you’ve ever been through in your life, and how long did it last? Did anything good come out of it? How did you manage to get through it? Please share the details, Thanks!
My back pain from Lyme related arthritis was worse than giving natural childbirth. At least with childbirth you could reasonably expect the pain to eventually end. Before antibiotics got the Lyme disease calmed down to a dull roar, I was washing very heavy scrips (borrowed from my parents stash leftover following various joint replacement surgeries)down with liquor, and doing a lot of pacing the floors at all hours of the night since neither sitting nor laying (lying?) was comfortable. Glad those days are over!
This thread might be of interest.
Dropping a liter bottle of water on my big toe, right at the base of the nail. It hurt terribly, but I counted my blessings that that was the worst pain I ever felt.
Oh, and ear infections.
About ten years ago, I had a procedure for kidney stone removal, called a percutaneous nephrotomy. Basically, this means the doc makes a tiny hole in your side, then into the kidney; he dilates the hole until it’s big enough to go in and fish out the stone. Anyway, I was just coming out of the anesthetic from having this done, when I spiked a major fever. You know the uncontrollable shivers that come with that kind of fever? Yeah. It wasn’t doing the hole in my side any favors. I’d shiver and moan and my doc would say “more morphine”. Finally, they’d given me so much morphine it suppressed my breathing. I knew that could kill me, but at that point, honestly didn’t care if it did. It took them five hours to get that pain under control. Five hours. You have no idea how long five hours last when you’re in that kind of pain. Really and for true, if they had offered to kill me then, I probably would have taken them up on it.
Now, I’ve had dozens of kidney stones, and anyone who’s had one will tell you that they are agonizing. But the stones were like the pain of a stubbed toe when put next to that five hour hell.
In the end, they ended up giving me ibuprofen to bring down the fever (which was over 104 by then), gave me max doses of morphine and dilaudid. That’s what finally got it under control, and brought back my will to continue living.
The following year, I had another stone that required that same procedure. I said to my doc “Frankly, the idea of doing that again kind of worries me”. He said “Worry? It scares the hell out of me!” Fortunately, the second procedure came off without a hitch.
Pepper spray in the eyes and on the face. It lasted about 20 minutes.
Shared experiences belong in IMHO. Moved.
samclem GQ moderator
I dropped a heavy wooden ironing board corner first on that same spot and chirst did it hurt. Wouldn’t think a smashed toe would be so bad, but if you hit that growth plate just right it’s pretty intense.
Still, not the worst I’ve had. I had a mallet finger in high school, which hurt, but the real pain was when they set it by hyper-extending and splinting it with pressure directly on the break. Yeah, the time between when it was set and when my parents were able to get back from the pharmacy with the pain medication was about the most painful couple hours I can fathom.
You reminded me of another one–severe sunburn. Where your skin is so hot, that makes you shiver which of course hurts the skin, rinse, repeat.
I enjoyed that thread, which was about medical professionals trying to rate pain. The basic concept is to establish a baseline, so we know how bad you think you are to start with, and whether or not you are improving.
The question should be phrased, “On a scale of 1-10, where is your pain now?” without trying to add modifiers such as “…where 10 is the worst possible pain you could imagine; etc etc.”
Anyway, it also indirectly reflects pain tolerance and personality.
We use to say the scale is as follows:
“10” I have very bad pain
“11” I have trouble comprehending English
“12” Only narcotics will help me and I want them now
“13” I am a total wuss
…and so on.
As manifested by external signs (cool skin; sweating; moaning) I’d say the commonest severe deep pain is kidney stones, but many other painful things produce qualitatively different responses. A limb chewed up in a woodchipper might have a surprisingly mellow owner, and a little stinging bug inside an ear canal might produce a stark raving lunatic.
In any case, don’t worry about the scale; it’s not a quiz. Give it any number and ask politely for a narcotic. Try not to make it your tenth visit with the same request and you’ll get the narcotic.
This is probably TMI, so consider yourself warned.
About one in every three or four periods makes me wish I were dead. I get gut wrenching pain that has me alternating between lying on my bathroom floor, wailing in pain, and breaking out into cold sweats and sitting on the toilet with a bucket in front of me as well. It’s as if my uterus is trying to exorcise a demon. When this happens, it’s always on the first day of my period and will last anywhere from two to twelve hours. During one of the longer bouts, after the need to be physically in the bathroom was passed, I just had a bucket next to my bed that I would lean over and puke into ever fifteen minutes or so. Not much would come out towards the end (lovely yellow bile with streaks of blood in it!) and I think that was the worst part.
FWIW, I have talked to my gyno about the problem. She put me on the pill and, after trying several different flavors of it, I decided that it just wasn’t for me. I hated how it made me feel. If I’m diligent, I can usually tell what periods are going to be bad ones and pump myself full of OTC medications, which usually do the trick.
The worst in terms of sustained pain level was from a severe laceration from a bicycle accident. Between the cut and the associated bruising, the throbbing pain was just short of unbearable for maybe two days.
The worst in terms of instantaneous, short lived pain was when a banged by head on the sharp corner of an oven hood. Hurt like hell for about a minute, during which time I severely damaged said hood, and then spent the next half hour banging it back into shape before wifey came home and had me committed (she never found out).
But the real worst is the neuropathy I have in my right leg. It feels like an electric shock lasting from less than a second to maybe 30 seconds. The thing about it isn’t the pain level, although that can be quite nasty, but the fact that I don’t know when it’s going to strike. Fortunately, for the last 10 years, Neurontin has kept it from happening.
There have been a lot. Still, I remember when I had two broken arms in full wrist-to-shoulder casts.
It wasn’t so much the breaking them that hurt the worst.
The most painful part was being on the can while they were healing. Imagine trying to wipe yourself clean if both of your arms are broken and in casts. Ouch.
Getting hit by a truck. As I lay in the street, I thought that my leg had been knocked off. I would come to in the emergency room and scream for morphine. They would tell me that I couldn’t have any painkillers since I was going into surgery, I would say “ok, ok…”, and pass out for five or ten minutes until I came to again and started screaming for morphine.
The only funny point was when the nurses asked for a urine sample, and I couldn’t give one (stress will do that to ya’.) Thinking that I might be shy, they asked my father to help. I remember him grimacing and mumbling, “Hey, they need for you to pee.” I tried and then screamed “No, it was blown off too?!?!”
At some point, they asked where I was hurt, and I screamed “My freaking leg!” The nurses explained that they needed to know what else hurt, and I told them that my shoulder hurt a little and my mouth felt funny. As it turns out, I had a separated shoulder, a broken nose and three broken teeth, along with the broken femur and muscle and arterial damage.
I went through a window many years ago, and cut the medial nerve and several tendons out of might left wrist. A few days after surgery, with my hand all bound up, I started having “night twitches” - you know how you get the jumpies sometimes when you are falling asleep? Well, a bnch of muscles that normally get a lot of use hadn’t been getting any, and they got quite jumpy.
I would start to fall asleep, and my left hand would clench - thus jerking the stitches for all the tendons and the major nerve in my arm.
Only time I’ve ever screamed, I think. Once I got used to it, I would just cry. That was a tough couple of weeks.
I’d say the worst pain I’ve ever endured was either probably about 5 minutes after completely tearing my Medial Collateral Ligament in a football game, or the day after surgery to repair it, when the OR/recovery painkillers wore off and I discovered that I was allergic to vicodin, and had to put up with some kind of tylenol/codeine combination that was far less effective, but didn’t make me nauseous and seriously stupefy me at the same time.
I guess as far as intensity goes, it was the actual injury- I was sitting on the bench with the team doctor yanking on it, when BAM! the pain hit… cold sweats, real pale, wide eyes, gasping, etc… It wore off after about a half-hour though.
After the surgery, it wasn’t quite as intense (maybe 80%), but was constant, no matter how I sat, etc… it just HURT like hell. I guess having a great big screw put sideways into your femur will do that…
peritonsilar abscess
Until I went to the doc, swallowing was like sticking an ice pick into my throat. I ended up carrying a cup around to drool into b/c the pain of swallowing was just too much.
The worst was when the doc went to squeezing the back of my soft palate to drain all the vile stuff in there. He must have sucked out a pint of the most horrid-looking goop. When he said he had to do it one more time, I about ran out of the room.
Abcessed tooth. I wanted to cut my head off.
You maybe want to talk to her again - or to someone else. I have two friends who used to have horrific periods and their docs put them on some pill to fix it but it was most definitely not ‘the’ pill. Both reported great relief.
Ironically perhaps, getting the tip of my index finger amputated in a doorway was not painful at all. Someone had to bring it to my attention that I was standing there spouting blood.
The most painful event I ever had was, at about age 10, falling off a bicycle onto my face and chest. The fall not only broke my nose and knocked the wind out of me, it briefly paralysed my chest muscles so I couldn’t inhale. After a couple of panicked attempts to breathe, I truly believed I was about to die.