the most acute physical pain you've ever experienced

i've always been fascinated by the question of how a chronic painful condition would affect my outlook/basic philosophy. strangely it'd probably be for the better

Not sure if it changed my outlook or basic philosopy. Trigeminal neuralgia still hasn't been pinned down, the root cause is still not known, and if it's just bad luck I am kinda ok with that?

It do think it raises the threshold: tooth ache was the worst for me as well. Until I got this (I just got it out of the blue). I have had bad tooth ache after I got this condition but it's been much more bearable ever since. Knowing there's something way worse it didn't hurt as much. Which is a plus in a way.

More thread derail here: there is a rare condition where infants are born without the ability to feel pain. They never know when they've hurt themselves and never experience negative feedback from physical harmful to teach them to avoid it. Burns, bruises, cuts, broken bones go mostly unnoticed. It isn't pretty.

Yeah I'm aware of that. Let's say in my deal with the devil the pain sense still exists, it just isn't painful

i have been extremely lucky with this sort of thing. worst things i can remember are minor burns and electric shocks, car door being slammed on my fingers, bicycle crash which ended with my chin split open and road rash everywhere.

I've only had one broken bone and it was a tiny fracture near my elbow that honestly didn't hurt much as long as I didn't move it.

BUT. When I was a kid, maybe 9, I was playing baseball with my friends in the front yard and in a heroic effort to get someone out, I snagged a grounder and dove to slap my non-gloved hand on the base. The good news is, my hand got there first and the runner was out. The bad news was, the kid running to the base trod full force on my naked thumb. The worse news is, we were using some flat garden stones as bases, so my thumb got crushed between a foot and a rock.

BUT. The even worse news is, when I went screaming into the house with my thumb swelling up like a hot air balloon, my parents took a look at it and said, "Oh, you need to reduce the pressure on that." Theoretically, this is a valid medial response -- fingernails and toe nails constrain the swelling of an injured digit, which can lead to intense pain, as was indeed the case. However. The home remedy that was applied was as follows: One of my parents, probably my dad, restrained me and held my hand out straight (me crying in agony the whole time). The other parent, probably my mom, proceeded to use a match and rubbing alcohol to sterilize a sewing needle, and then pushed the needle straight .... through ... my swollen ... unbelievably sensitive ... thumbnail ... into the flesh below. I screamed. And screamed. And ... nothing happened. No geyser of blood to relieve the swelling and the pressure. Nothing. So now I had a hugely swollen thumb AND a punctured thumbnail. I'm not sure which hurt more, it was just a giant throbbing locus of all the pain in the universe.

After that, somewhat sheepishly, my parents gave me a big icepack and just waited for the swelling to go down on its own.

I still love my parents, btw. But I have promised my children I will never under any circumstances push hot needles through their thumbnails.

"Would you be without physical pain if it meant you would never feel happy"

― "The" Blink-182 (wins)

but what if pain is the only thing keeping us ALIVE, man

Dental surgery on an infected root canal. Two hours in the chair, the most painful part of which consisted of the dentist scraping infected crap out of my root canal. Every time her scraping went deeper than the numbed area, I shouted with the pain, she re-numbed me, waited a couple of minutes, and the whole mess started again. I would rather have no teeth than go through that again.

Definitely the worst part was the anticipation. And the pain. The pain was the worst part. Apart from the anticipation.

my dentists really put the no in novocaine

I had a compound fracture on my right wrist in second grade. Don't know if it was because I was still such a small person or what, but I remember in the hour or so after the initial action that caused the fracture, I wanted to take deeper breaths, but couldn't, as the body movements necessary to facilitate the depth of the breaths I wanted would caused a shooting pain from my wrist up to my shoulder. So, in addition to being unable to move my right hand and/or arm without pain, having a constant dull ache in my wrist, and being stuck at the babysitter's loud, uncomfortable house until my mother could pick me up, I was having these short, wimpy, totally unsatisfying breaths.

And then, when I got into the emergency room and they diagnosed that I did have a fracture, they set my arm in a splint, which had this thing that they wrapped into the splint that started out warm in temperature, but eventually increased in temperature to a point where it actually magnified the constant pain in my wrist. I don't think I slept at all that night because of how bad it hurt.

I've gone through oral surgeries, fallen off ladders, heavy alcohol dependence withdrawal, and still experience neck-based tension migraines. But that sleepless night with my entire arm just seemingly getting hotter and hotter on top of already throbbing pain still stands out as the most significant.

Was expecting a few more (or any!) answers of "giving birth".

Shingles

Absolutely no question whatsoever. Took me all day to think of that though. This thread is tough going.

When I was twenty I was in a car accident. I had all the tendons in my right foot severed, chunks of glass in my biceps and neck, permanent nerve damage to my left hand, and open fracture of the right femur. To repair the femur the orthopedist put in a long pin and sawed off a graft of my pelvic bone to help stimulate bone growth. I felt like I was being held together by stitches. The pelvic graft was absurdly painful, post-surgery. Some of my wounds became infected. Several times when the nurses picked me up out of my bed to bring me to another part of the hospital, the pain of all these broken parts getting twisted and pulled out of (relative) repose was so overwhelming that I simply passed out in their arms.

When Ward Fowler's nurse told him kidney stones were 'the worst pain a man can feel' I took it as implying that childbirth is probably the worst pain humans endure

the sting of the bullet ant, the warrior wasp, and the tarantula hawk (a wasp that hunts - oh, you guessed it) are supposedly the most painful things any animal can encounter and survive.

i had surgery for an inguinal hernia which required incision to my groin. i learned afterwards that virtually all bodily movement involves the muscles there and so i spent the next couple of weeks in bed unable to move without great pain.

when i was feeling a bit better i noticed that something was amiss and went back to the surgeon. he speculated what it might be and told me to lie down. then, without warning me about exactly what he was doing and without anesthetic, he stuck a needle into my scrotum several times. it was not pleasant.

but i feel lucky to have not endured some of the horror stories upthread.

The Sateré-Mawé people of Brazil use intentional bullet ant stings as part of their initiation rites to become warriors.[29] The ants are first rendered unconscious by submerging them in a natural sedative, and then hundreds of them are woven into gloves made of leaves (which resembles a large oven mitt), stingers facing inward. When the ants regain consciousness, a boy slips the gloves onto his hands. The goal of this initiation rite is to keep the glove on for a full 5 minutes. When finished, the boy's hand and part of his arm are temporarily paralyzed because of the ant venom, and he may shake uncontrollably for days. The only "protection" provided is a coating of charcoal on the hands, supposedly to confuse the ants and inhibit their stinging. To fully complete the initiation, however, the boys must go through the ordeal a total of 20 times over the course of several months or even years.[30]

second most painful thing in my life was when I was a kid, maybe 9 or 10? and my foot slipped off the wet boards of a lazily constructed boat pier on a lake where we were vacationing with family friends, and my whole right leg went straight down between two soaking planks of wood, basically flaying my knee and part of my thigh. the main thing I recall after that was consigning myself to lie in the back of our van outside so I wouldn't bother anyone else while I cried out in pain for hours. There really wasn't anything to do that would help, they don't make band-aids big enough for that.

That's about it for me; I've broken my nose 3 times which probably is obvious in retrospect if you've seen my WDYLL pics, but that doesn't hurt that much, you just pass out and wake up with a bigger schnoz that also happens to be adjustable for a few days. I've been extremely lucky. (knocks on wood)

There are women who have given birth who have also had kidney stones, and they often say kidney stones are worse.

Anyway, I had a stone once and I think about it almost everyday. It was too big to pass, but I had about three immobilizing attacks before I was scheduled to have it smashed to bits with ultrasonic waves. The first attack I didn't know what was going on and thought I was dying. Our first kid was barely a toddler, so we had to hand her off to a neighbor at night while my wife rushed me to the hospital. Second two involved taking Vicodin and lying face-down immobilized on the bed for hours, teetering between extreme pain and borderline unconsciousness.

I drink a lot of water now.

back spasms involving my neck, during which i could basically not move at all without getting electric shocks down my limbs (and tongue?!)

that was so over the top that when i think about it i can't really conjure it up. i can and often do conjure up thoughts of tearing ankle ligaments, however

these things were unpleasant but good lord you people. be well

I've heard all kinds of stories about the sort of dietary habits that supposedly can lead to kidney stones, and in conclusion, I've determined my kidneys just don't know how to make stones. (knocks on wood again)

how did it happen three times, tom?

I lead with my face.

1. playing spider-man on the tall stacks of animal feed bags in my grandfather's farm supply store, I must have been five or six. jumped onto a stack that fell over and I somehow ended up on the bottom of the pile. concrete floor.

2. jumping backwards off the side of a resort swimming pool on summer vacation. didn't jump backwards far enough, caught my chin, lip and nose on the side, knocked myself unconscious, I'm sure all the other folks just loved the sight of a kid floating face down filling the water with blood coming out of his face.

3. while drunk, climbed out of a third floor barracks window, to try and sneak around to a different window and freak some of my fellow airmen out, because ha ha crazy shenanigans. the ledge I was holding onto was damp and dusty, which equals a thin film of mud, so I lost my grip and fell to the ground. I missed a metal sprinkler head and a big cactus by inches. left a huge bloodstain on the ground that was there for weeks afterwards.

achilles schnoz

have literally never broken anything else

and I've done a lot of dumb bro antics

(knocks on wood yet once more)

The first time I had gout in my big toe was incredibly, shockingly painful; anything touching it all was agonizing. Thankfully I can take a dirt cheap pill with zero side effects daily and it hasn't bothered me in a decade.

Most recently though was after I had an infected wisdom tooth taken out last summer when I was 42. There's a reason dentists tend to do this before you turn 30 because apparently they fuse into your jaw more solidly as you age. The initial toothache was awful, the extraction was terrible, but that evening after the novacaine and initial narcotics wore off I took a deep breath and got cool air into the open wound which is the only time I've ever almost passed out from pain. Little chips of bone would work their way out of the healing gum for a couple months afterwards which didn't really hurt but was incredibly disturbing psychologically.

I have promised my children I will never under any circumstances push hot needles through their thumbnails.

song lyrics imo

2 weeks ago i got out of bed too fast, went dizzy, fainted and fell back onto the heavy wooden bed frame.
i heard the bones snap, and then felt the pain,and screamed and screamed.
30 mins later a first responder arrived, pumped morphine into me and took one look at my back and called for an ambulance.
many many hours later of intense pain i was advised that i had two broken ribs in my back.
only way to deal with it is pain relief.
2 weeks later and still on hardcore painkillers.
i still cannot breathe without sharp pain in my chest and back, and i cannot lie down in bed, so have to try and sleep sitting up.
and the best bit : being able to hear the bones crunching and grinding against each other and waiting for them to burst a lung.

Ouch! that sounds very bad, mark.

I remember a doctor telling me a lot of the worst broken bone injuries he dealt with are like yours, as in occurred in freakish household accidents.

omigod mark, that sounds horrible. lie still and try not to laugh. maybe just stick to the Excelsior thread.

yeah, definitely avoid any radio 4 comedy shows as well.

Argh, heal up Mark - I've been prone for half the week after pulling a muscle in my back at the start of a gym class, and carrying on through the whole hour

When I had kidney stones two years ago, two of the nurses said, with a barely concealed blend of horror and glee, that they'd heard it was worse than giving birth.

cheers folks.
on a lighter note : the drug addled downtime has meant i have caught up with GOT, added my FAX, Sinatra and Bowie Ryko collections to my digital archive, and put on weight.

p lucky compared to some of the stories here. i had an operation on my sinuses a few years back, like to widen the passage that joins your nose, i think. i remember after it was done they had my nose packed up with these bandages, like cylindrical wads of tissue that had a kind of wire bit at the end that came out of my nose. after 24 hours or so the nurse was like "okay we're going to remove your bandages now" - it was a mixture of pain, a kind of friction, and the alien discomfort of these unfeasibly long tubes of paper moving out of my nose and seeming to scrape past my brain. it was the sort of thing that makes you exclaim. when the first one came out i was left kind of marvelling and horrified by how long it was, and then the knowledge of what had just happened made me instantly fear the second one, prob the most extreme version of that sensation i've ever had.

but not as painful as some of the stuff itt sounds.

inguinal hernia surgery. twice (one on each side) before the age of 23. there are not enough painkillers on earth.

I broke my collar bone, scaphoid (base of thumb/wrist), and elbow once (classic getting knocked off bike injury). I decide I should walk the rest of the three miles home wheeling my bike because i didn't want to leave it there, and kept on throwing up from the pain. so that was a time.

I had a biopsy in my lung once, and they couldn't give me any anaesthetic that day because i was being operated on the day after. They lie you down on a gurney, and sort of... well very much *stab* you in the back with a large needle, about a half the width of a knitting needle. Nurse said 'this will probably hurt', and then she went for it and I sort of went 'ummmph' and she went 'sssh'! That's the sort of pain when you go very white and cold and clammy.

And on the *same day*, I had a catheter put in my upper thigh (not 'fisher king' upper thigh euphemism, actually my upper thigh). they were going up through my blood vessels - i think it must have been the arteries, right? - and up through the ventricles of my heart, then up into the carotid i think. Again no anaesthetic, and when they were going through the heart, they'd tell me to stop breathing and stay *absolutely still* while they moved it a bit further, would stop, and then i could breathe for a bit. When they were up in the carotid i could feel the catheter in my neck. And that wasn't pain exactly, but it was extraordinarily unpleasant, and after the procedure was over i kept throwing up over and over again.

man, i've had a real shitty week in terms of health/general discomfort but this thread is making me count my fucking blessings.

must have been the arteries, right?

femoral arteries, iirc

xxp Holy shit that catheter sounds horrific, Fizzles.

i suffered intermittent crippling migraines from infancy until i was 19. all i could do when i got them was lie in bed and wait until they go so bad that i passed out.

When I was ~22 a partner informed me that she had gonorrhea. Was pretty sure we'd always used condoms but there were a few blurry nights...

Went to a doc in the box to get tested, they shoved a long q-tip up my urethra to get a swab. I have never felt that particular kind of pain - entry and then swabbing wherever it hit. All to find out I was clean.

I'll take the glass through my shin, broken wrist bones and nearly severed finger traumas of my past any day over the cluster of migranes I experienced 16 years ago during a particularly stressful period when my life was falling apart. Turn off the lights, hide under covers, press my head between two pillows, and don't move anything more than a millimeter to avoid exacerbating the pain.

I'm not going to get too specific... but it was recovering from major surgery. A 10 year old kid should not want to die....

Worst is seeing the the dizzying dots of color at the center of the visual field, with words on the monitor containing the requisite letters but bereft of meaning, that I experienced 45 minutes before the migraine began in earnest. The third time this happened I took off work in the mid afternoon and *rushed* home to prepare for the pounding to come, but the certain knowledge that one's about to suffer is as painful in its way as the actual pain.

i always wondered if years of really harsh pain did something to my brain. my brain was pretty fucked up as a teen. i'd really like to be able to blame my subsequent behavior in life on SOMETHING.

deep vein thrombosis in my left leg that I ignored for two or three fully occluded weeks until it was life-threatening. nurses popping in and out of the ER bc they were sharing the ultrasound images and wondering how I was alive. there just isn’t a lot of pain like dirty blood flowing in and out of your calf.

My mum warned it me it was the worst thing ever. Afterwards I thght: ok, my pain level is higher than I thght.

It was painful but it was short. So 🤷🏼‍♀️
I think pain that is short is much better than being in constant pain. Because it wears you down.

I went through a two week period of acute pancreatitis post-gallbladder removal. That led to my very first non-overnight hospital stay and a lifelong battle with postcholecystectomy syndrome. Anyway, I think it was during that two-week period when I was a few weeks shy of thirty that I began to lose all my faith in a higher power, such was the intensity of my pain. Several years later I underwent reconstructive surgery on my upper arms to correct some deformities I was born with, but had my pain poorly managed and have suffered chronic pain from that ever since. During the immediate post-recovery period (where I was coping with the grand total of 100 stitches on both arms, 50 per) I was in so much pain that I had to rely on a meditation podcast to help me fall asleep. Those were the two most painful incidents I've ever lived through.

BTW, correction above: it's not "lifelong", I know. It's just been ever since the gallbladder removal, so about ten years.

Hugs Dee

Hugs Dee

So sorry I'm only seeing this now, sweet Nath; all my love to you, sweetheart. Anyway, I feel like my chronic pain issues have toughened me up and made me a better human, as cheesy and clichéd as that sounds.