I also jammed my finger in a door so hard the nail turned black and fell off a week or so later.
I face-planted on a stick…almost lost my eye.
It was scary too because that eye was covered in blood and I couldn’t see…I was in the 2nd grade. My brother said little white bubbles were coming out of the blood…
Okay, now that one is going to give me nightmares. In which I vomit.
I’ve also had a pilonidal cyst lanced without any anesthetic. I’ve never ever heard myself weep like that. But the worst pain was the first few seconds (hours?) after coming out of the anesthesia after my breast reduction. Eighteen inches of incisions across my chest. Seven pounds of breast tissue cut away. Nipple complex cut out in both breasts… This is the only kind of pain that I’ve experienced that will make me cry just remembering it. I saw black, too. And I couldn’t yet talk, really. God, I couldn’t process it intellectually. It was so severe that I kind of felt like my conscious self was outside of my body. My brain just went haywire.
Oooh, yeah. That reminds me of another one. I’m 11 years old, and the neighbor kid down the street has a Slip n’ Slide. I was never allowed to have one because my mom recognized them as the quick trip to the ER that they are. Anyway, I tucked my leg under myself oddly on it, and…well, let’s just say that if I didn’t have an imperforate hymen, I would have lost my virginity to my own big toe. As is, it hurt both my toe AND my crotch. That was a fun limp home.
I had a decayed molar where about 1/3 of the top broke off. I bit down on some food that was forced into that hole in a way that was much more painful than anything I felt from that tooth for some reason. The friend sitting across from me said I turned white as a ghost. The superpain only lasted for about 5 seconds before subsiding to a more normal excruciating pain you’d get from biting down on a bad tooth, but if I had a gun in my hand and I thought that original pain was not going to stop, I probably would have blown my brains out after another 5 seconds. I’ve had compound fractures, abrasions over most of my face, and pots of scalding water poured on me, and they were nothing compared to that 5 seconds. I was trembling for several minutes afterwards.
Some mysterious intestinal issue that left me in screaming agony one Christmas. I got some mild cramps, figured it for something I ate.
Unfortunately the pain only escalated until I was hung bareassed over the side of the tub next to the toilet, dry heaving from pain and involuntarily pounding on the tub to distract myself. Finally I screamed enough to bring my parents running from where they were downstairs with the workmen who were there to do some sort of tile project.
I pretty much howled in agony for a good while after my parents had gotten there. It was bad enough that I didn’t give one. tiny. hoot that my famously neurotic mother was seeing me bareassed and in utter indignity.
Fortunately, the pain subsided by itself and my parents rolled me into bed. I guess they figured that if it came back, they’d take me to the ER. Even after the barium swallow my dad took me in for the day after or so, they had no clue what it was. :mad:
I lived on white rice porridge and soy sauce for the rest of that holiday, and had a few additional minor abdominal pain episodes, but nowhere near as bad as that first episode. :eek:
Now I wonder if it might have been the intestinal spasming that someone else posted about upthread.
Reading each and every one of these postings makes me want to go to bed, curl up and whimper
No fucking contest.
I re-herniated the disc at L5/S1 after a cross-country flight. I’d had surgery on it in August of 2006, and it should have been fine…the surgery is 90-95% effective and reherniations are rare. Well, lucky me.
Except this time, the pain was whole-body-shudder hell. The pain shot searing waves down my my back and butt into my hamstrings and feet, and eventually, shot forward into my groin and abdomen. I lost all mobility; I couldn’t sit, stand, walk, or crawl for more than a few seconds. Eventually, I couldn’t shower or even bathe myself in a tub. I could lie and enjoy and the bath water, but couldn’t wash my hair or body. Attempting such Olympic feats as moving to another room or dressing myself filled me with such pain I would tremble afterwards. I lost weight quickly because I couldn’t get to the kitchen to feed myself, and the pain was so overwhelming I didn’t notice when I was hungry.
I made noises I didn’t know were possible. I screamed, moaned, sobbed, and wailed from the core of my being. It was fucking hell.
An MRI showed what little disc material left had herniated straight out like a finger and was kinking the nerve root like a garden hose. When I had the repeat miscrodiscectomy, the surgeon removed three one-centimeter-plus sized disc fragments…these things are usually measured in millimeters. Holy crap. He told me after the surgery that he didn’t need to ask–he knew I was feeling much better.
I’m now three weeks post-op, and sore and weak from not being able to move for weeks, but my life is livable now.
Cracked tooth. The dentist said it was abscessed, but my face didn’t swell up, so I dunno. He gave me amoxicillin and Vicodin. The amoxicillin was fine; the Vicodin made me itch, made me nauseated, rendered me unable to walk, and gave me mood swings so miserably severe that I burst into tears every time there was a kitten on television. It did not kill any pain. I told the dentist this and he gave me Percocet instead, with exactly the same effects. I doubted very much that they would give me a bottle of Dilaudid, and they certainly wouldn’t kill me upon request, so I essentially lived with a tiny dental gnome driving a white-hot poker into my back molar for a week.
That was the only time in my life I have ever seriously considered puking until I had actually thrown up the interior of my feet, and then hammering my head on the floor until I passed out. It seemed like an entirely reasonable alternative to the tooth pain.
This reminds me of a time when I had to go to the E.R. for a severe gastritis attack. Those things huuurt and they last. I get them every now and again, but this one time it was bad enough that I threw up a lot. And HARD.
I get to the E.R. and am being attended by a young doc with NO. SENSE. OF. HUMOR. I mean really, If I had known that he was a veritable black hole of humor, I wouldn’t have tried to lighten the situation with a joke. I do that. It’s how I cope sometimes.
He asked me if I had been vomiting. I said, “Doc, I puked so hard that there were little chinese people sitting on the edge of the toilet screaming, <faux chinese accent> “What I doing HERE?!””
He looked me dead in the face with a very grave expression, and said, “Ssssoooo, you’ve been hallucinating.”
No fucker! It was a bad joke, but funny to me! Jeez, if I HAD been hallucinating, it might have been interesting, but as it was, I was just throwing up a lot.
I laughed nervously and said, “No. Just a joke. Nevermind. I have been vomiting.”
I hate laying an egg of a joke under the best of circumstances.
I spent 1/1/2008 in the E.R. with lumbar back spasms, similar to Shodan’s story. I can’t imagine that a worse pain exists, but some of the things in this thread sound like they might be worse. During the follow-up visit with my doctor, I downright demanded that he give me a prescription for flexeril and percocet so I can always have some on full standby.
If given the option of having lumbar sprain again or getting kicked in the nuts once a week for an entire year, I’d gladly take the weekly nutcracker.
It could have been worse. I once ended up in the ER with a blinding migraine, and the neurologist on-call ordered an MRI for me, to rule out any abnormalities and to confirm that I was “just” suffering from a migraine, and didn’t have an aneurysm that was about to blow.
They didn’t want to give me any pain medication until after it was done.
Once they got the results back, he jokingly commented that they scanned my head and found nothing… snort har-har-har. He seemed to think this was incredibly funny.
I did not find it amusing. My response was to roll over and barf on the floor (again).
I swear to pete, there ought to be a class somewhere in med school about bedside manner. Try not to joke to the ailing, but if the ailing make a joke, fucking laugh.
Come to think of it, maybe they do have that class, but people are failing it.
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Migraines. It’s fun when the sensation of your face against your pillow is agonizing!
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This wasn’t really pain in the typical sense: I had surgery on some of the muscles surrounding one of my eyes when I was a kid (7 or 8, I think). It hurt afterwards, and there wasn’t much that could be done, but the worst part was the itching. Know how sometimes a healing cut itches? Imagine that, only it’s inside your eye, and you’ve been warned that Very Bad Things will happen if you rub your eye. To make things worse, I had extremely bad allergies, and it was the peak of the allergy season - I actually wasn’t allowed in the basement, attic, or out of the house for a week, until my eye could heal enough.
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Menstrual cramps as a teen. The only time I’ve ever passed out from pain was due to that, as were the only times I went home sick from school.
Several classics as mentioned by various posters.
Otitis Media - inner ear ache like a red-hot spike being driven into my ear. ER doc says “Usually we get this in 6-year-olds.” Shut the hell up, doc. Give me the painkillers and something ending in -mycin and do it NOW!
Abscessed tooth put off until blinding pain (I was in college, decades ago). Doc said. “Looks like it’s about to blow.” Then had to put me off an hour because a young kid riding a trike had fallen and broken off a tooth they hoped to re-implant. The tylenol-3 they gave me just blunted the edge of the pain. When they finally got me in the chair, they drilled up though the inside of my left upper canine. The dentist kindly showed me in the mirror. Canine tooth, isolated with a rubber dam. Hole in tooth with pus oozing out. A week later had to return for oral surgery. Open a flap along the gumline, scrape out all the rest of the nasty-bad stuff. Gave me intravenous demerol and phenacetin Took three hours, felt like 20 minutes and I f-l-o-a-t-e-d back to my room. (Fortunately, within walking distance.)
Gallbladder. Here’s a fact that Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, South Beach, etc. won’t tell you. Rapid weight loss can trigger gall bladder problems cite I lost 87 pounds in about 8 months. (Started at 367, so this was not an anorexia thing). Had never had the slightest problem with my gallbladder. Then I started having pain in what I thought was my intestine. Grew steadily worse. Tried laxatives, change of diet, nothing. Finally went to ER in the evening. They did rectal exam, gave me a “cocktail” of Mylanta-like stuff, seemed to help a bit. Thank God I asked my daughter to stay over at my house (my wife had died 4 months previously). At 5 am I had her drive me to the hospital. Finally they did ultrasound, found the problem. The next day, gallbladder surgery. The doc later said it had “a touch of gangrene.”
For the rest of my stay, I fell in love with my demerol pump. No home should be without on.
Interesting. I found a good doctor (unlike the first one) that noticed and could also fix a torn PCL. 20 years ago and my “bad” knee is as good as my “good” one. Good enough to run anyway.
I’ve never had one, nor suffered pain to compete with anything in this thread (the back trouble I had summer holiday before last came close, though: we’re talking about taking twenty minutes to turn over in bed and an inch-thick duvet in the way being too thick to roll over and impossible to move out of the way with any limb movement within range), but I know the kind of thing you’re talking about. It would be kind of like when you’re in bed and the gout has struck, and you’ve got a sheet over your foot and you’re thinking “Damn, that shit is heavy; also I can feel every fucking spring in the mattress”.
I’ve had a couple of broken bones and ruptured my ACL and given birth unmedicated, but my most painful injury wasn’t all that serious. I was a gymnast in high school. One day, I was sitting on the high bar facing the low bar (on a set of uneven parallel bars). I half jumped, half fell off. My chin hit the low bar at about the same time my knees hit the floor. I knocked myself out for a few moments and was truly unhappy when I came to. This was one of those occasions where death would have been preferable to the pain I was feeling. Essentially, I badly pulled every muscle between my hips and my head. I also bit my tongue and needed a few stitches on my chin, but didn’t realize that until much later. I was convinced I’d never walk again. Fortunately, there are a lot of fun medications out there that are great for muscle pain. A couple of weeks later, I finally noticed that there was an area of my ribs that was completely numb, so I guess I must have damaged some nerves, too.
I’m glad I’ve never had kidney stones!
Ooh, I forgot about these. I get them 2 - 3 times annually – often enough that I can go to my doc and say OTITIS MEDIA and he gives me some Levaquin samples and sends me on my way.