Chronic cluster headache sufferer here.
To sum up, I’ve been:
Shot, stabbed, shot a second time, broke 7 bones in various appendages, hit with a baseball bat, hit by a car, multiple teeth issues, and migraine headaches, sprinkled for fun.
Basically, I took steve-o’s motto and ran with it (your body is a ride, ride it until the wheels fall off).
None of this comes close to the lightest cluster headache I’ve had. The sheer panic, the knowledge of what’s about to happen, the inescapable amount of pain I know is coming… Fuck CH.
Is there a connection between your lifestyle and the CH? Did one of these cause the other, in whichever sequence?
What do you do to get put through all that?
Made light of someone else's cluster headaches in a past life
I'm an episodic CH sufferer. No other pain comes close in comparison. You're not alone, brother (if I can make that gender assumption given your user name).
It's the best remedy I've tried insofar as it's the only thing that has worked as any type of preventative, and the only thing that has disrupted a cycle for me. It doesn't work as an abortive, in my experience, but it beats every pharmaceutical I've tried in every other way.
Sourcing it has been an issue, and it sucks to open yourself up to criminal offense for not wanting to live in pain, but we do what we have to do.
If you can jump through hoops with doctors and insurance, look into Ajovy. It's the only preventative that helps with my headaches, and it helps really well. But it's an expensive auto-injector and I had to run through several meds that don't work before insurance would approve, and I still need a discount card to help with the copay, but I've had about a 95% reduction in headaches, and the ones I've had were mostly mild and easy to control with Tylenol or at most a triptan.
Top 3:
Shingles in my eye / face / scalp.
Appendix ruptured while I was on the toilet.
Kidney stones (multiple times)
I am picturing this all happening simultaneously
Oh no, shingles in your eye?? How was that?
It was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced.
Also, I had so many eye doctors appointments. They were worried I’d lose vision in that eye. Luckily I didn’t.
Damn. Glad there wasn't any vision loss. Yeah I had shingles before too and got treated pretty quick, but it was definitely freaky reading how it could spread to your eyes and cause permanent damage.
I haven't had shingles, and my appendix lasted until I could get it out, but I am with you on the kidney stones.
I've had 5 or 6 kidney stones and "the big one" has been harmlessly hiding in my kidneys for a few years. Every time, I think I'm going to power through the pain because the ER only gives you like one or two doses of Toradol and sends you on your way with FlowMax and useless NSAIDs which I can just get off the shelf. I've never powered through the pain. Every time I wind up paying like $250 for 4-6 hours of relief.
To this, I'll add I've had migraines that made me want to drill holes in my skull. They've been bad enough that if I'd had a gun, I'd have used it. I'm not saying they hurt more or less than kidney stones, but I can't tolerate headache pain like that. It's the difference between "my back is in agony" and "existing is agony."
I got 2 hits of morphine and when that didn't do fuck all for my kidney stone, they gave me ketamine. Can't believe you couldn't get anything stronger, that sucks.
I guess I shouldn't have said every time. The last two or three times (still used to try to power through just to not go to the ER). They used to give me Vicodin or Dilaudid, but they've gotten super stingy with opioids. Which I understand but for freaking kidney stones???
I get opioids are a big problem for some people but back in the days of over-prescription I'd have spares for years that could help when my back went out or something. I was a very responsible user, frequently not taking them as soon as I could bear the pain without them. They need to get back to a middle ground or find less addicting medicine that works as well.
Man those migraines sure feel like a little extra space up there would sure fucking help though.
Doesn't have to be deep just given enough room for the pressure to even out right?
The circumcision I had in my mid teens. Well, not the circumcision itself, but the erections I would get in the morning which would rip the stitches out of my cock, bleeding until I masturbated with anesthetic gel to orgasm just to stop the pain.
In which context does someone get a circumcision mid teens?
Phimosis
I have a family member who got one in his 30s.
Erections began to hurt so much due to phimosis, he and his wife weren't having sex.
Circumcision is not exclusively for the religious, there are medical reasons it may be chosen.
Was bending a piece of sheet metal on a 10 ft. bending brake. Stupidly had both my hands in the jaws trying to adjust the workpiece when the jaws partially closed on my hands. Imagine having all your fingers sandwiched between two thick steel plates because that's basically what happened. It wasn't really pushing down but just the weight of the jaws alone was enough that I was stuck and couldn't get my hands out.
It didn't hurt initially. Just felt like very intense pressure. I started hollering for help. Eventually another guy in the shop saw me and came running over to open the jaws. As soon as he did, I got this sharp, shooting pain in all my fingers. I think I hopped all over the shop, screaming obscenities. Had to just hold ice packs all day to keep the swelling down.
Didn't lose any of my fingers. Didn't even break any bones, somehow. Just bruised them really severely.
It hurt like a son of a bitch but I was incredibly lucky.
The most intense physical pain I ever felt was waking up after impacted wisdom tooth removal. One side of my face was appr. 3x the size of the other.
The second worse was last week; waking up from anaesthesia after having all 22 remaining teeth removed. It's slightly better now and I'd put it at 8,5/10.
The worst pain I've ever felt was mental though.
It started almost three decades ago when my father killed himself when I was a teen. To be honest, I never recovered. I'm a shell of a human being begging for release (death) daily while being too much of a coward to actually do it.
Oh, and after returning to work with 0 teeth, my coworkers now amuse themselves by making me say tongue breakers. I already knew they didn't like or respect me before all this, but this really drove a dagger into my heart because it was someone I never would have expected it from. I've been at this company for 10 years and in this team for 5 and I'm fighting a daily urge to follow in my father's footsteps.
He really had the right idea. I was pissed at him back then but I have more understanding and respect for his decision every single day.
That's fucking awful. I genuinely hope you find yourself surrounded with people who love and respect you. I know life can be utter shit, but I'm glad you're still here.
Perhaps you can get a gofundme for dentures or implants in the future? It'd improve your quality of life and is worth pursuing if you feel like it's something you have energy for.
22 teeth removed? What in the world?
Check my post history, there's a picture.
Spinal Stenosis. Woke up one day feeling like my back was not only broken, but that I could feel the broken ends grinding against each other.
Full bowel blockage
Ruptured appendix
With number 1, by the time I got to the hospital my shirt was wringing wet with sweat, vomit, tears, and blood. I took it off and told the ambulance driver to just chuck it in the bin lol
I walked around with a ruptured appendix for weeks without knowing it. In my case, the pain was very minimal (not normal)
there was so much raw sewage in my abdomen, they decided to gut me from my pelvis to my sternum, take everything out, and powerwash me
there was a problem with the hospital pharmacy. I woke up in the ICU with zero pain meds and my nurse screaming murder at the pharmacy tech over the phone. “For the love of god he’s up, I need that morphine RIGHT FUCKING NOW”
don’t know how long it took, but that was pure hell.
then I got full bowel blockage, multiple times, throwing up and all, with my stomach cut in two trying to heal. Surprisingly the blockage was almost as painful as the unmedicated seppoku I experienced.
Take my upvote for bowel pain being horrific.
Another data point. I also literally broke my back from a fall on the ice. If bowel pain was a 10, I’d put breaking my back at about a 6.
I'm sorry for what you went through, but the mental image of being emptied and power washed is so goddamn funny.
It's that type of thing that reminds me, oh yeah, we're basically just machines made of cells
Omg. Bowel pain is the most excruciating type of pain I've felt, it's about as strong as breaking a bone. I'm sorry you been through that!
I've never had that, but I have IBS-C and can see exactly how the pain could get that bad. Please tell me they corrected whatever caused it.
Ok so here's the kinda crazy part. I'm a sideshow and fire performer. I've suffered large burns, I can drill into my sinus cavity, I had my tongue surgically split, I staple myself with an upholstery stapler all the time.
Nothing has beat dental pain.
Sorry, what? You drill into your sinus cavity? What does that mean?
I do it with icepicks, nails, and even power drills. I can also mental floss, in which a tube goes in the nose and out the mouth, though I'm still new to that one. Power drills are very uncomfortable and have caused the most nosebleeds.
That's super cool! I knew a guy that would eat small ropes and pull it out his nose but... Wow that is next level. Thanks for sharing.
My wife said her dry socket was up there with birth of our large son.
Kidney stones. I've had the tips of two fingers on my left hand chopped off, and even that didn't come close to the feeling of a kidney stone rattling down the pipework.
I have Medullary sponge kidney, which in short makes my kidneys a stone factory. It's a love/hate relationship at this point. On the plus side, I've found drinking at least 2 liters of lemonade every day has done wonders to stop my kidneys from feeling like they're trying to kill me all the time.
Reminds me of a person in Woodwork class who partially cut into their finger with the table saw
I also forgot one day to let the table saw get to full speed and was lucky I didn't get wood launched at me because the teacher noticed and stopped me from using the saw
I absolutely hated myself for forgetting that basic step because I had used the table saw perfectly fine before
How did you get your fingers chopped off??
By sticking them where they didn't belong... kind of hard to explain but I was working on a friend's lawn mower and lost my balance, I tried to push against the mower to hold myself up but my hand slipped, kind of bounced off the ground and the mower blade managed to catch them.
It didn't really hurt but I was more mad at myself for it happening. I brought the fingertips to the hospital but they were kinda smooshed, and they had to take a bit more bone out of my fingers so that they'd have enough skin to close it up.
Jeez dude I hope your hand is still functional ok
Oh ya, it's fine.... It took a while to get used to having slightly shorter fingers, and it feels weird as hell when you bump things with them without the normal fingertip padding (Now it's just skin and bone hitting things) but I'm used to it.
Childbirth, my hand was killing me.
Physical pain? Migraine.
I have had kidney stone, childbirth, and broken bones, also once a torn Achilles tendon, all hurt bad, none were as bad as a bad migraine. That is the worst pain I've survived. So bad I got hallucinations, crying and puking up anything even a bare sip of water, nothing but pain exists. Migraine is by far the worst physical pain I have felt.
I’ve tried to explain the pain to my partner. She doesn’t understand that pain that intense makes you nausea. I also can’t remember simple things like what month it is, my dogs name, her name, like it’s crazy because your in so much pain. Luckily that have been significantly less frequent since I’ve moved to a different area of the country and I’ve gotten better at preventing them by catching them early.
A pain so great that your fingers stop working and your limbs go numb and everything in your body triggers a throb but you can't stop crying because it hurts too bad.
Uuuuuuugggggghhhhhh. I'm really happy that you're able to have them significantly less frequently. That's a huge boon. Hopefully you can be migraine free moving forward!
Mine got less intense after menopause and the worst ones were when I was on birth control pills, though I didn't know that until I stopped taking them. I thought menopause might end them (as mine were primarily hormonal), it didn't but menopause plus continuous daily low dose MHT has come close, but less intense has been interesting - before I didn't understand when the doctor would ask how bad is the pain, I would say Migraine, like what is the question? There is no scale, it is a migraine. But post menopause they do vary.
I learned that one of the things a migraine does is fuck with serotonin receptors so you experience the pain without any accompanying euphoria, that is part of why it hits different from other pain but the way I've described it to people is imagine the worst hangover you've had then multiply the headache part of it by about 10x.
I'm only glad that my migraines are very mild: scintillating scotoma to warn me the pain is coming and a tylenol500 and Advil every 2 hours with a good hit of caffeine will tamp that down. Soon as the vision is back I'm almost back to work.
I was once running along a wharf and slipped while landing a jump. Stuck the landing briefly, but then my feet went up and I went down. I lay for a moment mentally checking feeling in the lower extremities and dreading the point when I had to move and run to catch my boat, but I did all that without much issue.
It's been generally ignored for 30 years, so it's hardened up nicely between the sacrum and ilium and generally abused the rest of the back with the gait differences. That's why when I super strained it one morning by merely bending forward, I was the only one in the exam room who was surprised it was gonna do that.
It's the only time I've had morphine (baby morphine 2mg) and it didn't really do much that was positive -- too weak to dull the pain and already hitting me with gut issues. Riding out recovery on the lesser Tylenol/Advil stack was a challenge but I couldn't take the gut side-effects from the opioids.
Waiting on a programme to strengthen that up has been fun since the hillbillies made the doctor's quit during COVID, but I'm in a stable state and obviously here to post snark and spelling corrections; so we're good!
A spinal tap. It felt like a toothache in my entire body while a demon choir sang in a high pitched whine.
When I was 11 there was a chance that I had contracted meningitis.
Wanted to post the exact same thing. Experienced that a few months ago. Absolutely horrible. And i think the doctor's instructions made it worse. They told me to slump together and not round out my back. But after several failed attempts I rounded out my back and it finally went in. But that's only the beginning. The sucking sensation was so awful. It felt like they were trying to drain my brain.
I can still feel it.
Yeah they had me round my back, were pretty clear about it, but this was 30+ years ago so maybe some medical knowledge has come around, but I've not heard of it.
Sorry you had to go through it, sure wish they had a better way to get spinal fluid for tests.
I heard wild stories from paramedic about people with chronic pain.
It is not uncommon to get calls from relatives like:
" Our grandma fell, broke leg, and didn't want to bother you. She is on other side of city and we can't get to her."
And it turns out that it is open fracture but because she is in pain all the time, she didn't think it is big deal.
Gout in my knee. Gout anywhere has been bad. The knee was the worst.
No gout attacks in years though, keeping it under control.
The first gout attack I had was the worst. I had been limping for two weeks thinking it would just go away, but it got steadily worse until it became unbearable and I went to the doctor. The diagnosis was almost instantaneous. She looked at my foot and went "Yep, gout". It got worse for another couple of days until it slowly started ebbing away. I was basically a cripple for at least two weeks though.
I have it better under control now, but it still plays up sometimes. Gout sucks, but also there are worse things I suppose.
Doc thought I had gout. Try some drugs and get an x-ray. Not gout, the X-ray shows, just arthritis from walking on my feet in combat boots so much.
Repeat that every time I move and go to the doc to get more of the painkillers I need when it gets really bad.
On the bright side, it's not gout. ;-)
I had it on the ball of my foot. Like being stabbed with a thousand lava hot needles.
I was shot in the eye with a bb gun when I was in 9th grade. It was absolutely miserable. Right after it happened, I had to practically get carried back. My cousin and one of my friends held me up on either side because I couldn't see anything and wanted to just lay there due to how severe the pain was.
The trip to the emergency room is a story too. A nurse in the ICU thought I was hit by a baseball despite the paperwork and asked me, a teenager that definitely didn't get to the hospital myself, if I knew my mom when she returned from the bathroom. After getting to the ER, I vomited up the entire stack of pancakes and the half dozen bologna sandwiches I had eaten that day (I was 14, teenage hunger). 2/10, do not recommend.
Holy shit the rumours are true... you CAN put someone's eye out with that!
That's the kicker lol I was a lucky little shit, I blinked at the moment of impact which was enough to prevent me from losing my eye entirely. My retina detached and was operated on, a macular hole still exists today, and I still don't eat bologna. That Christmas, I got a Christmas Story tshirt from my grandma that says "you'll shoot your eye out kid"
Haha your grandma is awesome!
loss
l | lI
ll | l_
I've had so many accidents with some that needed surgery and nothing beats getting my finger stuck in the car door of an Uber. I'm just glad the driver didn't move until after I freed my finger.
Fucking Crohn's Disease sucks. All of my "adventures" with it have been painful, but the one that takes the cake:
A couple of years ago, my GI wanted me to do a pill endoscopy test, which is where they basically have you swallow a pill that has a camera embedded in it, and it takes pictures while it traverses your insides. You're supposed to naturally "pass" it like anything else you eat, but in my case I did not, and it got stuck. My GI did not believe me, and it just kept getting worse and worse. To put a timeframe on things, this happened in early February of that year.
I had ER trip after ER trip throughout that year, they determined that it wasn't going to pass on its own and needed to be surgically removed, but since it was not "life threatening" they couldn't just wheel me into an OR immediately and have it done, it had to be scheduled. Took forever to find a surgeon to schedule me under. One of the times that I was in the hospital due to this, the doctor on my "care" team wanted me to do what she called a "supreme bowel cleanse" to see if that would dislodge it. I was hesitant to do it, but I was pretty much willing to do anything at that point to end this nightmare, and only because she promised me that if it didn't work, they'd take me into surgery and do it the old fashioned way. That ordeal was terrible, I've had Crohn's since before I was a teenager, I'm very used to doing colonoscopy prep - this was far worse than that, the pain was unbearable and the amount of bowel cleanse that they gave me must've been right at the border of their ethical limits (or at least, I imagine that has to be a thing, right?) and plot twist she did not hold up her end of the bargain when the pill still did not pass, instead she gave me a few days worth of pain meds and discharged me the next day.
My condition continued to get worse and worse, yet my operation wasn't scheduled till early July. The hospital that the surgeon worked for agreed to pre-admit me into their care 2 months in advanced because it got to the point where I could barely even hold down regular water and I had to be put on IV nutrition with a PICC line and all.
Fast forward to the operation day, they ended up having to do two surgeries in one go, the first being to remove the pill, and the second was to try to fix the damage that had been revealed on the camera. The moment I woke up from the operation I was screaming in pain, and begging them to put me back under (which they could not do). They kept giving me pain meds and I'd end up passing out eventually from the pain, wake back up, and the whole ordeal would start again. Eventually they put me on one of those self-administered pain med pumps where I could click a button every so often and it would give me some pain medication through my IV.
I didn't end up going home until the very beginning of September (first week I believe), and I had arrived there sometime in the middle of May. I will never do one of those pill endoscopy tests ever again. I also switched GIs since my current one at that time had refused to listen to me when I told her something was wrong at the beginning of the "experience".
You win. Give this man the $10000.
I also choose this guy's Crohns.
For me personally it was getting some of my arms skin getting shoved between two desks that I had my arm resting on after someone slammed them together tightly during high school
Left a red line that took a while to go away
Edit I just remembered something wven more painful then this
I'm going to copy paste my comment reply to someone else below
"You reminded me of the one time I was visiting my uncle as a child and I ended up puking in the car because the sun was hitting the back of my head in summer, and this was Australian summer where It can get hot and humid
I don't know if it was a migraine but it was painful as fuck"
There was also the time i got rope burn from tug o war in primary school but the car headache that was potentially a migraine was more painful
Losing people I loved.
Getting my nail pulled off.
Also, not exactly painful, but tonic clonic seizure.
Getting hit by a truck while walking down the road, after the initial ragdoll physics were over. EVERYTHING hurt, from my hair follicles to my toes. Wouldn't wish it on anyone.
Severely herniated disc - I screamed at an ER doc that wouldn’t give me an MRI (or at least a referral) and tried to send me home with prednisone and ibuprofen. I had herniated my disc before but not as bad so knew what was up and I had taken prednisone for it and it just makes it worse. Doctor’s are so quick to be like “this is drug seeking behavior“ and I’m like yep can you also give me an MRI so I can be one step closer to treatment. Eventually got spinal surgery and mostly feel better.
migraines
sun poisoning on shoulders
colitis flare up
broken arm
sprained ankle
Dislocated shoulder. It went over the front of the socket which is apparently quite rare, and the most painful. I was blacking out front the pain, a friend fainted, ambulance gave me laughing gas which was great. Hospital visit was not fun, they tried various kinds of morphine which didn't seem to have much of an effect, then ended up giving me some sort of date rape 'cooperative sedation' meds and letting the student doctors take turns to fail at relocating my arm and fuck up the socket even more.
I mean I get that med students need to learn somehow but I feel like after one failed attempt a real doctor should do the job. Or like, build devices that allow to practice without causing harm to a person. Wtf
Mine dislocates this way as well. Bends you in half so you have to baby step walk right. It's happened six times now.
Nobody understands how bad this hurts. ER visit every time with 2-3 hour wait in ER with no pain meds. My shoulder is destroyed but now I've built up enough muscle to hold it in place.
Seriously people are like yeah that happened to me once, wasn't that bad, why didn't you just pop it back in yourself?
No motherfucker this is a completely different story.
But yeah. I understand you! Cluster headaches got nothing on this type of dislocation.
appendix
Had had a couple of bone brakes, but it felt like nothing compared to that pain, it also got away, was saved by a blood testing and going straight to operation table, after the pain ceased.
I feel like I've heard that before. Something about it being concerning if the pain suddenly stops because it indicates that it ruptured. I'm not a doctor though, just something I heard so it might not be accurate.
Some time ago I shitted a fucking big shit it almost broke my shit hole.
Not good.
Did it ever snap back to normal lmfsho
6 vertebrae, 4 ribs, base of my skull, scapula—fractured; it is a pain that has never faded and never fundamentally changed in 10.5 years. I can't escape it for even a minute. It is like a sword in my back, my spine feels like a twisted and knotted towel, and my mind like a voice shouting over the pain. Thanks for asking.
1 Kidney stones.
2 tear in intestine.
3 fractured vertebrae
To the tune of The Twelve Days of Christmas
🎶4 Shattered collar bone 🎵
A dear friend was car-jacked and they stomped his collar bone. I do NOT want to see or feel that ever.
And a kick in both of my testes
Inflamed sacroilliac joints causing stabbing pains in my legs while on a city break where we were walking everywhere. Thought it was sciatica at the time but multiple MRIs later was confirmed to be something similar but different..
Never broken a bone so don't have much to share in terms of the painful experiences.
Gout. Big toe on fire, throbbing with pain, joint swollen until there are no discernable features. Even a feather touching the area is enough to generate hot searing pain. The constant urge to 'pop' the big toe joint set against the impossibility to actually wriggle the toe without passing out.
Should drink lots of water to flush out the uric acid, but every trip to the bathroom has to be carefully considered because walking there takes 2-3 minutes of grabbing on to nearby things/people while stepping awkwardly on the outside edge of the foot, instead of 20 seconds of normal walking.
I've had severe tooth pain for a couple of weeks (a cyst - the pain killed the nerves in some of my teeth), and 3 days of gout until the meds worked well enough to walk less painfully were worse.
It's a throw up between dislocating my arm while kiting and wearing both wrist straps for the brake lines. So my arm dislocated in mid air, fell to the ground, kite inflates but doesn't take off and dragged me along the ground by my dislocated shoulder until I hit a rock.
Falling while climbing solo breaking my ankle and having to crawl out to find help.
And finally crashing while skiing and landing my hip on a rock, the ski patrol didn't know if I had a spinal injury and couldn't give me painkillers to get me off the hill, so they took me down a slushy bumpy spring slope on a sledge. Turns out I'd just fractured my hip so after the xray my friends dad the doctor got me loaded up with painkillers to make up for it.
Edit: that's just some of the worst I can think of, I am very grateful that the human mind cannot remember pain.
And people wonder why I don’t do dangerous shit.
Personally I prefer not having life long medical problems.
My father
Did he birth you from his cock or something?
Getting cheated on.
I was stung by a bullet ant (see username).
I had some sort of bad migraine episode where I couldn't stop puking. Every time I threw up, the force of doing so would cause a wave of pain that was like someone hit me in the head with a baseball bat.
You reminded me of the one time I was visiting my uncle as a child and I ended up puking in the car because the sun was hitting the back of my head in summer, and this was Australian summer where It can get hot and humid
I don't know if it was a migraine but it was painful as fuck
pancreatitis. I spent half of my 2021 in the hospital. it's apparently more painful than childbirth, it made me faint and my skin was yellow.
I've had a few teeth get broken in half horizontally without getting fully knocked out.
Runner up is a wrist fracture at multiple locations, and the two don't even come close - the teeth were WAY more painful.
Motorcycle accident.
Broken collarbone was the worst part. Broken ribs, internal bleeding, and later an infection with high fever that put me on antibiotics for a while were the least of it surprisingly.
The accident itself wasn't so bad due to adrenaline, however having one piece of the collarbone almost puncture my lung, and the other piece pop out of the skin a little at the top was uncomfortable.
The absolute worst part was recovery. The two pieces of collarbone rubbing together constantly, having to lie on my back still to sleep, while resting my arm in the sling on top of broken ribs. Unable to roll in my sleep gave me severe back pain. I basically had little to no sleep for the first 3 months.
Was prescribed painkillers that didn't do much until they upgraded me to tramidol. I didn't react well to it so I could choose between strong pain and no sleep or strong nausia and vomiting with also no sleep.
Painkillers don't take away the sensation of bone rubbing on bone. The memory alone makes me shudder to this day
Tooth fractured about 90% through at the gum line after I got hit by a car while biking.
It would be 'fine' (painful but just really sore like the rest of me) if I bit down on that tooth for a bit to fully seat it, but every time I talked, ate, or otherwise accidentally jostled it it would be like someone jabbed a red hot poker into my face - the crack went across the root and any bit of movement pulled on it.
It was a rough two weeks to get it looked at and a root canal done. I kept getting woken up by searing pain if I moved a bit during the night.
Pretty sure I have undiagnosed IBS. Occasionally when my turds are overly firm, usually after a pizza or pasta night, I get a sharp shooting pain right up the butthole. It's momentary, but it's the only thing I can confidently call a 10/10 pain. In those split seconds it's blinding.
Probably proctalgia fugax.
Oh yeah I get that and it’s just the worst
Got kicked in the balls when I was younger. It's not pain, it's something else. Of a different nature. You're transported outside of everything, outside of reality. It was transcendental.
Like the Avatar Life Cycle was severed in that moment. Truly the most unique type of pain to experience.
Iritis/uveitis - My cornea detached due to the heavy pressure inside my eye. The most painful thing EVER.
Kidney stones - Close second
Motorcycle accident at highway speed that jammed gravel into my cranial cavity and left me looking like watermelon-head for 3 months - I'd still rather have this than kidney stones or iritis...
Three herniated discs in my back causing sciatic pain. It wasn't that the pain was bad on a moment-to-moment basis, but that it just want on and on and on. It was agony to sit down, so I had to stand in my cubicle to work. It was painful to lie down, so I ended up getting about 4 hours of sleep each night. I was taking several grams of ibuprofen, acetaminophen (yes, I'm lucky I didn't destroy my liver), and naproxen sodium daily, just to be functional. This went on for over a year.
The fun part is that when I first starting having sciatic pain, I was pretty sure that it was my back, because I hadn't done anything that would have injured my leg. I had really good insurance at the time, but my doctor refused to order an MRI or even an x-ray; he thought I was trying to get a prescription for drugs. It took about 15 months of pain, and multiple visits to my doctor, an ER, and even attempting to see a chiropractor (who was at least self-aware enough to realize that he shouldn't touch me without an MRI first), before a scheduling error got another doctor in the practice to look at me, order an x-ray, and then order an MRI on the basis of the x-ray. Within about two days of the MRI being read I had received a referral to a neurosurgeon, in less than a week he was asking me whether I wanted a laminectomy or a spinal fusion. (These days I'd be opting for disc replacement), and I was recovering from surgery about a month after that MRI.
lemmy.ml
I had (and still have) a sore spot under my right shoulder blade, I think it's called rhomboid pain, which I visited a physical therapist for. He found the exact spot and massaged it with his knuckle and that was by far the most painful experience of my life. On the scale from 1 to 10, that was 8.5. At 9 I would start screaming and 10 would make me pass out.
What ever has been the second most painful experience doesn't even register compared to that.
I had a JJ stent removed without anesthesia. I have a penis so they enter this way to get it out.
I thought the pain of the kidney stones, which were the reason I had a JJ sten, twere the most painful thing I could have in my life. Turns out I was wrong.
Remember to drink, really.
Are you me?
Also I almost fainted during the first piss after the JJ removal.
Migraines and kidney stones. Just no.
Toe-to-heel second-degree burns on both feet.
I was 10, and stood up in sand that had been heated by a portable barbecue. The irony is, one of the adults had moved the grill so nobody would step in the coals. It had sunk its little wire legs and had been sitting directly on the sand for a couple of hours.
I stood up, screamed and ran for the ocean. About halfway there, the blisters puffed up and I had to crawl until someone figured out what was happening and hauled me into the water.
Double middle ear infection, couldn't let my head tilt to either side for three days, or absurd pain ensued for an hour.
How did I sleep then? Exactly.
Cluster migraines.
Broken bones. Worst was the broken rib. Couldn't do shit. Just breathing hurt.
Spinal tap. The pain went to 11. It was not fun.
I've been lucky, just throwing my back into spasm.
I had my fair share of health problems,from a major motor vehicle accident with a broken spine,burns,ruptured nerves, etc. to a stroke, a dislocated shoulder and knee, etc.
But the worst one? By far?
A fucking kidney stone. It literally redefined my 10/10 pain level.
Two weeks ago I stubbed my pinky toe so hard that I was sure it was broken, whilst talking my dog out in the middle of the night. It made my entire foot swell up for days. It's still sore today.
It's worse than when I broke my wrist as a teenager.
Heartbreak, death of friends family, migraines
spine surgery
had a large abscess excised from my right thigh. they did a wet-to-dry pack instead of closing it. while I was under, they were able to get two full gauze rolls into the hole. the pain of getting it back out was the worst pain I'd ever experienced in my life
Same thing here. Had to change the gauze daily and have never felt pain like it before or since. Healed up really well though.
If we mean emotional pain, heartbreak.
If we mean physical pain, alcohol withdrawal.
My ankle had a tendency to swell up and hurt in my 20s, and I had no idea why. Just figured it had never really healed from a previous injury.
One day, it was worse than ever. I couldn't walk on it at all. I hopped (literally) into the ER, and they told me that the only way they would know is to draw fluid from the joint. Keep in mind, this particular joint is twice the size it should be and can't have any pressure put on it.
That was the kind of pain that's so bad your body doesn't even know how to react. I was sweating, cold, nauseous, and dizzy. It probably only took a few seconds, but it felt like it lasted 10 minutes.
Turns out I have chronic gout. Which can be determined with a blood test. 🤦🏻♂️
I pulled my sciatic nerve. Was bed ridden for a month
Well I had hives about a day or two after I had bottom surgery and had to switch to otc painkillers, so it’s either that or the cluster headaches I had as a kid.
Third place goes to the infection I had after a particularly invasive removal of wisdom teeth, also sans opiate.
Being allergic to both opiates and one of the most common antibiotics really fucking sucks.
Emotional pain it’s either my mom’s death to cancer or my ex father disowning me
The very sudden and very quick pain I had in my back this morning. It was so bad I very nearly passed out.
Had a random sinus pain that was so debilitating had to call my dad to take me to the er. Was around 13 to 16
phone call could barely understand me. Bridge of my nose to back of head felt like sharp daggers in waves.
By the time made it to er was gone had 0 pain and I never experienced it again. Dr's said it was sinus but I still don't have a fucking clue what that was
Small stuff compared to some others on here, but noteable for being 100% self-inflicted and fairly warned. Not me, I watched someone stick almost a quarter cup of wasabi in his mouth. It was the first time he'd seen it, was warned by multiple people, and did it anyways. His eyes rolled back into his head. He vomited. He passed out briefly. Someone had to drive him home because he was basically acting like he was intoxicated.
He said later he figured it would taste like pistachio ice cream.
Humerus knitting while I'm trying to sleep sitting up without moving it.
Testicular torsion, left untreated for a minimum of 12 hours when I started puking from the pain, that's when I got to the ER. Some anti-nausea and morphine through an IV got me into a ultrasound when the motherfucking resident found the twist and made sure I was on an active dose of morphine and tried to untwist it without anesthesia. Jesus fucking lord Christ in hell, nothing can't undo that pain. (Cue 17 years later I discovered it helped me develop PTSD ).
Right up there was a pneumothorax where the ketamine didn't work and the pain meds were pretty shit when they put in the emergency chest tube. You know, scalpel through skin, muscle whatever is between ribs and plueral cavity. I was tripping balls so I felt the stabbing while I left my body and observed getting cut into (probably from the mirror light above me). Also contributed to PTSD I learned.
Not so bad as those but still almost made me puke from pain was an EMG on my hand to diagnose how bad my carpal tunnel was. The neurologist went straight for a nerve I guess and is was a lightning bolt of pain that didn't stop until he took the needle out.
You're probably thinking now "Jesus you've probably got a high pain tolerance" and no, quite the opposite actually. Prior to some intense therapy, pain in any amount always led to panic attacks, as my brain had made a leap from pain = bad to pain = literally dying.
For me, a bad gallstone. Pain enough to make me throw up twice and they had to give me two doses of morphine before it worked well enough.
Physical pain? I've had a spinal tap, countless perforated eardrums, dental nerve pain, broken bones and dislocated joints. You might consider me quite unfortunate and each of these is a story in itself. (The burst eardrum is definitely the worst of these, in severity and relentlessness) So anyway, I'm no stranger to physical pain.
BUT, I'm even more unlucky in that I suffered from a pretty rare condition called recurrent corneal erosion syndrome for three years after somebody poked me in the eye accidentally whilst he was trying to do the Saturday Night Fever move.
It's hard to describe the pain, but I'm told it's a contender for the most painful condition known to medical science. A woman once popped her own eye out with a spoon rather than continue to live with the condition.
The cornea (layer of transparent tissue covering the pupil/iris) is pretty bad at repairing itself. Like the other tissues in your body, it attempts to bond with nearby tissue when it's ruptured. (Think on how a cut on your hand heals). Except with RCE, the cornea preferentially adheres to the eyelid instead of itself. So, when you sleep, the front of your eye "heals" onto the eyelid, and then it tears open when you next open your eyes. Each time you sleep, the wound gets worse, until you can no longer open or close your eyes without agonising pain. So you are utterly sleep deprived, unable to blink for fear of the worst pain you've ever experienced every single time you do, and it hurts a good amount constantly anyway. It's as good an example of your own body torturing you as you could ask for. And it goes on and on and on. There's only one treatment which works, which is a type of laser eye therapy, for which the expense is very high. So I had to wait 3 years. The only way I managed to continue functioning was when I was allowed anaesthetic eye drops, which became like the air in my lungs. I would have to beg for them regularly, and I never had enough. Every night and morning I had to remember to squirt gel into my eye before closing/opening it, which would stop the healing effect IF I was lucky. Had the laser therapy not worked I don't know what I would've done. It's been eight years now, but it's "recurrent", so there's no guarantee it's gone for good. I wear glasses that I don't strictly need now, to make sure my eye is at least partially protected at all times. Sometimes, especially if I've drunk alcohol and I'm dehydrated, I get a little reminder that it's there. I live in fear.
It's a close call between kidney stone (the initial dislodgement from the kidney into the urether) and labour... Kidney stone wins because it had the element of surprise, extremely rapid escalation (0 to 100 in less than 10 minutes), and unlike labour contractions it just. kept. going nonstop until I got those sweet sweet IV drugs.
Realization, rejection, change, a swift kick to the nuts, growth.
Chronic cluster headache sufferer here. To sum up, I’ve been: Shot, stabbed, shot a second time, broke 7 bones in various appendages, hit with a baseball bat, hit by a car, multiple teeth issues, and migraine headaches, sprinkled for fun.
Basically, I took steve-o’s motto and ran with it (your body is a ride, ride it until the wheels fall off).
None of this comes close to the lightest cluster headache I’ve had. The sheer panic, the knowledge of what’s about to happen, the inescapable amount of pain I know is coming… Fuck CH.
Is there a connection between your lifestyle and the CH? Did one of these cause the other, in whichever sequence?
What do you do to get put through all that?
Made light of someone else's cluster headaches in a past life
I'm an episodic CH sufferer. No other pain comes close in comparison. You're not alone, brother (if I can make that gender assumption given your user name).
Have you ever looked into psilocybin?
https://blog.petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2022/04/18/small-doses-of-psychedelics-for-cluster-headaches/
https://americanmigrainefoundation.org/resource-library/can-psilocybin-treat-cluster-headache/
It's the best remedy I've tried insofar as it's the only thing that has worked as any type of preventative, and the only thing that has disrupted a cycle for me. It doesn't work as an abortive, in my experience, but it beats every pharmaceutical I've tried in every other way.
Sourcing it has been an issue, and it sucks to open yourself up to criminal offense for not wanting to live in pain, but we do what we have to do.
If you can jump through hoops with doctors and insurance, look into Ajovy. It's the only preventative that helps with my headaches, and it helps really well. But it's an expensive auto-injector and I had to run through several meds that don't work before insurance would approve, and I still need a discount card to help with the copay, but I've had about a 95% reduction in headaches, and the ones I've had were mostly mild and easy to control with Tylenol or at most a triptan.
Top 3:
I am picturing this all happening simultaneously
Oh no, shingles in your eye?? How was that?
It was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced.
Also, I had so many eye doctors appointments. They were worried I’d lose vision in that eye. Luckily I didn’t.
Damn. Glad there wasn't any vision loss. Yeah I had shingles before too and got treated pretty quick, but it was definitely freaky reading how it could spread to your eyes and cause permanent damage.
I haven't had shingles, and my appendix lasted until I could get it out, but I am with you on the kidney stones.
I've had 5 or 6 kidney stones and "the big one" has been harmlessly hiding in my kidneys for a few years. Every time, I think I'm going to power through the pain because the ER only gives you like one or two doses of Toradol and sends you on your way with FlowMax and useless NSAIDs which I can just get off the shelf. I've never powered through the pain. Every time I wind up paying like $250 for 4-6 hours of relief.
To this, I'll add I've had migraines that made me want to drill holes in my skull. They've been bad enough that if I'd had a gun, I'd have used it. I'm not saying they hurt more or less than kidney stones, but I can't tolerate headache pain like that. It's the difference between "my back is in agony" and "existing is agony."
I got 2 hits of morphine and when that didn't do fuck all for my kidney stone, they gave me ketamine. Can't believe you couldn't get anything stronger, that sucks.
I guess I shouldn't have said every time. The last two or three times (still used to try to power through just to not go to the ER). They used to give me Vicodin or Dilaudid, but they've gotten super stingy with opioids. Which I understand but for freaking kidney stones???
I get opioids are a big problem for some people but back in the days of over-prescription I'd have spares for years that could help when my back went out or something. I was a very responsible user, frequently not taking them as soon as I could bear the pain without them. They need to get back to a middle ground or find less addicting medicine that works as well.
Man those migraines sure feel like a little extra space up there would sure fucking help though.
Doesn't have to be deep just given enough room for the pressure to even out right?
The circumcision I had in my mid teens. Well, not the circumcision itself, but the erections I would get in the morning which would rip the stitches out of my cock, bleeding until I masturbated with anesthetic gel to orgasm just to stop the pain.
In which context does someone get a circumcision mid teens?
Phimosis
I have a family member who got one in his 30s.
Erections began to hurt so much due to phimosis, he and his wife weren't having sex.
Circumcision is not exclusively for the religious, there are medical reasons it may be chosen.
Was bending a piece of sheet metal on a 10 ft. bending brake. Stupidly had both my hands in the jaws trying to adjust the workpiece when the jaws partially closed on my hands. Imagine having all your fingers sandwiched between two thick steel plates because that's basically what happened. It wasn't really pushing down but just the weight of the jaws alone was enough that I was stuck and couldn't get my hands out.
It didn't hurt initially. Just felt like very intense pressure. I started hollering for help. Eventually another guy in the shop saw me and came running over to open the jaws. As soon as he did, I got this sharp, shooting pain in all my fingers. I think I hopped all over the shop, screaming obscenities. Had to just hold ice packs all day to keep the swelling down.
Didn't lose any of my fingers. Didn't even break any bones, somehow. Just bruised them really severely. It hurt like a son of a bitch but I was incredibly lucky.
The most intense physical pain I ever felt was waking up after impacted wisdom tooth removal. One side of my face was appr. 3x the size of the other.
The second worse was last week; waking up from anaesthesia after having all 22 remaining teeth removed. It's slightly better now and I'd put it at 8,5/10.
The worst pain I've ever felt was mental though. It started almost three decades ago when my father killed himself when I was a teen. To be honest, I never recovered. I'm a shell of a human being begging for release (death) daily while being too much of a coward to actually do it.
Oh, and after returning to work with 0 teeth, my coworkers now amuse themselves by making me say tongue breakers. I already knew they didn't like or respect me before all this, but this really drove a dagger into my heart because it was someone I never would have expected it from. I've been at this company for 10 years and in this team for 5 and I'm fighting a daily urge to follow in my father's footsteps.
He really had the right idea. I was pissed at him back then but I have more understanding and respect for his decision every single day.
That's fucking awful. I genuinely hope you find yourself surrounded with people who love and respect you. I know life can be utter shit, but I'm glad you're still here.
Perhaps you can get a gofundme for dentures or implants in the future? It'd improve your quality of life and is worth pursuing if you feel like it's something you have energy for.
22 teeth removed? What in the world?
Check my post history, there's a picture.
Spinal Stenosis. Woke up one day feeling like my back was not only broken, but that I could feel the broken ends grinding against each other.
With number 1, by the time I got to the hospital my shirt was wringing wet with sweat, vomit, tears, and blood. I took it off and told the ambulance driver to just chuck it in the bin lol
Take my upvote for bowel pain being horrific.
Another data point. I also literally broke my back from a fall on the ice. If bowel pain was a 10, I’d put breaking my back at about a 6.
I'm sorry for what you went through, but the mental image of being emptied and power washed is so goddamn funny.
It's that type of thing that reminds me, oh yeah, we're basically just machines made of cells
Omg. Bowel pain is the most excruciating type of pain I've felt, it's about as strong as breaking a bone. I'm sorry you been through that!
I've never had that, but I have IBS-C and can see exactly how the pain could get that bad. Please tell me they corrected whatever caused it.
Ok so here's the kinda crazy part. I'm a sideshow and fire performer. I've suffered large burns, I can drill into my sinus cavity, I had my tongue surgically split, I staple myself with an upholstery stapler all the time.
Nothing has beat dental pain.
Sorry, what? You drill into your sinus cavity? What does that mean?
It's called blockhead
I do it with icepicks, nails, and even power drills. I can also mental floss, in which a tube goes in the nose and out the mouth, though I'm still new to that one. Power drills are very uncomfortable and have caused the most nosebleeds.
That's super cool! I knew a guy that would eat small ropes and pull it out his nose but... Wow that is next level. Thanks for sharing.
Damn, that's actually harder! Reverse mental floss
Wow. I'm super interested.
My wife said her dry socket was up there with birth of our large son.
Kidney stones. I've had the tips of two fingers on my left hand chopped off, and even that didn't come close to the feeling of a kidney stone rattling down the pipework.
I have Medullary sponge kidney, which in short makes my kidneys a stone factory. It's a love/hate relationship at this point. On the plus side, I've found drinking at least 2 liters of lemonade every day has done wonders to stop my kidneys from feeling like they're trying to kill me all the time.
Reminds me of a person in Woodwork class who partially cut into their finger with the table saw
I also forgot one day to let the table saw get to full speed and was lucky I didn't get wood launched at me because the teacher noticed and stopped me from using the saw
I absolutely hated myself for forgetting that basic step because I had used the table saw perfectly fine before
How did you get your fingers chopped off??
By sticking them where they didn't belong... kind of hard to explain but I was working on a friend's lawn mower and lost my balance, I tried to push against the mower to hold myself up but my hand slipped, kind of bounced off the ground and the mower blade managed to catch them.
It didn't really hurt but I was more mad at myself for it happening. I brought the fingertips to the hospital but they were kinda smooshed, and they had to take a bit more bone out of my fingers so that they'd have enough skin to close it up.
Jeez dude I hope your hand is still functional ok
Oh ya, it's fine.... It took a while to get used to having slightly shorter fingers, and it feels weird as hell when you bump things with them without the normal fingertip padding (Now it's just skin and bone hitting things) but I'm used to it.
Childbirth, my hand was killing me.
Physical pain? Migraine.
I have had kidney stone, childbirth, and broken bones, also once a torn Achilles tendon, all hurt bad, none were as bad as a bad migraine. That is the worst pain I've survived. So bad I got hallucinations, crying and puking up anything even a bare sip of water, nothing but pain exists. Migraine is by far the worst physical pain I have felt.
I’ve tried to explain the pain to my partner. She doesn’t understand that pain that intense makes you nausea. I also can’t remember simple things like what month it is, my dogs name, her name, like it’s crazy because your in so much pain. Luckily that have been significantly less frequent since I’ve moved to a different area of the country and I’ve gotten better at preventing them by catching them early.
A pain so great that your fingers stop working and your limbs go numb and everything in your body triggers a throb but you can't stop crying because it hurts too bad.
Uuuuuuugggggghhhhhh. I'm really happy that you're able to have them significantly less frequently. That's a huge boon. Hopefully you can be migraine free moving forward!
Mine got less intense after menopause and the worst ones were when I was on birth control pills, though I didn't know that until I stopped taking them. I thought menopause might end them (as mine were primarily hormonal), it didn't but menopause plus continuous daily low dose MHT has come close, but less intense has been interesting - before I didn't understand when the doctor would ask how bad is the pain, I would say Migraine, like what is the question? There is no scale, it is a migraine. But post menopause they do vary.
I learned that one of the things a migraine does is fuck with serotonin receptors so you experience the pain without any accompanying euphoria, that is part of why it hits different from other pain but the way I've described it to people is imagine the worst hangover you've had then multiply the headache part of it by about 10x.
I'm only glad that my migraines are very mild: scintillating scotoma to warn me the pain is coming and a tylenol500 and Advil every 2 hours with a good hit of caffeine will tamp that down. Soon as the vision is back I'm almost back to work.
I was once running along a wharf and slipped while landing a jump. Stuck the landing briefly, but then my feet went up and I went down. I lay for a moment mentally checking feeling in the lower extremities and dreading the point when I had to move and run to catch my boat, but I did all that without much issue.
It's been generally ignored for 30 years, so it's hardened up nicely between the sacrum and ilium and generally abused the rest of the back with the gait differences. That's why when I super strained it one morning by merely bending forward, I was the only one in the exam room who was surprised it was gonna do that.
It's the only time I've had morphine (baby morphine 2mg) and it didn't really do much that was positive -- too weak to dull the pain and already hitting me with gut issues. Riding out recovery on the lesser Tylenol/Advil stack was a challenge but I couldn't take the gut side-effects from the opioids.
Waiting on a programme to strengthen that up has been fun since the hillbillies made the doctor's quit during COVID, but I'm in a stable state and obviously here to post snark and spelling corrections; so we're good!
A spinal tap. It felt like a toothache in my entire body while a demon choir sang in a high pitched whine.
When I was 11 there was a chance that I had contracted meningitis.
Wanted to post the exact same thing. Experienced that a few months ago. Absolutely horrible. And i think the doctor's instructions made it worse. They told me to slump together and not round out my back. But after several failed attempts I rounded out my back and it finally went in. But that's only the beginning. The sucking sensation was so awful. It felt like they were trying to drain my brain.
I can still feel it.
Yeah they had me round my back, were pretty clear about it, but this was 30+ years ago so maybe some medical knowledge has come around, but I've not heard of it.
Sorry you had to go through it, sure wish they had a better way to get spinal fluid for tests.
I heard wild stories from paramedic about people with chronic pain.
It is not uncommon to get calls from relatives like: " Our grandma fell, broke leg, and didn't want to bother you. She is on other side of city and we can't get to her."
And it turns out that it is open fracture but because she is in pain all the time, she didn't think it is big deal.
Gout in my knee. Gout anywhere has been bad. The knee was the worst.
No gout attacks in years though, keeping it under control.
The first gout attack I had was the worst. I had been limping for two weeks thinking it would just go away, but it got steadily worse until it became unbearable and I went to the doctor. The diagnosis was almost instantaneous. She looked at my foot and went "Yep, gout". It got worse for another couple of days until it slowly started ebbing away. I was basically a cripple for at least two weeks though.
I have it better under control now, but it still plays up sometimes. Gout sucks, but also there are worse things I suppose.
Doc thought I had gout. Try some drugs and get an x-ray. Not gout, the X-ray shows, just arthritis from walking on my feet in combat boots so much.
Repeat that every time I move and go to the doc to get more of the painkillers I need when it gets really bad.
On the bright side, it's not gout. ;-)
I had it on the ball of my foot. Like being stabbed with a thousand lava hot needles.
I was shot in the eye with a bb gun when I was in 9th grade. It was absolutely miserable. Right after it happened, I had to practically get carried back. My cousin and one of my friends held me up on either side because I couldn't see anything and wanted to just lay there due to how severe the pain was.
The trip to the emergency room is a story too. A nurse in the ICU thought I was hit by a baseball despite the paperwork and asked me, a teenager that definitely didn't get to the hospital myself, if I knew my mom when she returned from the bathroom. After getting to the ER, I vomited up the entire stack of pancakes and the half dozen bologna sandwiches I had eaten that day (I was 14, teenage hunger). 2/10, do not recommend.
Holy shit the rumours are true... you CAN put someone's eye out with that!
That's the kicker lol I was a lucky little shit, I blinked at the moment of impact which was enough to prevent me from losing my eye entirely. My retina detached and was operated on, a macular hole still exists today, and I still don't eat bologna. That Christmas, I got a Christmas Story tshirt from my grandma that says "you'll shoot your eye out kid"
Haha your grandma is awesome!
loss
I've had so many accidents with some that needed surgery and nothing beats getting my finger stuck in the car door of an Uber. I'm just glad the driver didn't move until after I freed my finger.
Fucking Crohn's Disease sucks. All of my "adventures" with it have been painful, but the one that takes the cake:
A couple of years ago, my GI wanted me to do a pill endoscopy test, which is where they basically have you swallow a pill that has a camera embedded in it, and it takes pictures while it traverses your insides. You're supposed to naturally "pass" it like anything else you eat, but in my case I did not, and it got stuck. My GI did not believe me, and it just kept getting worse and worse. To put a timeframe on things, this happened in early February of that year.
I had ER trip after ER trip throughout that year, they determined that it wasn't going to pass on its own and needed to be surgically removed, but since it was not "life threatening" they couldn't just wheel me into an OR immediately and have it done, it had to be scheduled. Took forever to find a surgeon to schedule me under. One of the times that I was in the hospital due to this, the doctor on my "care" team wanted me to do what she called a "supreme bowel cleanse" to see if that would dislodge it. I was hesitant to do it, but I was pretty much willing to do anything at that point to end this nightmare, and only because she promised me that if it didn't work, they'd take me into surgery and do it the old fashioned way. That ordeal was terrible, I've had Crohn's since before I was a teenager, I'm very used to doing colonoscopy prep - this was far worse than that, the pain was unbearable and the amount of bowel cleanse that they gave me must've been right at the border of their ethical limits (or at least, I imagine that has to be a thing, right?) and plot twist she did not hold up her end of the bargain when the pill still did not pass, instead she gave me a few days worth of pain meds and discharged me the next day.
My condition continued to get worse and worse, yet my operation wasn't scheduled till early July. The hospital that the surgeon worked for agreed to pre-admit me into their care 2 months in advanced because it got to the point where I could barely even hold down regular water and I had to be put on IV nutrition with a PICC line and all.
Fast forward to the operation day, they ended up having to do two surgeries in one go, the first being to remove the pill, and the second was to try to fix the damage that had been revealed on the camera. The moment I woke up from the operation I was screaming in pain, and begging them to put me back under (which they could not do). They kept giving me pain meds and I'd end up passing out eventually from the pain, wake back up, and the whole ordeal would start again. Eventually they put me on one of those self-administered pain med pumps where I could click a button every so often and it would give me some pain medication through my IV.
I didn't end up going home until the very beginning of September (first week I believe), and I had arrived there sometime in the middle of May. I will never do one of those pill endoscopy tests ever again. I also switched GIs since my current one at that time had refused to listen to me when I told her something was wrong at the beginning of the "experience".
You win. Give this man the $10000.
I also choose this guy's Crohns.
For me personally it was getting some of my arms skin getting shoved between two desks that I had my arm resting on after someone slammed them together tightly during high school
Left a red line that took a while to go away
Edit I just remembered something wven more painful then this
I'm going to copy paste my comment reply to someone else below
"You reminded me of the one time I was visiting my uncle as a child and I ended up puking in the car because the sun was hitting the back of my head in summer, and this was Australian summer where It can get hot and humid
I don't know if it was a migraine but it was painful as fuck"
There was also the time i got rope burn from tug o war in primary school but the car headache that was potentially a migraine was more painful
Losing people I loved.
Getting my nail pulled off.
Also, not exactly painful, but tonic clonic seizure.
Getting hit by a truck while walking down the road, after the initial ragdoll physics were over. EVERYTHING hurt, from my hair follicles to my toes. Wouldn't wish it on anyone.
Severely herniated disc - I screamed at an ER doc that wouldn’t give me an MRI (or at least a referral) and tried to send me home with prednisone and ibuprofen. I had herniated my disc before but not as bad so knew what was up and I had taken prednisone for it and it just makes it worse. Doctor’s are so quick to be like “this is drug seeking behavior“ and I’m like yep can you also give me an MRI so I can be one step closer to treatment. Eventually got spinal surgery and mostly feel better.
migraines
sun poisoning on shoulders
colitis flare up
broken arm
sprained ankle
Dislocated shoulder. It went over the front of the socket which is apparently quite rare, and the most painful. I was blacking out front the pain, a friend fainted, ambulance gave me laughing gas which was great. Hospital visit was not fun, they tried various kinds of morphine which didn't seem to have much of an effect, then ended up giving me some sort of date rape 'cooperative sedation' meds and letting the student doctors take turns to fail at relocating my arm and fuck up the socket even more.
I mean I get that med students need to learn somehow but I feel like after one failed attempt a real doctor should do the job. Or like, build devices that allow to practice without causing harm to a person. Wtf
Mine dislocates this way as well. Bends you in half so you have to baby step walk right. It's happened six times now.
Nobody understands how bad this hurts. ER visit every time with 2-3 hour wait in ER with no pain meds. My shoulder is destroyed but now I've built up enough muscle to hold it in place.
Seriously people are like yeah that happened to me once, wasn't that bad, why didn't you just pop it back in yourself?
No motherfucker this is a completely different story.
But yeah. I understand you! Cluster headaches got nothing on this type of dislocation.
appendix
Had had a couple of bone brakes, but it felt like nothing compared to that pain, it also got away, was saved by a blood testing and going straight to operation table, after the pain ceased.
I feel like I've heard that before. Something about it being concerning if the pain suddenly stops because it indicates that it ruptured. I'm not a doctor though, just something I heard so it might not be accurate.
Some time ago I shitted a fucking big shit it almost broke my shit hole.
Not good.
Did it ever snap back to normal lmfsho
6 vertebrae, 4 ribs, base of my skull, scapula—fractured; it is a pain that has never faded and never fundamentally changed in 10.5 years. I can't escape it for even a minute. It is like a sword in my back, my spine feels like a twisted and knotted towel, and my mind like a voice shouting over the pain. Thanks for asking.
1 Kidney stones. 2 tear in intestine. 3 fractured vertebrae
To the tune of The Twelve Days of Christmas
🎶4 Shattered collar bone 🎵
A dear friend was car-jacked and they stomped his collar bone. I do NOT want to see or feel that ever.
And a kick in both of my testes
Inflamed sacroilliac joints causing stabbing pains in my legs while on a city break where we were walking everywhere. Thought it was sciatica at the time but multiple MRIs later was confirmed to be something similar but different..
Never broken a bone so don't have much to share in terms of the painful experiences.
Gout. Big toe on fire, throbbing with pain, joint swollen until there are no discernable features. Even a feather touching the area is enough to generate hot searing pain. The constant urge to 'pop' the big toe joint set against the impossibility to actually wriggle the toe without passing out.
Should drink lots of water to flush out the uric acid, but every trip to the bathroom has to be carefully considered because walking there takes 2-3 minutes of grabbing on to nearby things/people while stepping awkwardly on the outside edge of the foot, instead of 20 seconds of normal walking.
I've had severe tooth pain for a couple of weeks (a cyst - the pain killed the nerves in some of my teeth), and 3 days of gout until the meds worked well enough to walk less painfully were worse.
It's a throw up between dislocating my arm while kiting and wearing both wrist straps for the brake lines. So my arm dislocated in mid air, fell to the ground, kite inflates but doesn't take off and dragged me along the ground by my dislocated shoulder until I hit a rock.
Falling while climbing solo breaking my ankle and having to crawl out to find help.
And finally crashing while skiing and landing my hip on a rock, the ski patrol didn't know if I had a spinal injury and couldn't give me painkillers to get me off the hill, so they took me down a slushy bumpy spring slope on a sledge. Turns out I'd just fractured my hip so after the xray my friends dad the doctor got me loaded up with painkillers to make up for it.
Edit: that's just some of the worst I can think of, I am very grateful that the human mind cannot remember pain.
And people wonder why I don’t do dangerous shit.
Personally I prefer not having life long medical problems.
My father
Did he birth you from his cock or something?
Getting cheated on.
I was stung by a bullet ant (see username).
I had some sort of bad migraine episode where I couldn't stop puking. Every time I threw up, the force of doing so would cause a wave of pain that was like someone hit me in the head with a baseball bat.
You reminded me of the one time I was visiting my uncle as a child and I ended up puking in the car because the sun was hitting the back of my head in summer, and this was Australian summer where It can get hot and humid
I don't know if it was a migraine but it was painful as fuck
pancreatitis. I spent half of my 2021 in the hospital. it's apparently more painful than childbirth, it made me faint and my skin was yellow.
I've had a few teeth get broken in half horizontally without getting fully knocked out.
Runner up is a wrist fracture at multiple locations, and the two don't even come close - the teeth were WAY more painful.
Motorcycle accident. Broken collarbone was the worst part. Broken ribs, internal bleeding, and later an infection with high fever that put me on antibiotics for a while were the least of it surprisingly.
The accident itself wasn't so bad due to adrenaline, however having one piece of the collarbone almost puncture my lung, and the other piece pop out of the skin a little at the top was uncomfortable.
The absolute worst part was recovery. The two pieces of collarbone rubbing together constantly, having to lie on my back still to sleep, while resting my arm in the sling on top of broken ribs. Unable to roll in my sleep gave me severe back pain. I basically had little to no sleep for the first 3 months. Was prescribed painkillers that didn't do much until they upgraded me to tramidol. I didn't react well to it so I could choose between strong pain and no sleep or strong nausia and vomiting with also no sleep.
Painkillers don't take away the sensation of bone rubbing on bone. The memory alone makes me shudder to this day
Tooth fractured about 90% through at the gum line after I got hit by a car while biking.
It would be 'fine' (painful but just really sore like the rest of me) if I bit down on that tooth for a bit to fully seat it, but every time I talked, ate, or otherwise accidentally jostled it it would be like someone jabbed a red hot poker into my face - the crack went across the root and any bit of movement pulled on it.
It was a rough two weeks to get it looked at and a root canal done. I kept getting woken up by searing pain if I moved a bit during the night.
Pretty sure I have undiagnosed IBS. Occasionally when my turds are overly firm, usually after a pizza or pasta night, I get a sharp shooting pain right up the butthole. It's momentary, but it's the only thing I can confidently call a 10/10 pain. In those split seconds it's blinding.
Probably proctalgia fugax.
Oh yeah I get that and it’s just the worst
Got kicked in the balls when I was younger. It's not pain, it's something else. Of a different nature. You're transported outside of everything, outside of reality. It was transcendental.
Like the Avatar Life Cycle was severed in that moment. Truly the most unique type of pain to experience.
Iritis/uveitis - My cornea detached due to the heavy pressure inside my eye. The most painful thing EVER.
Kidney stones - Close second
Motorcycle accident at highway speed that jammed gravel into my cranial cavity and left me looking like watermelon-head for 3 months - I'd still rather have this than kidney stones or iritis...
Three herniated discs in my back causing sciatic pain. It wasn't that the pain was bad on a moment-to-moment basis, but that it just want on and on and on. It was agony to sit down, so I had to stand in my cubicle to work. It was painful to lie down, so I ended up getting about 4 hours of sleep each night. I was taking several grams of ibuprofen, acetaminophen (yes, I'm lucky I didn't destroy my liver), and naproxen sodium daily, just to be functional. This went on for over a year.
The fun part is that when I first starting having sciatic pain, I was pretty sure that it was my back, because I hadn't done anything that would have injured my leg. I had really good insurance at the time, but my doctor refused to order an MRI or even an x-ray; he thought I was trying to get a prescription for drugs. It took about 15 months of pain, and multiple visits to my doctor, an ER, and even attempting to see a chiropractor (who was at least self-aware enough to realize that he shouldn't touch me without an MRI first), before a scheduling error got another doctor in the practice to look at me, order an x-ray, and then order an MRI on the basis of the x-ray. Within about two days of the MRI being read I had received a referral to a neurosurgeon, in less than a week he was asking me whether I wanted a laminectomy or a spinal fusion. (These days I'd be opting for disc replacement), and I was recovering from surgery about a month after that MRI.
lemmy.ml
I had (and still have) a sore spot under my right shoulder blade, I think it's called rhomboid pain, which I visited a physical therapist for. He found the exact spot and massaged it with his knuckle and that was by far the most painful experience of my life. On the scale from 1 to 10, that was 8.5. At 9 I would start screaming and 10 would make me pass out.
What ever has been the second most painful experience doesn't even register compared to that.
I had a JJ stent removed without anesthesia. I have a penis so they enter this way to get it out.
I thought the pain of the kidney stones, which were the reason I had a JJ sten, twere the most painful thing I could have in my life. Turns out I was wrong.
Remember to drink, really.
Are you me? Also I almost fainted during the first piss after the JJ removal.
Migraines and kidney stones. Just no.
Toe-to-heel second-degree burns on both feet.
I was 10, and stood up in sand that had been heated by a portable barbecue. The irony is, one of the adults had moved the grill so nobody would step in the coals. It had sunk its little wire legs and had been sitting directly on the sand for a couple of hours.
I stood up, screamed and ran for the ocean. About halfway there, the blisters puffed up and I had to crawl until someone figured out what was happening and hauled me into the water.
Double middle ear infection, couldn't let my head tilt to either side for three days, or absurd pain ensued for an hour.
How did I sleep then? Exactly.
Cluster migraines.
Broken bones. Worst was the broken rib. Couldn't do shit. Just breathing hurt.
Spinal tap. The pain went to 11. It was not fun.
I've been lucky, just throwing my back into spasm.
I had my fair share of health problems,from a major motor vehicle accident with a broken spine,burns,ruptured nerves, etc. to a stroke, a dislocated shoulder and knee, etc.
But the worst one? By far?
A fucking kidney stone. It literally redefined my 10/10 pain level.
Two weeks ago I stubbed my pinky toe so hard that I was sure it was broken, whilst talking my dog out in the middle of the night. It made my entire foot swell up for days. It's still sore today.
It's worse than when I broke my wrist as a teenager.
Heartbreak, death of friends family, migraines
spine surgery
had a large abscess excised from my right thigh. they did a wet-to-dry pack instead of closing it. while I was under, they were able to get two full gauze rolls into the hole. the pain of getting it back out was the worst pain I'd ever experienced in my life
Same thing here. Had to change the gauze daily and have never felt pain like it before or since. Healed up really well though.
If we mean emotional pain, heartbreak.
If we mean physical pain, alcohol withdrawal.
My ankle had a tendency to swell up and hurt in my 20s, and I had no idea why. Just figured it had never really healed from a previous injury.
One day, it was worse than ever. I couldn't walk on it at all. I hopped (literally) into the ER, and they told me that the only way they would know is to draw fluid from the joint. Keep in mind, this particular joint is twice the size it should be and can't have any pressure put on it.
That was the kind of pain that's so bad your body doesn't even know how to react. I was sweating, cold, nauseous, and dizzy. It probably only took a few seconds, but it felt like it lasted 10 minutes.
Turns out I have chronic gout. Which can be determined with a blood test. 🤦🏻♂️
I pulled my sciatic nerve. Was bed ridden for a month
Well I had hives about a day or two after I had bottom surgery and had to switch to otc painkillers, so it’s either that or the cluster headaches I had as a kid.
Third place goes to the infection I had after a particularly invasive removal of wisdom teeth, also sans opiate.
Being allergic to both opiates and one of the most common antibiotics really fucking sucks.
Emotional pain it’s either my mom’s death to cancer or my ex father disowning me
The very sudden and very quick pain I had in my back this morning. It was so bad I very nearly passed out.
Had a random sinus pain that was so debilitating had to call my dad to take me to the er. Was around 13 to 16
phone call could barely understand me. Bridge of my nose to back of head felt like sharp daggers in waves.
By the time made it to er was gone had 0 pain and I never experienced it again. Dr's said it was sinus but I still don't have a fucking clue what that was
Small stuff compared to some others on here, but noteable for being 100% self-inflicted and fairly warned. Not me, I watched someone stick almost a quarter cup of wasabi in his mouth. It was the first time he'd seen it, was warned by multiple people, and did it anyways. His eyes rolled back into his head. He vomited. He passed out briefly. Someone had to drive him home because he was basically acting like he was intoxicated.
He said later he figured it would taste like pistachio ice cream.
Humerus knitting while I'm trying to sleep sitting up without moving it.
Testicular torsion, left untreated for a minimum of 12 hours when I started puking from the pain, that's when I got to the ER. Some anti-nausea and morphine through an IV got me into a ultrasound when the motherfucking resident found the twist and made sure I was on an active dose of morphine and tried to untwist it without anesthesia. Jesus fucking lord Christ in hell, nothing can't undo that pain. (Cue 17 years later I discovered it helped me develop PTSD ).
Right up there was a pneumothorax where the ketamine didn't work and the pain meds were pretty shit when they put in the emergency chest tube. You know, scalpel through skin, muscle whatever is between ribs and plueral cavity. I was tripping balls so I felt the stabbing while I left my body and observed getting cut into (probably from the mirror light above me). Also contributed to PTSD I learned.
Not so bad as those but still almost made me puke from pain was an EMG on my hand to diagnose how bad my carpal tunnel was. The neurologist went straight for a nerve I guess and is was a lightning bolt of pain that didn't stop until he took the needle out.
You're probably thinking now "Jesus you've probably got a high pain tolerance" and no, quite the opposite actually. Prior to some intense therapy, pain in any amount always led to panic attacks, as my brain had made a leap from pain = bad to pain = literally dying.
For me, a bad gallstone. Pain enough to make me throw up twice and they had to give me two doses of morphine before it worked well enough.
Physical pain? I've had a spinal tap, countless perforated eardrums, dental nerve pain, broken bones and dislocated joints. You might consider me quite unfortunate and each of these is a story in itself. (The burst eardrum is definitely the worst of these, in severity and relentlessness) So anyway, I'm no stranger to physical pain.
BUT, I'm even more unlucky in that I suffered from a pretty rare condition called recurrent corneal erosion syndrome for three years after somebody poked me in the eye accidentally whilst he was trying to do the Saturday Night Fever move.
It's hard to describe the pain, but I'm told it's a contender for the most painful condition known to medical science. A woman once popped her own eye out with a spoon rather than continue to live with the condition. The cornea (layer of transparent tissue covering the pupil/iris) is pretty bad at repairing itself. Like the other tissues in your body, it attempts to bond with nearby tissue when it's ruptured. (Think on how a cut on your hand heals). Except with RCE, the cornea preferentially adheres to the eyelid instead of itself. So, when you sleep, the front of your eye "heals" onto the eyelid, and then it tears open when you next open your eyes. Each time you sleep, the wound gets worse, until you can no longer open or close your eyes without agonising pain. So you are utterly sleep deprived, unable to blink for fear of the worst pain you've ever experienced every single time you do, and it hurts a good amount constantly anyway. It's as good an example of your own body torturing you as you could ask for. And it goes on and on and on. There's only one treatment which works, which is a type of laser eye therapy, for which the expense is very high. So I had to wait 3 years. The only way I managed to continue functioning was when I was allowed anaesthetic eye drops, which became like the air in my lungs. I would have to beg for them regularly, and I never had enough. Every night and morning I had to remember to squirt gel into my eye before closing/opening it, which would stop the healing effect IF I was lucky. Had the laser therapy not worked I don't know what I would've done. It's been eight years now, but it's "recurrent", so there's no guarantee it's gone for good. I wear glasses that I don't strictly need now, to make sure my eye is at least partially protected at all times. Sometimes, especially if I've drunk alcohol and I'm dehydrated, I get a little reminder that it's there. I live in fear.
It's a close call between kidney stone (the initial dislodgement from the kidney into the urether) and labour... Kidney stone wins because it had the element of surprise, extremely rapid escalation (0 to 100 in less than 10 minutes), and unlike labour contractions it just. kept. going nonstop until I got those sweet sweet IV drugs.
Realization, rejection, change, a swift kick to the nuts, growth.