I’ll bet it did. Yesterday, I was sitting on the floor helping my husband put some Ikea furniture together. My 3-year-old was “helping” by handing us tools & whatnot. Seemed harmless until she accidentally dropped a hammer on my ankle bone. :eek:
God damn, that hurt. And what’s amazing was how much it hurt considering that no real damage was done. It’s hardly bruised, much less broken. But it still hurt bad enough to make me cry. I felt bad because I think my daughter was freaked out…I doubt she’s ever seen me cry before!
I had a spinal tap- again, about 15 years ago (that was a painful time in my life), and the procedure itself didn’t hut. You always hear about how much they hurt, so I don’t know why mine didn’t. The Headache From Hell that followed for 2 days hurt a lot, but not the spinal tap itself.
Oh yes, pain meds. The doctor in the ER, after I broke my wrist, suggested Tylenol + codeine. I told him that didn’t do anything for me. He gave me 5/500 vicodin. The feeling of well-being was awfully nice, but the vomiting 90 minutes later was kind of a downer. Aleve only takes the edge off, so for the past 3 weeks I’ve just been dealing with the painful ache from the little bones in my wrist rubbing against the broken bone end. It’s better than migraines at least.
As for the uveitis, my sympathy on that. I’ve dealt with patients who thought that cataract surgery and glaucoma treatments were perfectly acceptable side effects from their uveitis treatments, because uveitis is such a bitch of a disease in comparison.
Mine aren’t as bad as most of yours, but my top two:
1 - Roller skating (around age 10 or 11?). I never was really good at it, and I lost my balance. Instead of falling forward or backwards, I fell straight down onto my right skate. My crotch just slammed into that roller skate. Holy shit that hurt so bad. I distinctly remember not being able to breathe and I couldn’t hear anything except for super loud ringing. I couldn’t even see anything; everything was black with tiny bright blue pinpricks of light flashing.
2 - Cramps (like olives). One time in high school, I had no pain meds and no one else around me did either. The cramps got really really bad during my last class of the day. I literally had to crawl down the hallway to the bathroom; I couldn’t even walk. Let me tell you, you know you feel like shit when you are laying with your face on the floor of a public bathroom and you don’t care. I ended up vomiting from the pain. Eventually (after what seemed like approximately 2930436823 years), I felt okay enough to slowly walk out to go home.
Hard to rank them. I chipped my big toe knuckle once playing soccer. I was kicking the ball as hard as I could and my opponent was trying to do the same thing only he kicked me instead. Doesn’t sound painful but it was worse than any broken bone I’ve had. Kidney stone ranks up there. Root canal when the local anesthesia wore off. I actually saw a flash of light with the pain. NEVER get root canal work without some sort of pre-numbing. Re-numbing the root as it is removed can go from zero to blinding pain in a nano-second.
Once upon a time, when I was a lad of twelve, I was out working for about three hours, shirtless and in the Florida summer sun. Now, being as how I’m as pale as a cave-fish, I got a severe sunburn. But that wasn’t the painful part. The painful part was how my skin dried out and started itching. And it was maddening; given the choice of having my skin flayed off or keeping it on and enduring the itching, I would have gladly chosen the first option!
Okay, sure, it wasn’t like I had a limb ripped off or anything, but imagine having every square inch of your arms, neck, lower legs, torso and neck positively on fire, and no amount of scratching or lotion could ease the itching. I couldn’t stand it; I was in a bathtub the rest of the day. Needless to say, I’m now well-acquainted with long sleeves and sunscreen.
Oh, the whole knee. It went out to the outside (right knee, so out to the right of the knee) so that the shin bone did not line up with the thigh bone. Two times, it went back in on its own when I hit the floor. The third time, after being transported to the hospital with it out, I hysterically screamed DON’T TOUCH ME! DON’T YOU FUCKING TOUCH ME! in the ER until they knocked me out. I was on crutches for weeks and in an immobilizing knee brace for weeks more.
Once in a great while my abdominal adhesions get really bad. They were once so bad I almost called my FiL to take me to the ER (and I probably should have). I was curled up on the cold bathroom floor hoping to die. I think if I had been able to get to the bedroom I’d have shot myself.
When I had mononucleosis about 2 years ago. The doctor mis-diagnosed it as tonsillitis and prescribed me a medication that actually inflamed the mono and made it worse (as I was later told.)
I could not swallow without the most hideous, unbelievable pain. The whole back of my mouth and my throat were covered in thick, white bacterial lesions. In three weeks, I lost thirty-five pounds from lack of ability to swallow. I was able to only drink a tiny amount of soup and water.
Eventually I convinced my doctor to give me Vicodin, which he did, and I took a lot of it and it only dented the pain. I was also gargling bottles of Lidocaine gel like crazy. Thankfully, when I went back to the doctor he correctly diagnosed it as mono, and he gave me an injection of very powerful antibiotics. Surprisingly, this cured it in just a few days.
The day after I had the shot, I looked at the thick, white swollen mass of my upper throat in the mirror, and I opened my mouth very wide, which apparently flexed some kind of muscle back there and tore the skin a tiny bit, and huge amounts of yellow pus just drained out. After this, it felt WAY better. In a few days, I was no longer ill.
Oooh, Argent Towers just reminded me of a pain I’d totally forgotten about… a hernia of the esophagus when I was about 16. That hurt like a bitch. I spent days of the healing period completely alone, and I remember laying on the floor of the living room weeping because I couldn’t even drink water without incredible pain. I was starving and thirsty as hell, and there was nothing I could do about it because I could maybe swallow two gulps of water every hour or so without tears immediately springing to my eyes.
It absolutely amazes and terrifies me the sheer number of possible sources of agony there are for the human body.
Natural childbirth was transcendentally painful. (And screw what everyone says about how “you totally forget the pain afterward!” My ass you do. I still remember every minute of my non-epidural birth with Whatsit the Youngest.)
But my vote is going to have to go to the aftermath of having an impacted wisdom tooth removed. I also had two other wisdom teeth extracted at the same time, under general anesthesia, but it was the impacted one that gave me three days of total misery afterward. Even with the Vicodin, I still wanted to throw myself out a window. I remember thinking very seriously that I would never be able to eat normally again. God, that sucked.
I think I’m going to be sick. If I knew what an ACL was, I’d try to avoid blowing mine up.
Maybe the time I spilled boiling honey on my stocking feet. Only 60%, but the cotton held the honey pretty well. Sterile as all hell, so there was no infection. Bitch doctor recommended Advil. Freakin’ Advil!
Crushing my pinky-toe on a table leg was right up there.
The removal of two impacted wisdom teeth under local wasn’t that bad.
Removal of three of the seven screws which had reassembled my tibia/fibula made me intimately aware of the measure of innervation a bone possesses. Local for the incision only.
Had the kidney stone attack about twenty years ago. I awoke at about 3AM thinking someone was stabbing me and lurched out of bed to confront my attacker - no one was there! The doc said that I’d probably be bothered by kidney stones in the future; so far, so good, no recurrence.
Had a gall bladder operation about ten years ago - that was definitely the worse, far ahead of childbirth, kidney stones, broken ankles, (yes! Plural!) etc. Thinking I could tough it out, I didn’t see a doc as soon as I should; turned out that I had gangrene in the gall bladder and am very lucky to be alive. Am so glad I didn’t know that until a week after surgery.
My surgeon said that gall bladder surgery is a very stinky surgery - having gangrene made it pretty nearly unbearable for him, death-threatening for me.
The OP is obviously (?) talking about physical pain, however…
I’ve had various injuries, illnesses, major dental work, and MOHS surgery – but a broken heart is the worst pain I’ve ever endured. And I’m not kidding.
My oral surgery didn’t go so well and I wound up with dry sockets. Jesus Pete, that’s horrible.
I also got E. coli one time and that was days of agony, not being able to sleep but not being able to do anything, either. Just feeling like I wanted to die just to get some relief.
Also, shingles was BAD. And I had a mild case. Imagine feeling the exact paths of the nerves in your face, sharp and burning, and it NEVER stops. It throbs and pinches and feels like every nightmare where the bad guy gets you. I hope if I’m very, very good, I’ll never get it again.
One time my sweetie got some kind of something that caused his intestines to spasm and contract in the most excruciatingly painful way. I was sick on adrenaline by the time I got him to the doctor, since just listening to him in so much pain was so terrible it put my whole body on high alert.
Well, there’s your absolutely agonizing pain that abates fairly quickly, and there is the less agonizing pain that lasts for 18-24 hours. Hard to compare the two.
In the first category, we have the time I demolished my left ankle playing soccer. Ruptured all the ligaments on the outside of the joint, damaged the cartilage, and left a couple of bone chips floating around in the joint (doctor said it’d cause more damage to find them than to leave them there). Hurt worse than when I ruptured my right ACL. Absolute and complete agony. It was then that I developed my theory that there is a maximum amount of pain that the human brain can process, and it is moments like that when, for a split second, the pain-o-meter in your brain pegs. Just for a moment. Then the ordinary agony sets in.
In the second category, there would be some of the migraines I have experienced–agonizing head pain with violent nausea. One episode I endured for around 20 hours (I’m not sure why), the last 12 of which I couldn’t even drink water, before asking my wife to take me to the ER. I was crying in pain by that point.
It is hard to decide the worst. When they happened, the 2 simultaneous broken arms were very bad. But in the years since, other things have pushed them down the list.
Muscle spasms in my back a few years ago, during which I had to continue to work because I was out of sick time, and I couldn’t take relaxants to get through the day because I drove a forklift. I would hobble into work, climb onto my forklift, then do the best I could to spend the next 8 hours on it because it hurt so much to get on and off.
About 4 years ago I had to have about 1/4 inch of my jaw ground off to properly fit a crown on a back molar. But while it was probably my worst dental experience, it was more unpleasant than painful. I only needed 1 vicodin after the anesthetic from the procedure wore off.
I had 3 abscesses in the last 2 years. The first one lost me the molar with the crown on it, the second was a result of a bone spicule from the removal, and the third was from the second not healing completely and resulted in a root canal and a crown on the next molar up. All of them are up there near the top of the pain list. But the second was the worst. I was taking 2 vicodin every 5 hours so I could sleep for 3 hours in between. The hour on either side of taking the pills it hurt to much to sleep.
Then there was the liver biopsy. They gave a list of things that could cause “discomfort” from a liver biopsy. But most people don’t have a problem. I had all of them. He took 3 slivers out, each time he hit a nerve in my liver, so I felt it when the tool snipped. He also hit a blood vessel so it bled a lot. And they cut through the diaphragm muscle which irritated my vagus nerve. The hole from the biopsy made it painful to lie on my side. The vagus nerve made it impossible to lie on my back. I had 4 grains of morphine and 2 tylenol w/codeine and spent 4 hours trying to balance at an angle that didn’t hurt too badly to breath.
The sciatica attacks are bad, the arthritis is ever present, but the abscess and the liver biopsy are a tossup for the worst.
Man, that sucked. I got taken to the hospital and they decided that they need to wash out all the paint. It took 4 people to hold me down. One on each arm and leg.
That REALLY sucked.
Slee
*Imagine having a 12 pound weight dropped directly onto your eyeball from about a foot.
You know in movies when you see a woman (usually) hit in the face, and they fall over, and struggle to get back up? That’s how heavy my head was. I can remember trying to alert attention to my folks, because I knew that something was really wrong.
I got out of bed and hit the floor – because my head was too heavy and it felt like I had a drill in the back of both my eyes. I struggled out of my room, but that’s as far as I got because I had to crawl while trying to keep my head up off the ground, and I couldn’t both crawl and keep my head off the ground. I can remember tripping over my head. My dad found me, apparently hours later in the hallway.