I would happily give birth again to avoid being pregnant again. I had a pretty miserable time of it, and while it was not acute pain of any type, I think prolonged periods of lower level suffering have to count for something. I was constantly nauseated so I couldn’t take my psych meds so I had to take medical leave from work to avoid a mental health crisis, after the nausea went away the crushing fatigue kicked in. It was so depressing. I had no energy to work, to talk to my husband, to watch a movie. My life was drained of all meaning for several months.
And what I went through after delivery was on a different level entirely. I just remember after I gave birth I thought, “It’s finally over” but actually no. The next few days were a nightmare of getting ordered around by nurses, and a jaundiced baby that cried continuously and never latched. After fourish days without sleep, I was skirting the line of postpartum psychosis, suicidal and almost completely untethered from reality. Scary shit. If I had been able to articulate what was going on in my head, I would have been hospitalized. Fortunately I recovered quickly after my husband rather forcefully ordered me to bed and I slept a solid nine hours.
I couldn’t risk that happening again, but I’m glad I had no foresight and it happened the way it did, because my son is the best thing that ever happened to me. It just took me several months postpartum to realize that.
It’s hard to decide in retrospect, but I think it was when one of my many (13, I think) eye surgeries took longer than expected, and the local anesthetic wore off*. I spent almost 30 minutes feeling every cut and stitch, and I’d been warned not to cry out or move. Hellish doesn’t begin to describe it.
I have had 4 different surgeries on my nose for a deviated septum, turbinates, pulops, etc. I also have severe obstructive sleep apnea (which a touch of central to round out the joy). So each time I have sinus surgery with anesthesia, it has to be at a hospital where I can be admitted for 24 hours of observation after surgery. No surgical center and then go home a couple hours after surgery for me.
So after my first sinus surgery had healed up, the surgeon was not entirely happy with the work on the deviated septum and indicated he would like to go back in and do some clean-up. This would mean another 24 hour hospital stay, etc. Thinking myself to be a problem solver, I asked if it could be done in his practice’s surgical center if I did not go under anesthesia. Maybe instead they just use a local to numb the area??
I was wholly unprepared for the pain involved with having multiple injections of a local anesthetic placed inside my sinuses. Deep inside my sinuses. Multiple times. On each side.
The subsequent additional surgeries have all occurred in a hospital and the 24 hour stay because I will never, ever do that again.
A little background: I’ve had trouble with my sciatic nerve ever since January of '89, when I slipped on a patch of ice and went down sideways. I never know what will really set off the sciatica but when it happens…
There have been two times when sciatica left me barely able to get out of bed for almost an entire week. The second time was the worst; I couldn’t escape the pain by being in bed. Sitting anywhere was out of the question.
The cause of this intense pain? It happened in my bathroom; all I did was transition from standing at the toilet to standing at the sink. I must have swiveled my hips wrong.
can you take a leak with the stone stuck? how long are they stuck (min? / hours? / days?)… and (assuming you are male) … can you feel the stone displacing and “coming down” your little pkbites?
It doesn’t go anywhere. I could urinate but barely. The stone is stuck. Pain form the back down into the scotum is indescribable!!!
They put a stent up you which is the length and circumference of a drinking straw with a loop at the end slightly larger than a nickel with a hole in the middle. Looks vaugly like that wand kids use to blow bubbles.
That stent remains inside of you for about a week while you heal from it’s placement. During that time your bladder is in spasms 100% of the time. Feels like you have a very full bladder all the time.
After a week they use high energy shock waves to blast the stone. For a week after that you have to urinate into a strainer to collect the small pebbles that come out. They want to examine the pebbles to determine what material they are made out of. It hurts to urinate while those pebbles come out.
If any of this sounds completely unfun, you haven’t heard anything yet:
When they remove the stent you are awake, unlike when they put it in. They put a metal cage thingy over your junk, inject some clear numbing gel into you (it doesn’t numb dick, quite litterally!!!) and the doctor fishes around inside you with an apparatus that looks very much like the claw game at an arcade. When the doc pulls it out it hurts like a mother fugger and it’s all bloody and goopy and it’s reminiscent of when they removed the bug from Neo in The Matrix. You’re screaming in pain while they pull this disgusting mess out of your prick!!!
A friend told the story about peeing into a strainer to collect stones for analysis. His new roommate asked if he used the same kind of strainer they used for tea. Turns it it was the exact same strainer.
Where people experience the greatest agony is not when it gets to your urethra. It’s when it’s in the ureter, the path from kidney to bladder, that it feels like you’re dying, and in fact you can be in a great deal of danger.
The peeing it out thing didn’t hurt me at all; I almost didn’t notice it.
The worst pain is the one you’re feeling right now.
Over the past several months, I’ve developed a frozen left shoulder. Can’t lift my arm above my head, any sudden movement causes a spasm of pain, and, worst of all, I can only sleep in one position (and then only for four or five hours, before I wake up with it throbbing. Compared to an abscessed tooth, or gout, the pain is minor- it’s nowhere near excruciating and I can work through it during the day. But it’s constant, and it’s present, and that makes it the worst pain I’ve had. For now.
Compared to kidney stones and pancreatitis and childbirth, nighttime leg cramps aren’t really that bad. But there’s a special sort of torment that comes from being woken from a dead sleep because your calf or hamstring (or worse, toe) has suddenly gone rigid and is radiating pain. What’s horrible is the immediate knowledge that if you attempt to move or shift it, it will get exponentially worse; so all you can do is lie there and wait for the muscle to relax.
It makes sense that tonsil and kidney stone pain would be horrible. Two places where you have the most nerve endings are your sex organs and speech organs (also, fingertips, which is why papercuts hurt so damn much). Tonsils are in your throat, close to the back of your tongue, where you have tons of nerve endings for speech. My tonsillectomy was SO painful, and two much more serious surgeries I’ve had were a cakewalk compared to it.
The long long labor I had, followed by an emergency c-section, was an ordeal, but the pain of recovery was much less than the pain of recovery from the tonsillectomy.
And, while I didn’t go through full delivery of my son, he did crown, and I did get to enjoy the insertion of two different styles of forceps. My gawd, that was some pain. Right where the nerve endings are.
Did you ever hear Bill Cosby’s story of his tonsillectomy, as a child? I loved the way the doctor was supposed to have explained it to the kid.
Now, your tonsils guard your throat, they stand there with hand grenades and bazookas, and anything bad comes into your mouth, they fight it off. Now, in your case your tonsils have lost the war. In fact, your tonsils have gone as far as to join the other side…
The worse pain for me was when I took a misstep and completely tore my plantar fascia away from where it connects to the heel one. This was worse than any of the pain I felt giving birth.
I’m back because I remembered another one. Fingers affected by Raynaud’s Syndrome remain the 10 on my personal 1-10 scale, and the worst of my kidney stones therefore rate a 9.
But a pretty solid 9.5 was when I volunteered as test subject for an intraosseous drill my EMS service was considering. Having a hole drilled into the marrow cavity of the bone wasn’t that bad, actually. But when they attached a syringe and started pushing fluid in - YOW! I almost levitated off that classroom table.