Vasectomy. I’m not sure if plnnr quite nailed it. I was given a valium prior to the “painless” operation. Made me more jumpy than before. The nurse, seeing how nervous I was, asked if I’d like to reschedule. Feigning bravery, I declined. Feet up in in stirrups, the doc injected both sides with the local anesthetic. I flinched on one side, so he had to go in again. Felt like throwing up. You can’t get kicked hard enough there to be able to empathize with this kind of pain.
The rest of the operation consisted of a lot of cutting & tugging that made me feel like Mel Gibson at the end of Braveheart. “Freedom!”. Indeed.
I can always spot a guy who has just had this operation because there’s that special bow-leg walk. Every step, if not taken gingerly, feels like your little guys (now the size of avacados) are being pulled down to ground level and released like rubber bands back up toward your groin. I once forgot this while “hopping” out of a tall pickup truck. I almost passed out.
I won’t even go into having to pull the stiches out over a period of weeks as they slowly dissolve…
This is a tough one. I also have a herniated disk (L5S1) that has sent me to the emergency room a couple of times - demerol just took the edge off. But I’d have to say the worst was a migraine I had just after Xmas of 2000 - 24 hours of throbbing pain in my skull, along with intense nausea and consequently dry heaves. I got Demerol in the ER (two doses intravenously), which helped but did not get rid of the pain - I was miserable for 7 more days. At least with the herniated disk, if I propped myself up just right with the pillows, the pain would ease up. There was nothing I could do to alleviate the migraine.
Ok, this didn’t happen to me, but I got to witness it.
Mack in junior high, a friend of mine and I got a ride to his house from his sister. She parked the car in the garage. The garage door was one of those that had multiple hinges that allow it to fold at the top when the door is being opened or closed. My friend went to close the garage door and inadvertently placed his fingers in one of the hinge places. He pulled down hard enough to make the door latch in the closed position…with his fingers in the seam.
Both hands were trapped.
All of a sudden, he’s got his head thrown back, he’s yelling, and he’s swaying back and forth like he was doing his best Ray Charles impression.
I thought he was kidding. His sister figured it out and reopened the door.
Poor bastard. In retrospect, though, he sees the humor in it. Of course, I saw it right away.
Cluster headaches. I used to get them all the time. Intense pain, like someone shoving a hot poker through the back of my head. You really can’t do much when they strike, because they only last 10 to 20 minutes. Basically, you crawl around on the floor, screaming, and want to bash your head onto a hard surface. I haven’t had one in about four years (knock wood).
Also, when I was 7, I broke my nose. I was coming in from recess at school and tripped over someone else’s boot or something. I flew nose-first into the corner of a brick wall.
Oh, and the time when I had some bizarre reaction to an antibiotic. It felt like someone was shoving a pole under my sternum and out my throat. Chest x-rays, ECG, the whole deal. What annoyed me in the end was that it turns out the infection I had turned out to be viral, not bacterial, so the antibiotics were useless in the first place.
Amen. Amenamenamen. The only pain I’ve had where I’ve tried to induce another pain just to give myself something else to deal with. se. mine too have stopped many years ago and I truely hope your hiatus from these is permanent.
While I think I have a relatively high pain threshold (dealing with a fractured coccyx when I was a kid), like capybara, I’m gonna read up on how to avoid internal stones of any sort. :eek:
A few things that caused me pain: torn ACL (3 times), severely sprained ankle, dislocated elbow, cracked rib, hiatal hernia spasms, TMJ spasms, severed hand nerves. It’s funny, but while I know these hurt greatly at the time they occured (saw stars, threw up, etc), I don’t really remember the pain. I can remember the intensity of it and my body’s reaction, but not the pain itself. Hmmm, I don’t think I’m doing a good job of explaining this.
Major pain after a dentist had to break apart some teeth to extract them and broke the socket or sockets in doing so! Nothing killed the pain after the anesthetic wore off until he gave me a prescription for some pills that were one step away from morphine. Those did a greeeeaaatttttt job of not only killing the pain but sending me into happy land initially. I could get to liking those real quick!
Kidney stone pain. Enough stories exist. Im just adding my vote.
First runner up is having ear drum punctured by doctor who syringed my ear. Screamed so hard people in the pharmacy next door heard me. Purulent and bloody drainage ensued for three days. Its now in every medical chart I have… must never syringe left ear. Ever.
This is probably pretty mild to most of the other posts here, but dangit if it wasn’t the worst pain I’ve ever been in.
When I was in 7th grade I got sick. It started out as a dull throbbing back pain (which I got all the time, a tale tale sign of the runs) that grew into a week of hell. First the back pain got so bad I took some of my dad’s pain meds that knocked me out and I slepted for hours. When I woke up I felt fine and ate dinner. About 20 minutes later my dinner came back up and the back pain was back.
The next day when I went home it still wasn’t gone so that Monday I was taken to the hospital. They couldn’t figure out what was wrong so I went back home to lay in the bed no eating or moving. The pain was in my abdomen but if I wiggled my toes, it hurt like hell. I went back to the ER the next day, and the next for the whole week and they were clueless. At first they thought my appendix ruptured but that wasn’t it, I had to have one of those berium (sp?) enimas too. shudder Eventually they figured out what was wrong after they gave me an ultra sound. Turns out I had two ruptured cysts on my ovaries that got infected.
I spent the night in the hospital with an IV drip in my arm and nurses waking up up every hour to check on me. Magically they pain went away the next day or two and I was back to normal. I’ll never forget that pain though or the hell of getting in and out of the car all that week when I could barely stand to crawl to the bathroom.