What's the most pain you've ever experienced?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
81

I feel like such a wuss…

Physical, I had two vaccines together which apparently my immune system got a liking to. It went into overdrive. I could have drawn a map of where every joint in the human body is, except that just the thought of grabbing a pencil already hurt. Every position hurt, a very sharp pain in every single joint and man, we do have a lot of joints! I’m so glad I don’t have chronic bone problems, that was bad but it only lasted a few hours.

Another time, I fell asleep at the beach, face up, and got sunburned both on all my front and on the back of my legs, where I had all these tiny blisters all over. Apparently the extent means it qualified as third degree (according to the doc who told me this, each burn was first or second, but the total extension upped the diagnosis), but I just lathered on a lot of aloe vera aftersun cream and soldiered on.

Mental, eh. While I don’t think I’ve ever qualified for a clinical diagnosis of depression, those times on the edge, right before being able to pull myself back from the pit and out of whatever situation has brought me there, are bad. But I do realize that I’m very lucky in never having truly fallen in.

82

Physical: either a kidney stone or a ruptured appendix. Both were horrendous.

Mentally: Brother 1 died on Halloween 2013, horse of 26 years PTS December 2013, 2nd brother died January 7 2014. I call it my Triple Crown of Death.

83

Me too. My worst pain was dropping a liter bottle of water on the base of my big toe.

I heard it from my brother this weekend. He had survived cancer and two heart events over the years and had just had open-heart surgery Friday. “And then you have gigi, who has had nothing the matter with her…” Hey, sorry. :rolleyes:

84

When death suddenly takes someone you love deeply, you die too. The rest of your time is spent just waiting for your body to catch up. . .

85

I once laughed at a friend and co-worker who was hobbling around the workplace with her shoe tied to her foot so that the whole foot was just resting on the upper of the shoe. It was due to the pain of an ingrowing toenail she told me when I asked. She said it was the worst pain she had ever known. “Yeah right” thinks I. Then a couple of years later I got an ingrowing toenail myself - karma’s a bitch - and up to that point it was the worst pain I had ever known. I was unable to sleep because of it, couldn’t bear anything on or near the toenail so no socks, no shoes. I went to work in slippers with the toe of one slipper cut out. I saw the company doctor about it and she told me that not only did I have an ingrowing toenail but that it was badly infected and I had to go to the hospital immediately.

I got over that and thankfully it’s never recurred - touchwood!

Then I got an abscess in my gum. It was unrelenting, deep throbbing pain. I couldn’t think straight because of it. It overtook the ingrowing toenail as the most painful thing I’d ever endured. It only completely stopped when I had the 2 teeth above it extracted.

Then I got a bad back. It’s something I have had since my teens. It gets pretty sore from time to time but not unbearably so although the pain does tend to wear me down. This time it was different. It was pain like I had never known before. If I moved the slightest inch the muscles in my lower back would go into a spasm. I started screaming it was so bad.

When I saw the doc, who paid me a house call as I couldn’t get out of bed, she sat down beside me and just that slight dipping of the mattress caused the back to spasm. I will never forget the look on her face as I started screaming again and begging her to do something or get the f away from me. She quickly gave me a muscle relaxant and something else but I don’t remember what. Within minutes I was in pain free and able to move. The relief was amazing. I live in dread of it happening again and every time my back twinges I get scared.

86

Glad I’m not the only one saying Appendicitis. Starting feeling sick, then I felt the pain. Then sickness kind of stalled while the pain SKYROCKETED. Like others in the thread they were about to send me home too as a viral infection had been going around but said a CAT scan is the only way to make sure it wasn’t appendicitis.

Twenty minutes later they come back with a tray full of syringes and drugs and said they’re prepping the OR at the main hospital and I’m scheduled for emergency surgery in 45m. 18 hours and $21,000 later I’m sent on my way.

87

Physical: When a sinus infection migrated down into my teeth. Thank god for amoxicillin.

Mentally: Nothing really. Although right now my supervisor keeps hemming and hawing about when he’s going to retire and hasn’t taught me any of his stuff yet. I wish he would shit or get off the pot already and decide.

88

Popping in, Spice Weasel!

This. I drove myself to the hospital after stopping to pick up some cranberry juice. I thought I’d picked up a UTI. I was pacing back and forth in front of the store, trying to get up enough courage to sit down in the car.

I threw up twice in the hospital parking lot, staggered to the front desk, and they admitted me immediately.

About four hours later, after bliss from the pain meds, I went to work for about an hour, got some work done, went home and passed the damn thing.

The next day I had my hysterectomy. I took a picture of the stone and showed it to my doc and the nurses as they were prepping me.

I can go another sixty years without doing that again.

89

The times my dentist drilled my teeth without novocaine. He didn’t believe in it. Probably because he wanted to do as many patients as possible, a penchant that included finding phantom cavities.

90

I found this article very interesting. Has any other LadyDoper experienced dismissal of symptoms because of our gender? (Maybe that’s another thread.)

91

It’s a tie between a residual air bubble in my gut after my first colonoscopy/polypectomy and a solitary attack of sciatica while driving a car.

92

Yes. The US Navy tended to assume that any wife was at the hospital with Munchausen’s Syndrome because we were lonely and looking for attention because our husbands were deployed … it was bad enough that it effectively trained me to wait until it was ‘go to the ER and get admitted for verging on death’ for stuff. I also got told that I was fat because I ‘sat on my ass popping bonbons all day’ - as a diabetic doing dietary and exercise control [and having good A1Cs to prove the control] I can damned well guarantee that I did NOT gain 150 pounds over 18 months sitting on my ass eating candy … and the asshat refused to put in for the blood work to try and diagnose it. Since he told me this when my husband was sitting in his office next to me, we went to the patient ombudsman and put in a complaint. Still didn’t get any bloodwork and since I was a spouse of an active duty squid, if I had gone off base it would have cost us money because we were within a certain distance of base. If I had been 100 miles away, I could have gone to civilian doctors and probably been diagnosed properly.

I have noticed that some doctors will talk to my husband instead of me when we are both at an appointment [or sitting around in hospital post surgery] and if I am in my wheelchair I will definitely get talked past or even talked down to like I was a brain damaged child …

93

Dish! What did the jerks do or say?

passes out and bangs head on desk on the way down

94

One of nine kidney stones. The one in 1978 might have been the worst. since I had the flu at the same time. But the '86 one was bad, too.

95

Fortunately, I haven’t had that much physical pain in my life. Just the normal assortment of broken bones, bad back and an average case of food poisoning.

The worst intense pain was after a surgery to remove growth on my tongue. It was in Japan and the meds they initially provided were as effective as pissing on a house fire.

It took a bit of convincing to get the nurse to call to doctor. She tried shaming me “Aren’t you a man?” to which I offered to make an inch incision on her tongue and see who could do a better job of withstanding the pain.

Finally the doctor came and authorized something stronger.

For emotional pain, besides just the long-term effects of my childhood, the two which were the worst was when my son died and then when I stopped drinking.

I had been self medicating for the PTSD and no one warned me that the symptoms would get worse before they got better. That was hell. But it’s in the past now.

96

In no particular order:

  • Having to lie on my stomach and stretch my right arm out in front of me so it would go into the MRI for scanning. My shoulder agonized me so much that I was shaking after that scan-- the longest 15 minutes of my life. Said shoulder later received surgery for severe impingement.

  • The needle electrode tests done by a neurologist to determine how bad my carpal tunnel syndrome was getting in both wrists. He would stick the needle into the flesh part at the base of the thumb and then put his hand over mine and tell me not to let him close my hand into a fist. The resistance + the needle = pure agony.

  • Gallstones getting stuck in the duct and causing severe chest pain, shortness of breath, and other heart-attack-like symptoms.

  • Stepping on a bee in the driveway while barefoot and feeling the venom for a full five minutes under my big toe.

97

I broke a tooth. It was an upper bicuspid. Due to some other health reasons, the stuff the dentist used to numb it didn’t work, so they sent me home with a script for antibiotics and hydrocodones. I dutifully took my antibiotics and stayed high for a week on the hydrocodones. I went back. The dentist shot me up again. I told him I could still feel it. He said OK, open wide-

He then proceeded to stab a huge needle down along the root of the tooth and inject more novocaine. I nearly came out of the chair.

It did the trick, but he was lucky the pain only lasted a couple of seconds.

98

Physical: either the apex of my migraine pain, before I saw a doctor, which was when I was about 13-14, or when I had a tonsillectomy/adenoidectomy at 34. There are a LOT of nerve endings in your throat and the base of your tongue, so relative to how serious a tonsillectomy is, it is m*********ing painful. And the stupid doctor gave me pills instead of liquid pain medicine. I had to crush them and take them with babyfood pudding, after spraying down my throat with a numbing agent. Day 1 all I could eat was Ensure over ice and Popsicles. Day 2 I could sip cold soda. Day 3 I could eat babyfood applesauce and sweet potatoes for roughage. Day 4, I could eat pudding meant for adults. It was almost a week before I could eat anything that needed chewing, and it was something like six weeks before I could eat things like oranges, tomatoes, or pineapples. Still, it fixed the problems it was supposed to fix, and I would do it again.

Emotional: my aunt, who had been my real mother since I was a toddler, moved from New York to Indiana while my family was in the Soviet Union. When I was almost 11, I returned to our new house in Queens, and to public school, after mostly being in Jewish Day school with my cousins, bereft of aunt, and facing the spectre of puberty. I didn’t have a word for it at the time, but I think I was clinically depressed for most of intermediate school. My grades were terrible, after being pretty good in primary school, and my relationship with my parents, especially my mother, which wasn’t great, hit its nadir. My mother left for a while to go to Europe to work on her dissertation, and I actually got a little better, and took over a lot of adult responsibilities in the house. Then, my mother came back, and I felt pushed aside; no one acknowledged anything I had done, and I was supposed to go back to being just a kid. My relationship with my mother got really bad. She started hitting me, and didn’t believe me when I said that the headaches I got were so bad, all I could do was lie in bed, and feel like I would throw up if I got up for dinner.

When I was 14, I went to live with my aunt and uncle, and it suddenly got a lot better. My aunt took me to the doctor, and I got darvocet and nausea medicine for my migraines, and my grades picked way up.

99

Way back in 1980 I had MANY kidney stone attacks - I had to go to the hospital each time to get hydrated then sent home. After about 10 months of attacks, they FINALLY removed it by surgery.

I got another kidney stone in 1986. This time it was blasted with sound (lithotripsy) and no surgery was needed.

Basically, with each attack, the pain was astoundingly nasty, as well as the nausea.

From what I have heard I think child birth could still be more painful.

100

The worst pain was no question my ankle surgery. It hurt to break it but nothing like when I woke up after having the plate and screws put in. I remember being barely conscious and hearing somebody say “Would somebody please give her some morphine and shut her up”. I vowed at that time never to get any elective surgery because I didn’t ever want to go through that pain again. That’s when I found out that narcotics don’t actually stop the pain-they just stop you from caring about it. I remember thinking “I’m in terrible pain, but it really doesn’t bother me.” (I actually had the hardware removed later and it wasn’t that bad).

Recently, I got a second degree burn on my finger and it was pretty bad for a few hours. I couldn’t stand to take an icepack off it for more than 10-15 seconds. The pain went away completely, with the icepack, though. I was starting to worry about how I would ever be able to sleep without taping an icepack to my finger before the pain eventually got better.