Something that was mistaken for appendicitis, but I still don’t know what it was, as the CT scan showed nothing. That was many days of hunched-over sweaty cramping.
Two things were recent: when I got back from a trip a few weeks ago, I’d been lugging two suitcases, one of them massive and heavy, plus a weighted-down backpack, all over the airport, then up three flights of stairs to my apartment, after more that two weeks of hauling my crap over three countries. I woke up at about 3AM feeling like someone had been jabbing an icepick into my lower back. I have bulging discs anyway, so I’m sure I’d just pushed my spine to its limits that day. Had to stifle screams that would have woken the neighbors.
Also, while I was Over There, got a new tattoo. Of my nine, this was my first on the ribs with a lot of shading. That was three solid hours of pretty bad needling. My artist said I was a trooper, though, barely moved at all. Like I said…ninth piece of ink, I’m used to needles, but still.
(To clarify for the un-tatted, ribs are one of the worst places, pain-wise, to get work done, as the flesh is pretty thin over the bone. Likewise knees/elbows, shins, etc…)
I had cluster headaches when younger but I don’t really remember the pain several decades later.
Abscessed tooth hurt a lot.
Frozen shoulders hurt a lot, especially when stepping down. I had one when climbing tire piles to look for mosquitoes, and that was pure agony. I quit after about 3 piles.
Broken tailbone. This was perhaps the worst for me because I was just a kid, falling from a skateboard when it happened. The worst part was the looong recovery time.
My recovery last March from shoulder surgery after the nerve block wore off. I had surgery to repair a grade 5 (out of 6) AC joint separation following a skiing accident. The pain after shoulder surgery was much worse than the pain following the initial injury. I thought I was going to go out of my mind. The only thing that made it bearable were the medications I was prescribed, including oxycodone. (I kept careful track of what I was taking and tapered the narcotics down to zero in less than two weeks.)
P.S. I posted without reading the whole thread. I don’t think my shoulder surgery pain holds a candle to what some others here have endured, like Qadgop‘s plane crash.
Variant happened with me at 4 years old. I was born with strictures in my urethra, so I tended to get a LOT of UTIs because I couldn’t void completely. So, for 4 appointments, 1 month apart, Mom took me in to the urogenital doc, where they inserted sounds to attempt to stretch out the adhesions. I would refuse to pee until I basically had no choice and my body peed for me. While screaming. [The docs finally hauled me into the hospital, knocked me out and did something to fix it. On the plus side, I got a kick ass Viewmaster and huge selection of the slide discs that went with them and a casette that was the stories the slides indexed to.]
Got my fingers caught in a slammed door. No broken bones but I couldn’t even bend my fingers for days.
I had a dentist wait too long after he gave me anesthetic before he pulled my tooth, and my jaw was no longer numb. I screamed so loud my mother charged in from the waiting room, but the fingers were worse.
Trigeminal nerve pain from an abscessed tooth. I had constant abscess pain: pressure/throbbing, plus insane jolts of nerve pain that made me just freeze until they went away.
Second worst was a 1.1 cm gallstone stuck in the neck of my gallbladder. Woke me up, the pain was enough to make me vomit. I got morphine at the hospital, but it did not completely stop the pain. They wanted to schedule me for surgery in a few weeks, because they inexplicably thought the stone would move. They also attributed my elevated liver enzyme numbers to a disease that I did not have. I had to push to be admitted. I had surgery about 24 hours later. The stone was still lodged in the neck of the gallbladder, and my elevated liver enzymes were much more elevated.
Third worst was pain in my tonsils from mononucleosis. It hurt so bad to swallow that I had a cup I would spit into rather than have to swallow my saliva. I would take big doses of pain killers before eating and drinking at my one meal of the day.
I agree with those of you who say kidney stones. Though IMHO they’re only painful when stuck in the ureter. I don’t notice them when they’re still in the kidney, and by the time they reach the bladder and urethra they’re tolerable.
The dentist drilling past the Novocain into live pulp during a root canal. Then sticking the needle in there to give me another dose.
Having my horse step on my ankle after knocking me down came close, and dislocating my shoulder in a faceplant is also in the top three, but it’s the dental one that wins by a scream.
Hey, I had major shoulder reconstruction surgery in 2013, and if I hadn’t bitten my tongue in the plane crash, that shoulder repair would have been more painful than the crash injuries. It was 9 months before I wasn’t in daily pain at or above a level of 5 with ordinary activities.
The crash was more terrifying, however. And makes a much better story than my shoulder surgery.
( ͡~ ͜ʖ ͡° )
