the morning after I had my gall baldder out and a vasectomy at the same time ( figured, I’m under general, might as well kill two brids with one stone) There was a mixup in the schedule and I was without paind meds and the nurse shift change missed me.
For about 40 minutes I was in the worst pain I have ever experienced until the doc came in and injected Versed into my IV. I went from a pain level of hell, not able to breath or move to sitting there perfectly fine in under ten seconds.
Managing to hobble my way to the bathroom in the theater and pee after drinking a large soda and watching about 2/3 of Return of the King. 
I didn’t want to miss anything, so I was almost going blind trying to hold it, lol.
Mine sounds pretty wimpy, compared to the horror stories upthread, but…
When I was 16, after several hours of a gastroenteritis attack that had me curled up in a tight ball of agony for several hours, they finally gave me shot of some muscle relaxant that resulted in several minutes of projectile vomiting and instant relaxation of all the horiibly cramped muscles in my body. Then they sent me back (well, my parents carried me) to the waiting room where I spent about an hour on the most comfortable filthy linoleum floor because I was too limp to sit in a chair, even with mom propping me up. The real fun came when the techs wanted me to stand up so they could x-ray my stomach. I understand it was very comic to watch - they would drape me over the machine and run behind the sheild to try and get a picture before I slithered back to the ground. After 4 times they gave up and just sent us home. I loved those Naval hospitals.
When the intern doctor finally got the tube punched through the inter-cardial-whatever stuff between my ribs and re-inflated my lungs. The relief wasn’t the inflation. I was still able to breathe, just not well. No, the relief was that the 22-year-old timid doctor intern wasn’t half-heartedly jabbing me with a damn spike between my ribs. During the “poking” I was screaming enough that some of the other interns had to run out (or so I’m told). But just as I took a breath for another yell, the tube went through and I got a real, full-sized double-lungful of air. That was the sudden realization of just how little air I’d been getting. So what was about to be a mother of a scream turned into me saying, “It worked” in a little croak. I DO remember some of the nervous laughter from the kids around me at that point.
I’ve had a couple true instances of absolute perfect relief. One was when I got my epidural when I was giving birth. I’ve had back problems my whole life (well, for twent years of it) and pregnancy only made them worse. Every day I wake up in pain and go to bed in pain, popping a variety of pills to dull the pain so i can function. But when I got that epidural, I asked, quite seriously, if there was a way I could live my life on an epidural. Because for the first time in probably 10 years I couldn’t FEEL my back. I was not AWARE of my spine’s existence. How often does the average person THINK about standing up or laying down or driving, and whether or not they can do it? i have to think about it every day, but for those six or so hours on the epidural (and morphine for a third degree taint tear) I was at peace.
Sort of like that but my dentist refused to remove it until I was on antibotics for ten days. On the ninth day in the abcess burst. Worse taste ever but it was an instant release from the throbbing pain.
I think my greatest pain (fortunately) was dislocating my kneecap, and the greatest relief was having it put back. I think it may have been the drugs they gave me though. I remember this overwhelming relief, and insisting on thanking everyone over and over.
I can’t take Demerol - makes me projectile vomit - but they always try when I go in after the triptan doesn’t work.
Sigh.
trust me this was physical. But it wasn’t an instant gratification kind of relief, but I must say it is the greatest relief I’ve ever experienced.
I was on some bad birth control pills. Bad. Um…no, really. BAD. They made me straight up depressed. And I mean depressed where you don’t want to MOVE. I didn’t do laundry for a month, I cried every 30 minutes for 3 whole months. Doing the dishes hurt, everything hurt - you name it. I didn’t even deocorate my house for my most favorite holiday - Halloween. And that is just so not like me. The experience was absolutely horrible. One good side to it was that it helped me to finally understand people who battle depression every day. Its not the people in your life or your environment that makes you this way. There is no good reason for you to be so lethargic and sad, but dammit you just ARE. You can’t perk yourself up, you can’t just “get over it” Your brain will not allow it. It was not the worst pain in the “sharp and angry” sense, but it was a truly awful experience that I now gladly pay through the nose monthly in order to never have to re-live.
When I told Doc no more of this and was switched to different medicine - even different than I had taken before this evil version - it was like a light had been turned on. I was not only not sad anymore, but I had ENERGY. I havent cried in months, I have no urge to. I am practically GIDDY every day. i have a job i loathe, I just had to put my 3 year old cat to sleep last week (I pick up her ashes tonight at the vet) - yet I wake every morning happy smiling and excited about what I get to do today. It’s rather frightening how great I feel.
AND my periods only last two days now. Sigh, whats not to love?
Ughh… Nothing worse than a case of First Time Doing This-itis.
In a freely ambulatory mode, the best relief I had was a trigger point / nerve block injection in or near my spine. Three months’ worth of muscle spasms caused by a compressed nerve just dissolved by the time the doctor pulled the needle out.
In a non-ambulatory mode - the day previous, I’d had a lumbar puncture (aka spinal tap) to rule out meningitis or whatever as a cause for a string of wicked headaches I’d been having. A possible complication of the procedure is leakage of cerebro-spinal fluid, (CSF) and even though it’s not much, it’s enough to feel like your brain is resting on the hard bony interior of your skull instead of floating peacefully on CSF. I can’t describe the pain or the disorientation - it’s quite an out-of-mind sensation.
Naturally, I had the procedure done on the day before Thanksgiving, so when I woke up a wreck on Thanksgiving morning, the only available option is the ER. I stagger in, hand over my insurance card, say “yesterday lumbar puncture need blood patch” and collapsed.
Collapsing is a good “get into triage fast” method.
Now, a blood patch is a simple procedure, in theory. It’s a sort of reverse lumbar puncture - instead of taking out a sample of CSF, they put in a similar amount of your own blood to fill the volume, and clot and seal the leak.
The neurologist that did the LP on Wednesday was an ace - he’d obviously done scads of these and could all but verbally coax a sample out of your spine without needing the needles. The doc available in the ER? Remember, this was a holiday, so I was probably lucky to get a first-year. I think she had to scurry off to Google “How to do a blood patch.” Instead of a quick poke with a needle to inject the local anaesthetic, she decided to ring the puncture site with a series of injections. Again. And. Again. And. Again. Meanwhile, I’m experiencing a mix of nausea, vertigo, and eleven flavors of pain while my brain is scraping against the sharp bones in my skull, and howling and screaming all throughout.
Eventually, she jams in the ever-popular 18-gauge short bevel spinal needle, then draws some blood out of my leg and injects it into my spine.
Reboot.
I go from wailing and screaming to wondering why I was raising a fuss two seconds ago.
It’s amazing what an effect a few cc’s of fluid volume can have, when put back into the right place.
I didn’t study for any of my bar exams until two days before I sat for them so I ended up staying up approximately 4 nights in a row for IL and 5 for CA without a single moment of sleep (caffeine and at the time, nicotine, were my best friends).
I can honestly say sleeping through those 7 flights at Midway was the greatest physical relief I have ever felt in my life. I’d get up just in time to reschedule the next flight back to L.A. and then promptly miss it because I’d fallen asleep at the gate.
OTOH, it has not been worth it to become the butt of my family’s jokes regarding missed flights.
Walking into the daycare lady’s apartment, after a frantic way-over-the-speed-limit drive across town, only to discover that I’d radically misunderstood what she’d told me over the phone and that my three-year-old daughter was not dead.
In fact, she was standing there smiling at me as I burst into the room, half-crazy with dread and fear.
For background, I made this post on LJ on a Saturday morning, and the events listed took place on a Friday night. It’s horrid TMI, but seeing as I’ve already posted it on LiveJournal, I might as well post it here as well.
It all started with a bleeding ovarian cyst. Tuesday afternoon I went into the ER directly from work with abdominal pains. It felt exactly like my appendicitis felt–the same place and everything. I knew I once had a small ovarian cyst on that side, but it went away over a year ago. I told the doctors all that, they did an ultrasound and determined that I had a 4.5 cm “funny-looking” cyst on my right ovary. “It’s probably not cancer,” the ER doc said. Very reassuring. They sent me home with a bottle of percocet and an admonition that I get it checked out ASAP by my gynecologist.
Flash forward to yesterday. I had been taking approximately three percocets a day–much less than they’d been telling me to take. I went in for an ultrasound at my GYN, who told me that the cyst was either endometrial or bleeding into itself and that all they could really do was wait a month, see if it goes away, and if it doesn’t it would require surgery. I had not taken a percocet all day before the ultrasound, but all the jiggling caused it to hurt again, so I took another one when I got home. By yesterday evening I realized that I had only pooped a tiny bit since I was in the ER, and it was starting to get a bit uncomfortable, especially since straining for a bowel movement is one of the things that causes the type of cyst I have to hurt even worse. I talked to my mom, and she put her doctor hat on and told me that yes, percocets cause constipation, and that I should go get some Dulcolax and take only one, because any more than one would give me diarrhea. I sent my husband out to get me some, and while he was gone, it began.
I went to the bathroom with the urge to poop. “Well, isn’t this funny,” I thought. “Patrick is going to get home and I’ll have already pooped and that trip will be worthless.” How wrong I was. I sat on the toilet for ten minutes, straining and sweating, as I felt the poop “crowning” and literally stretching out my asshole, but nothing would come out. My husband got home, found me on the toilet, and when he found out that things weren’t going well he got me a glass of water. I took two Dulcolax, thinking that there’s no way that I would get diarrhea from the average dose. And waited. By this point the abdominal cramps were getting to the point where I was starting to sweat, and my legs were going numb from sitting on the toilet for too long. I decided to grab a wad of TP and see if I could knock it out…and that’s when I found that behind the little point of turd that was sticking out was a softball-sized mass of shit that was harder than a rock and not nearly pliable enough for my sphincter to pass it. The little point that was crowning came off into the wad of TP, but the softball remained. That’s when I started to panic.
My husband had mentioned, when he came home with the Dulcolax, that he’d gotten the pills because he figured I wouldn’t want the suppositories. At the time that he came home, before I realized how dire this situation was, it got a chuckle. Now, as he heard me moaning and breathing heavily in the bathroom, he came in and checked on me and I told him in no uncertain terms that I wanted the suppositories right fucking now. So he got dressed and went out again, the saint. Meanwhile, I am in full-on throes in the bathroom–shaking, moaning, swearing, sweating, nearly vomiting, and praying to whatever mute and vengeful God that was up in the sky to end my pain. Everything that was happening to me felt like the description of the transition phase of labor. I keep trying to get up so I can get some bloodflow in my legs and maybe make gravity do something. It’s very hard to walk with a softball of shit pressed up against your sphincter, I learned. Still, the walking was a relief for all the other pain I was feeling.
Eventually I lost whatever was remaining of my sanity, sat down on the toilet, and started digging at the shit ball, pushing large chunks of it around and sometimes getting lucky enough to knock some out of me. It felt just like those long colored strips of modeling clay that I used in grade school–the kind that didn’t have the preservatives in it like Play-Doh so it wasn’t all nice and soft. Whatever remained of my dignity was completely gone at this point–I just wanted this fucking thing OUT. And yet, it still wasn’t moving. I felt like the guy from goatse, or that weightlifting picture with the prolapsed rectum. I seriously considered calling an ambulance.
And then my husband arrived with the suppositories. I had cleaned out just enough of a cavity in the shit ball to force one in there, but then I had to hold it in there for 20 of the most excruciating minutes of my life. I managed to walk to the bed, curled up in a fetal position on my side, and moaned. At one point my teeth were chattering uncontrollably. My husband, saint that he is, stayed with me the whole time, even when I started cursing at him to change the fucking channel right now! Apparently, The Next Great American Band is not that great at all when you’re dealing with an impacted fecal backlog.
After 20 minutes, the urge to shit became uncontrollable. I went back into the bathroom and the first thing that came out was the oily remains of the suppository. Fabulous. And then, slowly but surely, a miracle happened–I felt the softball start to progress. Apparently, the suppository was just what it needed to soften it up just enough that it would form a shape other than “round”. After about twenty minutes of pushing, I passed a turd the circumference of my wrist and the length of my forearm. The upstairs toilet is still clogged by this beast and I can’t get it unplugged–but that’s fine, because it’s no longer plugging ME.
The best part? Well, except for the fact that I now have oily discharge coming from my ass thanks to the two pills and the suppository, to the point where I think every fart is a shart waiting to happen? My husband had nearly passed out during the ultrasound at the GYN earlier that day, when all the nasty alien probing was covered by a paper sheet and he was sitting up by my head. Seriously, it took him 20 minutes to get his color back and he had to leave the room before I even had my clothes back on. During this, which was a hundred thousand times more horrifying? He was fine. Men.
One of my great pains was an ACL tear. When I had that repaired I had a spinal and this caused me to be unable to uniate for something like 24 hours. Now, after sugery they force you to drink fluids and they also give you fluids via IV, so I was pretty damned … um, full after a while.
Enter a young, fumbling, nervous male student nurse, told to cathaterize me. I’m male too, so we were both nervous, this being the first time for both of us. He did the deed without too much pain and the relief was the greatest of my life. I’m still straight BTW, but a nervous young man with a plastic tube will always have a place in my heart.
Definitely the epidural after nine hours of pitocin-induced labor. I wasn’t progressing and they were starting to get concerned, but 20 minutes after the needle went in the baby came out. The doctor almost didn’t make to the hospital in time.
A close second was the steroid shot for my seriously swollen knee. It didn’t work quite as fast, but the pain had been so bad earlier in the day that I’d almost passed out when I tried to put weight on that leg. However, the fluid removal that preceded the steroids ranks pretty high on the other end of the scale.
Drain Bead, that very, very thing has happened to me, and I agree it is horrible. I’ve never been through the transition phase of labor since I had all my kids C-section, but OMG, that constipation induced by Percocet was horrendous! The first time, my hubby wasn’t home for me to send him to the store (and there was no way I was getting there under my own power, as I’m sure you’ll understand!) and I ended up taking a taxi to the ER, where they promptly “cleaned me out”! The second time (I deal with Percocet a lot, thanks to chronic kidney stones), my hubby was home. I sent him to the store for a saline enema and mineral oil. Here’s what you do (in case it ever happens to you again!): dump out about 1/3 of saline enema solution, pour in mineral oil. Have hubby administer as much of the enema as possible (he may have to wriggle it around to get the tip past the softball in your ass). Wait 10 or 15 minutes. Ahhhh. Relief!!
However, an even better strategy, which I’ve developed since, is that whenever I’m on Percocet for more than a day, I use a Dulcolax suppository every morning that I’m on the Percocet. That way, it never gets to the “softball” stage!
Oh, and I now keep one saline solution enema and one bottle of mineral oil under my bathroom sink, just in case!
The bus ride from Yangoon to Mandalay takes 16 hours, because they have to stop every 20 miles to check their leaking tire and grease the palms of military checkpoints it really takes 22. You sit on bags of rice cramped next to live poultry, farmers bare feet resting on your lap. Babies cry. Everyone chain smokes. Because it’s summer it’s at least a humid 105 degrees outside, but it feels like much more in the stifling air inside. The window opens but only 2 inches, which you have open for only a few minutes until the locals gesture for you to close it, the reason is soon obvious as an open window allows gusts of fine dust to fill the cabin from the unpaved road. When I arrived I found a guesthouse that had air conditioning for 2 hours everyday, I was in luck, it was going to start soon. That shower and nap in a semi cool room was the greatest relief I’ve ever felt in my life.
For me it wasn’t relief from pain but relief from nausea.
See I get terribly motion sick. In spite of this I took up scuba diving :smack:
Going diving in fresh water was a breeze, no waves at all. My trip to the keys was equally uneventful. less than 1 foot seas and we spent all of our time in Looe Key which was mostly not very deep and more on par with snorkeling than scuba diving.
It was at this point in my diving career (if you could call it that) that my (now ex) husband decided we should go out on a charter boat. The charter was off of West Palm Beach. We had an agreement that we’d scrap the dive if the seas were greater than 2-4 feet. I thought I heard the dive master tell him “4-6 foot seas” when he asked but he swore that he said 2-4 and I believed him.
So we went and the seas were more like 6-8 ft and were were on a 25’ boat and I was as motion sick as I’ve ever been (only I couldn’t throw up because I have a strong aversion to puking). My (now ex) husband had to put my gear together and put it on me because I couldn’t move I was so sick. I actually prayed to die that day I felt so bad.
The Dive Master took one look at my condition and said “get her in the water”. The basically dressed me and shoved me over the side. As soon as I was under the water I felt better. It was a wreck dive which was awesome. When we got back to the top I got sick again but since we’d already had our dive I took a couple of dramamine and fell asleep on desk. That’s the last time I went scuba diving.
The worst thing is that the doctors never told me that this could be a side effect. Had I been warned, I would have been paying attention to it long before it became a problem.
Dude. You win the thread.