This has never happened to me, but I have nightmares about it and it must have happened to somebody: Has anyone ever vomited after abdominal surgery due to the anesthetic? Throwing up is bad enough, but throwing up with a fresh incision in your abdomen has to rank with the most pain possible without causing unconsciousness.
In the same vein, I’ve heard that violent retching can cause the esophagus to rupture. Anyone have any experience with that?
Seems inconsequential after reading 3 pages of this stuff, but here goes:
Ear infections
Migraines
Sprained/hyperextended: knees, ankles, wrists, elbows
Nail stepped on and driven deep into sole of foot
Biopsies of the cervix (TMI, I know)
My worst physical pain occured in grade 6 phys ed. We were playing a baseball game, teachers vs. grade 6 boys, in front of the rest of the school. I was playing first base, when the boys phys ed. teacher rifled a line drive straight towards me. Unfortunately, I was busy making eye contact with a a young lass in the front row, and I received this bullet square in the family jewels. It felt like an explosion of liquid fire, and then I passed out. I awoke a short time later in the fetal position, in so much pain that I didn’t dare scream, because I knew I wouldn’t stop, and unable to unfold myself. I subsequently took a quick ambulance ride to the emergency, where I received massive doses of pain killers and muscle relaxants. Needless to say, I was very sore for several weeks, not to mention I experienced the rather unsettling situation of passing blood for 3 days as well. On the upside, (yes there is an upside), I learned a valuable lesson on the merits of paying attention to the task at hand. Still get nervous playing baseball, though.
Not vomiting, but after my lung surgery (see top of third page), within hours of being transferred from ICU to regular recovery, I got the hiccups. Every time I hiccuped, it felt like I was being stabbed in the side with a cleaver. They lasted for hours. The worst part was that it hurt so bad, I would pass out, and then wake up three seconds later with the next hiccup. Imagine: “Hic-GURK!” <world swims before eyes> <faint> <heartbeat> “Hic-GURK!” <explode awake, wobble, faint again> <heartbeat> Over and over and over.
My hiccups finally ended… when I got a coughing fit. Not what you want to have happen after LUNG SURGERY. After maybe 30 minutes of hacking, I finally spit up a chunk of pink stuff about half the size of my little finger. The nurse took it away, then came back and said it was a piece of my lung, a “loose bit” that had been fastened inside when they sealed the incision after surgery.
Fun, huh?
Oh, and Dewt, your testicle story has to be one of the most agonizingly funny tragedies, in a dark and horrifyingly hilarious way, I’ve ever read. Plus, this little gem:
…reminded me of something that happened to a friend of mine. Didn’t happen to me, but he told me the story in graphic detail, so I’m going to share anyway.
He was working late in the theater, assembling the set onstage. He was alone; everybody else had left long before. He was using a Makita cordless drill and a screwdriver bit to sink sheetrock screws, putting the set together.
'Round about midnight (as I recall, he wasn’t too clear on the timeframe), he’s attaching a board at about head height. He secures one end, moves to the other, reaches above his head, and screws his thumb to the board. Right through the bone.
He’s so surprised and in such sudden pain that he drops the Makita. It bounces off his foot and away. He stands there, screaming, holding his wrist, trying with all his might to resist the impulse to yank his hand away.
Now here’s the worst part: The Makita bounced out of reach. With tears streaming down his face, he stretches his foot out, trying to get the drill, simultaneously trying to avoid pulling on his screwed-in thumb or putting pressure on it in any way. No go; the drill is unreachable. Even if it were close enough to touch with his foot, he has no idea how he would have picked it up.
He had no other tools on him, and he couldn’t pull the whole board free. So with his hand attached at head height, he had to stand there all night until someone else came in in the morning.
He says that at first, the person thought he was kidding: “Hey, morning! You work all night?” - “Give me the drill.” - “What? Why, what happened?” - “Give me the fucking drill, I screwed my thumb to the board.” - “<chuckle> Really? No way.” - “Give me the FUCKING DRILL!” - “Oh shit! Jesus! Sorry, here!”
He says the doctor said it was a “clean hole,” i.e. no splinters or fracture. Tetanus shot, regular cleaning and antibiotics, and he healed up with a round and very strange scar on his thumb.
Just thinking about this makes my hair twitch.
Well, it didn’t happen to me, (my worst was a garden-variety arm breaking and the subsequent snapping of the bone back into place) but a friend of mine got NAILED in the balls during a soccer game, got knocked over and broke his collar bone. This was within the span of a second or two.
I had a heart attack a few years ago. The heart attack itself was not so painful - the pain was more in my left arm and fingers than anywhere else. The worst part came later, in the hospital.
One extremely painful happening was when I was having my angiogram, and the tech was injecting the local anesthesia into my leg. Talk about STINGING - I was literally laying on the table with tears running down my face, while the tech was saying, “DON’T MOVE!!”
The worst part was the day after the quadruple bypass, when the PA removed the drains from my chest and the urinary catheter from down below. “OK,” says he, before the drains are pulled, “take 3 deep breaths and hold.” I did as he asked, and let the breath out with a loud “oh SHIT!!” The catheter removal was just as bad, as was the first time I had to pee. ( I made DAMN SURE that the catheter would be inserted whileI was sleeping before the surgery!)
hard decission…
well Krupp doesnt count (toddler asthma… kind off… diffrent causes… your throat swells so much that no more air gets into your lungs…) cause it is mostly psychological pain. Suffocating doesnt hurt at all… 
I think I ll settle for "thumb stuck in a camping table (dont ask)
I couldnt get it out for 2 or 3 minutes and screamed like mad… I was near blacking out when my mom got my thumb out of there… the shock was worse though… and a lot of neighbours came running to ask who had died…
dodgy
wait wait!
I changed my mind!
Ovary infection.
That hurt like hell and also made place for anger cause the doctor treated me like it was an STD… stupid bitch…
dodgy again
Someone very early on mentioned mine: Herniated disc at L5/S1. Spreads out from your back, across your hip, while simultaneously going down your leg. No position is comfortable. Sitting - forget it. Standing - no way. Laying down - not on your life. You must endure. The muscle relaxants can be very, well, relaxing.
Rabies shots are a close second. “Now this may be a little uncomfortable.” Believe me, it was.
This is OT: I tend to get really violent and persistent hiccups (we’re talking days on end). After 25+ years of suffering, I figured out that if you take a deep breath and hold it as long as possible, the hiccups quit. Just like that.
The other night, I was sitting in a wheeled office chair in my socks, when I rolled over my right big toe. I couldn’t get up out of the chair because my toe was stuck under it, so I couldn’t take my weight off the wheel, so I couldn’t get my toe out… I ended up sort of slouching off the chair in such a way as to get my weight off it. Not all that painful, but as soon as it happened, I thought about this thread.
When one of Nixon’s Watergate plumbers was bragging about how he could hold his hand in a flame, I just had to try.
It hurt like hell for days. Longer and more intense than when my ribs were broken, or my hand slammed in a car doore.
Spinal tap.
I was told it wouldn’t hurt, but imagine a raw tooth nerve being drilled. But it’s your spinal column.
Next worse - when I was told they would be back to do it again the next day.
Wow, I feel kinda wimpy now, but…
Labor/Childbirth, no drugs. The doc would come in every 15 mins. or so and check to see if I had dilated enough. My God, did he have to use his entire arm up to the elbow?! I was seriously backpeddling up the wall.
My husband came home from water skiing one day, thinking he had water in his ear. He reached for the alcohol, puts some in the ear and Wham! Turns out he had busted the eardrum. Then there was the time he was hit by a car and was in a full body cast, the time he drove up under a tracker trailer and bounced down the expressway, when he fell off the roof of the mall, when he was hit in the head with a concrete block and his skull was fractured, it goes on and on…
Being crucified.
I was scuba diving with a cold (not a good idea) and had no problem going down, but I couldn’t clear coming up. I had to just grit my teeth and go up. Felt like my face was going to explode until it the pressure finally equalized up on the boat.
A lot of folks here had it worse, so I’m feeling fortunate about this.
A “green-stick” bone break that the Dr. had to shove back into proper position. He said that it would hurt.
It took him and a couple of nurses on a “one…two…three”
When the bone reset it sounded like a shotgun went off.
Felt like it, too.
I was in a pretty bad car accident, I don’t remember anything about the accident (or half an hour prior to it happening). I broke a vertebrae, cracked another one, and dislocated another. The roof of the car was even with the hood (it was flattened). Including the cuts from all the glass in the car that had to break out, and the breaks, I imagine I was in a great deal of pain. So I did feel it, I just can’t remember anything. Kind of wish I could remember so I could make a grisly analogy like the rest of the folks, yeeeeouch.
My “worst pain ever” story is kind of funny. I was a sophomore in high school when I started to get a stomach ache. Over the course of an hour or so it gradually got worse until I asked to go to the nurse’s office. Once there it got so bad that I couldn’t think straight. First everything turned red, then I got tunnel vision. My mom left work to pick me up while I sat by the front door of my high school. The weird thing was, as soon as I laid down the pain all but disappeared. They X-rayed me at the hospital and said that I must have had an intestinal cramp. The doctor wasn’t surprised, because my large intestine was filled-end to end-with Twinkies. 
Since then, I at least two occasion I have felt the same thing coming on. I always laid flat on my back and the pain immediately dissapated. I’ve never figured this out.
But I’ve never eaten more than one Twinkie at a time ever again.
Last July, I ran my Motorcycle off the road. It ended up in a tree, I ended up four feet away from it on the ground. I broke my shoulder socket and clavical, six ribs on the right side and a few on the left plus my left ring finger, punctured a lung, lacerated my liver, beat the holy-hades out of my kidneys and spent six days with a tube down my throat on a breathing machine. This, was not a pleasant summer. But, what the heck, for a guy who never wears a helmet, I came out of it pretty good.
A greenstick fracture is a crack, not a complete break. Was the bone dislocated as well?