My husband had sciatica pain. One day while taking a walk, he slipped and all that was heard was a LOUD pop, followed by my husband's screaming in pain. It took him a minute to get up. He had landed directly on his sciatic nerve. BUT he started walking around. Low and behold the pain was gone. This was about 3 years ago and the pain has not returned. Happy accident😅😊
Unsurprisingly, childbirth with no medicine or epidural, and a tooth that was chipped and the nerves were exposed. The pain was unbearable. And surprisingly, an grown fingernail that got infected somehow and had pus build up just under the skin. Ended up having to go to the hospital and get it popped and it was the worst feeling ever even with numbing medicine. EXTREMELY PAINFUL.
When I was in the Army, I had one morning where I’d had a rough night’s sleep the night before due to fever, and I woke up with both the fever and a stiff neck. Alarm bells went off in the doctors’ heads for bacterial meningitis, and they ordered a spinal tap to confirm. What they DIDN’T do was take an ultrasound of my spine to see where the injection site would need to be. I had a small curve in my back that made it just tricky enough for them to get the right stick. It took them over half an hour and several attempts to finally get the spinal tap done correctly. In addition to this pain, I was also actively dealing with the pain of labral tearing in my right hip that was, at the time, misdiagnosed and untreated. So while my hip felt like a rubber band stretched to the breaking point, my spine felt like it was being repeatedly set on fire. That day was the first and last time I’ve actually passed out from pain. It’s also worth noting that results showed I did not have bacterial meningitis.
Herniating my L5/S1 disc. My ortho actually works on the Texas Rangers and Dallas Stars athletes and when he looked at my MRI even HE said that I was a solid 9.5/10 for severity. It was blown OUT to the point that it was taking a 90° turn straight down my spine instead of bubbling out like normal herniations. One of my sacral nerves got trapped under that "flap" of herniated disc, and for the entire 5 weeks I was trying to get a diagnosis that flap was just GRINDING against that nerve. It felt like I had a white hot baseball shoved up under my right butt cheek with a hot poker, and NOTHING alleviated it. My ortho said that when he got in there to fix everything, when he lifted away that herniation "flap" to remove it, the trapped nerve underneath was so bruised it was BLACK and it almost had a hole worn through it. He told my parents that if anything, I had been downplaying my pain all of that time. It was so severe for so long that when I woke up in recovery, remembered who I was/where I was/and why, and realized that white hot baseball was gone? I legitimately started _crying_ I was so relieved. The pain of the incision was NOTHING compared to that. I unfortunately freaked out the recovery nurse for a moment because she thought I was crying BECAUSE of pain, but once I told her it was because the pain was gone she smiled and said "Yeah, that happens a lot. I'm glad you've already gotten so much relief. 😊" Take care of your spine, kids.
Road rash after being run over by suv at high speed on my surron. Broken hip torn rotator cuff, concussion, multiple dislocations. The road rash was so painful i could manipulate my dislocated knee without even feeling the pain of it through the blazing intensity of that road rash. Like being burned with a blowtorch while being electrocuted with a splash of lye on the skin simultaneously. I felt more pain in that first week than every other thing that hurt in the whole rest of my 39 years.
When I was 22 I had a staph infection in my abdomen for three weeks. At the time I was on an injectable instramuscular medication and my dumb ass didn't sanitize the area of injection. I thought it was appendicitis since it was right in that area. The infection was too small for the doctors to detect, so they assumed it was swollen lymph nodes and gave me some antibiotics. The pain kept getting worse and since it was right by my lower intestine, it made me really constipated. Idk why I waited so long for a second opinion, especially since I was still on my parents' health insurance, but thank god I went when I did. The doctor said if I waited another week, I could've died. So I stayed in the hospital for five days. The shitty thing about infection removals is how they have to leave the surgical wound open and stuff it with gauze everyday to drain it all out, and I'm super squeamish, so I had to stay at my parents' house for several days after. Luckily my dad, being a retired cop, had basic EMT training and wasn't squeamish at all. The silver lining is that the whole ordeal is part of the story of how my now husband and I fell in love. We were just friends at the time, but I was touched by how he visited me in the hospital and took me out for dinner when I got out. He won my parents over before we were even dating. That was 9 years ago and we just celebrated 5 years of marriage last month :)
Abdominal Migraine. Imagine all the pain of the worst migraine but in your stomach along with vomiting every 2 minutes even though you haven’t eaten anything in hours. Now imagine that lasting for many hours
I'm 34 now and I still remember. I'm pretty sure I was 10 or 11 at the time. Way back then I didn't always take good care of myself. One such problem came up that required surgery in order to fix. The doctors at the time said they were going to give me stuff to numb me up so they could do their thing and wait 20 minutes for the medicine to kick in. They never waited. What followed was 20 minutes of the most agonizing pain I have ever experienced in my entire life. Until the medicine finally kicked in, it took a fully grown man who probably weighed more than 200 lb to hold me down because of how much thrashing I was doing due to the pain. I felt every poke and prod, every cut and tear as the surgery went on. Eventually the numbing meds kicked in and even though I was still crying and in pain, I was able to relax a bit. I'm in the US Army now, have been for about 14 and a half years. Every year we have to do what's called SRC. One of the parts of SRC involves getting shots from army medics in order to make sure we are healthy and have our records up-to-date. Every time I sit down in the chair to get my shots, I always end up having a miniature panic attack as I remember what happened to me when I was little. How I haven't been medboarded out for that reason alone is beyond me. Tl;dr - botched surgery process gave me PTSD whenever I see needles.
I had two separate rounds of needles three months apart that gave me a vicious needle phobia. It’s now managed, and I can watch a blood draw now. I bought a stuffed dragon about 8 inches tall that has small wings and a unicorn gold horn. George is my emotional support dragon. I can hold onto that and it has gotten pretty mangled while being squeezed to get an IV or something. It’s gone with me into the OR. It helps combat my “White Coat Disease” as well which sends my blood pressure to 220/140 sometimes, aka, you’re going to stroke and die. It’s not a living support creature, so it can’t get hurt. When I get home i have cats and a spouse. I mention this, because it might help. (Lidocaine local I metabolize very fast so that doesn’t help either). I hope you can find a way past this.
A blocked liver duct. Stones left in after a cholestectomy migrated to my liver, and blocked the duct to my pancreas, too. I couldn't even speak or think the waves of pain were overwhelming. I knew I was dying.
Weird but the worst was nothing. I went from feeling like my leg was on fire to feeling absolutely nothing. I nearly ended up paralyzed from the waist down and it was terrifying
I had a knee replacement. Two weeks later I tried to stand up from a seated position without aid. The pain was so intense, I teared up and it traveled from my heel to my upper back. The searing pain was followed a burning sensation in my entire leg. Awful.
My first ever flare up of Gout. Lost the genetic lottery and started getting it at a relatively young age (about 25ish). Had no idea what it was or what caused the flare up. Foot was swollen, it hurt to touch, even air moving caused it intense pain. Blankets on it? No sir, not even a sheet. Walking? Not a chance. It was the most intense pain I've ever felt. I've had flare ups since then but have had medication to combat it, and now am on a daily one that helps prevent it from happening at all. Alternatively, about on par with that, was the time a few years ago I managed to somehow get an ear infection in both ears at the same time.
I'm reading this to convince myself that it wasn't that bad, but I'm just recovering from sciatica. OMG. Still not sure whether I will eventually recover the sensation in my entire leg/buttock/groin, but the numbness is infinitely preferable to the incredible pain in my thigh, which lasted for 2 days. I cannot tolerate morphine but ended up with codeine, which finally got the pain under control. It started when I picked up my cat. He can stay on the floor from now on!
probably the all-over body aches from covid. i could barely walk or eat and while the worst was like two-three days, the recovery lasted for about a week to two weeks after the initial bout of sickness. caught it three times so i got thrice the joy of walking like an old man close second is the pinched nerve (pretty sure sciatic) that left me limping for a week right before a convention
I always would answer this question with "childbirth" but I had gallstones and the pain was equal to or worse than childbirth. But, at least with childbirth, I got something nice out of all that pain.
Blacking out because I had to pull shards and bits of a bombed molars out of my lower right jaw when I was 10 years old, around 2 am with a tweezers and not even an aspirin. Grab, wiggle and pull, make absolutely no sound, when eyes focused, do it again. Very long backstory. At 22 I finally got to see a dentist and after he almost threw up, he got the root out that I couldn’t get. Dental pain, some of it, I rate above labor and childbirth.
When I was 15, I had to have all four wisdom teeth cut out (it was either that or lose eight teeth). It turns out the dentist had to make bigger incisions than normal, and the moment the anaesthetic wore off, I couldn't stop crying, it hurt that bad.
Bacterial meningitis. Felt like ants were eating my brain. Almost died but at least I didn't end up paralyzed, blind or deaf. A lot of problems with memory though :/ and I feel like I'm not as smart as I was before.
Feeling the moment that my stomach split open and ruptured. I've had chronic pain and health issues all my life, so I'm pretty used to pain by now, but this was by far the worst. So, a couple of months ago, my stomach ulcers were so bad that it perferated and ruptured my stomach. I hope no one ever has to feel what it's like to have one of your major internal organs basically explode on you. And having sepsis runs a close second. That isn't a walk in the park either.
Having a large muscle like your front thigh cramp can be surprisingly painful. I was sweating because of the pain and it just kept going for several minutes. Amazing how much worse it was than calf cramps, kinda like a small needle vs a machete, not even close. Accidentally searing your own flesh on top of a sauna after tripping, accidentally stabbing yourself in the leg, having minor operations done without local anesthesia, they didn't surprise me like the cramp did. The few broken bones I've had surprisingly barely hurt. No surprise gallstones got mentioned here. Many women patients say giving birth was much nicer than that. Some male patients just scream and and you gotta wait the worst of it out until you can talk with them (while obviously taking care they get their pain medication). And one of the classics getting a double mention; cluster headache, aka suicide headache. Extremely painful prohibiting you from doing anything at all and worse yet, you can get it every night. After a few years of hours of horrible pain every night, you can imagine why it feels like you have to have a way out. The pain can be somewhat managed, but not exactly very well.
I have had 2 dry sockets after a tooth extraction. This occurs when the blood does not clot over the wound and the nerve is exposed and often the jaw bone is also. It was excruciating and I was so desperate that I was going to the dentist twice a day for numbing injections, and I hate the dentist with a passion and fainted in there once. In the evening, my dentist had rung my Dr so that I could have an injection of pethidine to help me get through the night, along with codeine tablets. I’ve had 3 babies and this dry socket was up there with labour pain!
Agonizing testicular pain. The clinic did an ultrasound and couldn't find out what was wrong, but the horror was real. Thankfully it went away after a few days.
Had a massive tumor in my breast, it litterally filled up the entire boob, because I had been too scared of having it checked out, when I first noticed it. As part of the diagnostic, I had to have a mammograph. I nearly fainted from the pain of having that tumor squished by an unrelenting machine. It was worse than childbirth with no pain relief, and I'd rather birth an entire soccer team, than having to go through that mammograph again
Ear infections and ripping your toenails off due to them getting caught in mattress fibers and being torn off when jumping on the bed for fun. Wouldn’t recommend
I developed a heamatoma after surgery, which sounds fine and all. But it was almost instant, so the burning pain of a tennis ball sized amount of blood pooling directly above an incision sight developing in less than 10 minutes as my skin had to stretch under and around compression bandaging. I have a pretty high pain tolerance, I've never labelled anything higher than a five, this was an eight easy and I passed out twice while they were trying to give me painkillers 😅
Botched wisdom tooth extraction. It was broken into several pieces and the dentist had to pick the pieces out of my jaw & gums. As soon as the Novocain wore off, even with Ibuprofen, I felt as if my jaw had been impaled by a spear and then jiggled around a bit before being yanked out.
I occasionally get gas bubbles stuck in my intestines (don’t ask why) and let me tell you, that s🤬🤬🤬 hurts like hell. I initially thought my appendix was acting up. Thankfully that wasn’t the case. I also occasionally get terrible migraines (My mom gets them too) and every time a migraine occurs, it feels like a grenade went off in my head.
It might not be much but... One time during karate practise, we were doing an exercise that involves punching and running (really fast), so i start running the fastest i could and, in the span of a second, i misplace my right foot and ended up bending my big toenail. It was torn, cracked and very much painful
The Novocaine they inject into an abscess before draining it never seems to actually numb anything. It's just extra burning before the pain of the scalpel. 🙃
For me it was my period cramps, my cramps are always bearable and this one seemed to be the same so i popped an ibuprofen and Tylenol to stop the pain but it only got worse, the pain made me feel sick and like I was going to throw up and I was begging to be stabbed hoping it would stop the pain hell I even hit myself and I was turning white. Lasted around 2 ish hours in my mind but it probably was 30 minutes or so. I wish I can remove my uterus yet it’s illegal for me to at my age even with it making my health worse than it already is.
