I had a nasal problem, and it wouldn’t stop bleeding. I had to have it cauterized, and it basically felt like a branding iron inserted up my nose into the middle of my head.
I’m pretty sure I left claw marks on the chair arms.
Physical pain only for me. I’ve never experienced anything I’d call mentally painful, in fact it’s usually mental numbness when my life starts to get messy.
The worst pain I’ve felt has been gallstone attacks (I’ve had at least thirty), and once had searing toothache.
Physical: I had an infected molar earlier this year and it went bad very quickly - my face swelled up and I started developing gum pustules and…well, you get the idea. The reaction of the dentist and assistant when they drilled it out was illuminating (“…still draining…oh god, it’s still draining…”).
Mentally…
+1
You win. If anyone has a worse story than this, I don’t think I want to hear it.
Dude… you need to get that damned thing out.
I’ve had kidney stones and I’ve had gallstones. I honestly don’t know which hurt worse, but death was a viable option in both cases.
Physical: I’ve led a life of high adventure, so I’ve had plenty. I was actually just talking about this yesterday. I was at the doctor’s office and their new thing they like to do is ask you to rate your current pain from one to ten (with ten being the worst). I overheard some random guy next door who had been laughing and joking around for the last fifteen minutes say he was at an eight. I was like, jesus christ dude, our scales are vastly different. I asked my nurse about how she deals with that, and we talked about it for a while. ANYWAY, on to my list:
Runner-up (and my personal favorite) is when I dislocated my right shoulder. I had fallen just right, and my shoulder popped down about three inches lower than it should have been. My shit-ass Army doctor had no idea how to fix it. The option he went with was to have four dudes hold me down on a hospital bed and have two other dudes try to pull my arm away from my body and back up into the socket. All modesty aside, I am kind of a BAMF, and was like “I’m not going to complain about it or make a noise.” Holy shit. I made it about ten seconds before I was screaming bloody murder. It was unbearable. I was getting narcotics through an IV but they weren’t doing a damn thing. We did this for an hour and a half. An hour and a half. Finally, we were taking a break from the fun when an ambulance driver dropped in and observed the goings-on. He said “Oh, my brother just dislocated his shoulder last weekend. They had him hang is arm off the bed and hold a weight. After a little while the muscles fatigue and the arm will slip back into place on its own.” I did that and my arm popped back in about a minute. Easy peasy. I owe that driver all of the beers, and that doctor a punch in the face. Before the ordeal, one of the nurses had given me a rolled up ACE bandage to squeeze “for the pain”. I still have it.
First place goes to this great condition I have called Proctalgia Fugax, where every once in a while, usually at night, it feels like someone is taking a pair of pliers and pinching the hole of my ass as hard as they can. It’s got a ramp-up time so I can usually stop it before it goes full swing, but at it’s worst it is incapacitating. The last time it got bad I nearly blacked out. It seems ridiculous to describe, but there it is.
Mental: Giving everything I could to make a relationship work with someone who is always right.
I had a small brain bleed about ten years ago. Absolutely the worst headache EVER! I was hospitalized for 10 days, on hydrocodone, and it barely tamped it down. Sent home, and I was off work for another two weeks. Eventually the headache went away. The cure was to let the blood reabsorb into my tissues.
Gall bladder attack one night. It felt like a sword had skewered me through and through. I went to the ER, but by the time I was seen, it had gone away. I got my gall bladder out a few years later, when it wasn’t acting up. They said my stone was about the size of a quarter.
Car accident. I had a seat belt bruise across my chest and boob. It hurt to cough, laugh, or sneeze. Very painful. I broke a bone in my hand too, but it didn’t bother me as much as that deep bruise.
Dolores hit it. Headaches. For me, migraines. For decades, come and go periods of migraines. The MRI saved me when it came out, they figured it out, gave me inderol, fixed me right up. When I feel em coming, inderol heads it off. Before that? Endless cycles of Excedrin, mess up the stomach, lose sleep, migraine, excedrin, same same. The kind of pain that makes you beg God to kill you. I know there is other bodily pain to compete, but this is the one I am familiar with. When your pain is next-to-suicide inspiring, it’s serious. If someone is migraine-struck, help them, they really, really need it.
Not to hijack, but holy crap, this has a name? Is there anything that you can do to stop it once it starts, or do you just have to wait it out? I usually end up walking around the house (in the dark, naturally, because I don’t want to wake anyone up) in agony until it subsides on its own.
I have several good stories on physical pain. I’ll rank them from least to worst, 5 to 1.
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In college, I got bronchitis on multiple occasions. By my senior year, I was having my fourth or fifth bought of it and you would think I had experienced it all. After having already gone to the clinic for this round, I had coughed in the worst way possible and pulled a muscle in my chest. I was convinced something had to be broken. I went back to the clinic and the doctor I got, different from the first one, spent most of our time together berating me for not getting an appointment with the first doctor. Then he gave me tramadol and told me to suck it up.
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Laboring in my back was terrible. I had to be induced because I pre-eclampsia and my little girl was sunny side up. 16 hours of labor was terrible because I couldn’t get an epidural. Which brings me to my next story. . .
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I tried to get an epidural to deal with the pain of my back labor. Except the anesthesiologist couldn’t get the needle in. He tried three times. I begged him to stop. I had horrible bruises on my back from his attempts. Now, I know this hurt more than labor. When I was about 12 hours in, I started to beg for a C-section. The nurse told me that they would have to try to give me an epidural again. I shut up. That’s how bad it hurt.
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When I was 15, a dentist did not wait for my tooth to numb before drilling. While he drilled at my teeth, tears streamed down my face and I tried not to move for fear of making it worse. After what seemed like an eternity, the assistant asked me if something was wrong. The dentist finally removed his tools and I replied that I was not numb. He huffed at me, gave me another shot and kept going without waiting. Now I experience a lot of dental anxiety. This one is worse that the labor and epidural because it felt like deliberate torture and had a bit of a mental element.
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In college, I had a root canal that failed. It started as a twinge, then blossomed into blinding pain. I could not figure out what was wrong because I thought that root canaled teeth couldn’t hurt. I went to the college urgent care and they tested my teeth. I thought I was dying when they tapped the tooth that shouldn’t hurt. They gave me a prescription for vicodin and told me to see a dentist. I waited an eternity for the vicodin which gave me maybe an hour of relief before plunging me into the abyss for hours until my next dose. I went to the dentist and he gave me antibiotics and more vicodin. After three days of pain, the antibiotics finally allowed me to recover. My root canal failure is still the worst pain of my 27 years of life.
As for emotional pain, I think living through my mom’s addiction to vicodin and benzos ranks pretty far up there.
I have a feeling we’re about to become friends for life…
I get in the shower/bath and give myself an enema with warm water. Works every time. I keep a little bulb syringe in the bathroom for this very purpose. I think just sitting in a warm bath helps, though, if you’re skeeved out by the enema thing. Me, I’d do just about anything to stop it. It is friggin’ horrible.
I didn’t know it had a name either. My wife is an nurse practitioner and spent a while trying to figure out what it was.
Physically, a medically necessary circumcision (as an adult) at the same time as getting a vasectomy. Twelve stitches in the head and testicles the size of oranges. I usually avoid prescription pain-killers because I’ve got a high resistance to many of the most common ones. They only start being effective at the “knock your ass out” doses. After being home about six hours, the pain was so bad that I spent the next three days zonked out on whatever it was my doctor gave me.for about another four days, I could barely handle walking a dozen steps without crying.
Mentally, I’m lucky. Nothing really comes to mind.
Thanks to 17 months of 24/7 excruciating physical pain, I’m going through the worst depression in my life right now, way beyond my normal chronic depression. If it weren’t for my husband’s support, I’d be a dead man. But there’s only so much he can do.
Severity: the time I was sitting down at a table in a cafeteria, using my hands to grab the chair and scootch it forward as I lifted my backside off just enough to be able to move the chair. The seat was a somewhat flimsy plastic, NOT properly attached to the leg, so it rose up, and my finger slipped between the top of the leg and the bottom of the seat just as my backside hit the seat. Hard.
This is the only time I have had such blinding pain that I nearly threw up. As it was, the other people at the table (strangers to me) were a bit startled by my barely muffled scream.
Worst overall, not for severity, was botched childbirth with failed epidural. The administration of that was almost as bad as the finger-smashing above, and the whole experience has left me traumatized enough that 22 years later I get twitchy when I have to drive past that hospital.
Electromyelograms / nerve conductance tests are bad enough that I’d refuse one again.
A root canal in a tooth that has not been adequately numbed is pretty damn bad.
And a recent-ish one: About 15 months ago I fell, awkwardly. My back hurt so I toned down my activities for the rest of the day. A few days later, I started having pain in my abdomen - not quite the right spot for appendicitis and not QUITE like the pain I’ve read you feel with an ovary misbehaving, but that general area. If I was sitting or walking around I was fine, but getting to a lying down position - or moving once I was in that position - was not good.
I saw the doc, and she had me hop up onto the exam table and lie back - which apparently was JUST the right movement to elicit the pain, along with a shriek and some very loud, very salty language from me that shocked ME and probably scared other patients.
That got me a thorough ultrasound and a CT scan with contrast to rule out the appendix and the ovary, as those could have required immediate intervention Upshot, it was probably an injury to the inguinal ligament. It ultimately improved though I still have twinges from time to time.
Why on EARTH was your dentist performing a vasectomy? 
Physically, appendicitis. Mental, my wife becoming hypomanic and hospitalized.
If they had diagnosed it correctly at the first attack, they would’ve done it quicksmart. But they completely didn’t figure out shit until the second attack, where they deemed it not an emergency and therefore unimportant. I was put on a surgery waiting list, which was in fact a waiting list for the short list, and after five years I was repeatedly informed how much further down the list (not up) I was being pushed. I no longer live in that country, presumably they’re still sending me updates to my old address on how far down the list I still am.
I can manage the attacks now, they are uncomfortable but no longer excruciating.
Kidney stones. Holy hell. Kidney stone pain is a whole other level of pain. Waves and waves of pain with random stabbing. Red-hot random stabbing. Writhing doesn’t help, rocking doesn’t help, weeping doesn’t help, the only thing that helped was morphine, and goddammit, that wore off when I got home.
Worst mental pain: when my fiance’ died suddenly. One night he was fine, the next morning, dead.
Agh, this thread is hard to read. group hug
Over half of the posts are about kidney stones / gallstones.
I am scared…