of lessons in Western and my bum was fine. Eventually you just don’t bounce in the saddle the same way anymore.
For real fun, try bareback. On a skinny, boney horse with a rough trot. We had a last minute larger-than-planned group show up and I had to grab an unsaddled horse that we wouldn’t normally ride bareback. Ow ow ow
I had surgery in hopes to correct my very flat feet (it partially did), but the stitches on one side became very, very infected when the dissolving stitches didn’t dissolve. I was 19, and while legally an adult, had signed over everything in that office to my mother, since she was really still making all the decisions. I was sitting in the chair, my leg propped up, already on some meds, and my doc (really, a great guy), asked my mom to step into the hallway. They did, they came back in a moment later, and my mom went around the far side, and took my hand. My doc said to hold her hand, and I, very confused, did. She grabbed my hair and buried my head in her chest. My doc then YANKED out the stitch that wasn’t dissolving, about three and a half weeks after surgery, which was quite grown in to the surrounding skin.
My mom later told me (months later), that the amount of pus that poured our was kind of shocking. I know I nearly passed out, and I cut into her hand with my nails. By that evening, though, the infection finally started clearing, and the sense of relief I had outweighed anything else. I was also on some… significant meds at that point. I have no idea how I walked out to the car.
Oddly enough, that’s the side with LESS scar tissue (I had the same surgery on both sides). The other side is the one that tells me when there’s a storm coming, and that still has a raised scar, 12 years later.
Mine wasn’t that bad but it’s worth mentioning for the remarkable ratio of stupidity to pain level.
Around 2001, I bought some delicious but ridiculously hotter than hot “African Pepper”. I used them regularly to flavour curry sauce so I knew that I only needed just a tiny bit of it in my sauce. I carefully chopped perhaps a quarter of a pepper then added it to the curry. The sauce was simmering nicely. And that’s when I decided that it was the right time to remove my contact lenses…
I spent the next 30 minutes under the open cold water tap.
A few years ago, one of my top front teeth developed an abscess. It swelled up and it became so painful that I could barely sleep or eat or even think. However, I had three days until I had a day off of work where I could go to the dentist to have it pulled, and, although I had paid sick leave available to me, I didn’t want to leave my coworkers in the lurch by calling out during a busy time of the month.
So one night after work, I sterilized a kitchen knife in boiling water and lanced the abscess myself. It was tricky and it hurt like hell, but once the pus had drained the pain dropped off dramatically and I was able to function until I got to the dentist.
DEAR GOD. You, sir, are a bad ass.
Mine are pretty slight compared to some of these.
A few months ago I went for my first bike ride in a long time and while everything seemed to go OK, that night I was just on the edge of sleep when my right thigh muscle cramped up.
Jesus wept, I managed to levitate out of bed somehow and then spent about 10 minutes (my loving wife timed it 
) bent over the bed with my forehead resting on the mattress, cross-eyed and crying with pain. It was deep enough that I couldn’t easily massage the area. At one point I was starting to wonder if I was having some kind of muscle infarction. I couldn’t walk very well the next day.
In hospital after getting my appendix out, something happened one night and I was suddenly in excrutiating pain which took, I believe, a double dose of morphine plus whatever pills I was on to get me back down to the point where I could barely drift off to sleep from exhaustion. Next day I was OK but for the next week I got occasional stabs of pain in the same area which tapered off after a while.
Thene there was the time I got my vasectomy and there was delay getting home afterwards so I didn’t have any painkillers on hand when the local anesthetic wore off. 
What about airplane headaches? I remember the first time I had one of those, I thought my eyes were going to fall out of my sockets!
I didn’t do this to myself, but after having my appendix out, and being back at school, I was walking down a hallway at school and one of the guys in school turned around from his locker to playfully smack his friend.
He missed, and caught me full in the stomach, just slightly to the side of my incision.
I saw stars.
Dislocated/ruptured a lower vertebrae while doing bent over rows. I thought I was paralyzed from the waist down the next morning; any sort of pressure at all on my back sent me to the floor. Couldn’t walk or crawl. Somehow the day after I was perfectly fine.
Tried deadlifting less than a week after that incident (incredibly stupid), heard the same familiar crack and went to the floor again… but this time I figured I’d be better in a day, and it was fine again.
This was about 5 years ago and I’m still lifting today, but if I’m bent over an engine bay working for too long I get severe soreness. I also can’t bike uphill anymore, the pressure builds in my lower back until it’s unbearable.
Second place is probably when I wiped out while road biking going about 30 miles an hour. Leaned too far into a turn with the wrong pedal down and found myself sliding across pavement in a split second. It actually didn’t hurt that day (walked into a CVS, patched myself up and walked into a gym) but the week after that I got no sleep at all due to the pain. I lost probably 10-15% of the skin on my lower left leg and had some rash on the left arm as well.
Third place was punching a brick wall in a drunken stupor, which pushed my right pinky knuckle back about 1". Typing would dislocate the finger. Never saw the doctor for that one, but it healed itself up over time.
I’m actually pretty amazed at some of the things the human body can recover from.