Pascal did his famous work on the cycloid to distract himself from toothache. Just sayin’.
My worst pain was only a fraction of a second, during a spinal injection procedure for a massively extruded L5S1 disk, when they accidentally hit my nerve root. I had no idea pain like that could exist.
My second worst pain was while on the operating table for a 13 mm kidney stone. They were just closing up a long wound on my flank, and I came out of anaesthesia. I remember one person saying, “Hey, he’s waking up” and another saying “Hey, you, go back to sleep, you don’t want to be awake now”. I was a little surprised that two people in a row would start their sentences with “Hey”.
Third worst was about 36 hours before, when I started renal colic working on that 13 mm stone, and a 9 mm and two smaller ones, all jammed together.
I’ve had more than 40 stones. If you really want to know what a kidney stone feels like, you have to ask somebody who’s only had maybe 2 or 3. I’ve experienced quite a variety of feelings. There’s a deep burning one-sided flank pain that comes in waves when the stone is high in the ureter, the colic. However there’s an extremely urgent stinging pain down low on centerline when the stone is further down the ureter trying to get through the ureter-bladder junction. And there’s a variety of other more obscure pains, depending.
One of my other severe pains was radiculopathic leg pain when I first ruptured that L5S1. It was damaging enough to the nerve that I’m still partly paralyzed in that leg, lo, 19 years later. I’ve had two fusions and one diskectomy, and they were all painful, but these are not in my top three. Likewise rotator cuff surgery, a broken bone, a few root canals and extractions, and whatnot.
Somewhere here I once asked the question “for those of you who have done both, which is more painful, childbirth or kidney stone?” and the majority response from people who said they had done both was “kidney stone”.
