What caused the most physical pain you've ever experienced?
5I recently saw someone talking about the most painful thing they’ve ever experienced. Thinking about it, I didn’t really know what mine would be. I’ve had a collapsed lung + surgery to prevent it, a kidney stone, and a vasectomy. I suppose it’s probably one of those, but I don’t really remember which was the most painful. Maybe I just have a tendency to block-out unpleasant memories. What was your most painful thing?
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When I was a teenager, I was putting away a futon. My sister sat down on it, not knowing my hand was still in the way, and it ended up ripping off part of my index finger. Hurt pretty bad.
@Cythwulf That’s sounds pretty gnarly.
@medz Yup. I vividly remember placing my fingertip in a cooler and riding to the hospital.
Plantar fasciitis as a result of surgery to correct club foot when I was born. Gets really bad every 3-4 months. In my case it requires a triple bone fusion to correct, which would put me out of commission for quite a long time.
Reading @woodhouse and @Cythwulf’s posts
@ThomasF
@ThomasF
1 gall stone, which led to pancreatitis and a very inflamed liver. That little sucker was on a mission to kill me.
@Thumperchick I have heard that pancreatitis is excruciating. My cat had that once and he didn’t want to move. At all. Or be touched.
The first spinal fusion. Rare and fuckery form of scoliosis caused my spine to essentially collapse in a couple months time. They shaved bone from my hip and used it to glue two steel rods along most my spine. I grew 1’1/4" in three hours and it pulled every muscle in my back. 30 years later, they had to fuse a few more in my neck, but that wasn’t nearly as bad. One of six operations overall for various things, but by far the worst. I’m the healthiest messed up person you will meet, haha.
That or watching the movie Very Bad Things. Probably that.
@KittySprinkles that is a very messed up movie. But the spine issues sound pretty painful too! Yikes
@moonhat It’s the only movie I’ve ever walked out on. It has zero redeeming qualities.
As far as the pain stuff goes, it’s allowed me to take strong physical pain in stride, because there’s no other choice really, it’s always there but it’s my normal so that’s ok. Strangely, I can get a cold and fall apart but have major surgery and damn near shrug it off.
Appendix… almost blew up. Went from perfectly fine at 8 a.m. on way to school to surgery about 3p.m. Maybe not worst in the world but my worst.
@raccoon81 In 1988, I was having some serious pain & ended up at a doctor’s office. He told me I needed surgery to remove my infected gall bladder, NOW! But, I had made plans to take my little sister to see Metallica & Queensryche in concert. My Dad said there was no damn way I was going to drive 4 hours to see a concert in my condition. So, being the great guy he is, he drove us from Fargo, ND to St. Paul, MN, let us kids go to the concert, then not only drove us back, but had me to the hospital for surgery by 6:00 AM the next morning after the concert!!
Broken bones are not fun.
Two arms.
Broken toes.
Broken Finger
Also to add, the second time I broke my arm–the state wide Washington Assessment of Student Learning was taking place.
@riskybryzness I broke my thumb playing dodgeball. Best athlete in the class side-armed one at me. Tried to catch it but it was rising and it caught the top of my thumb and bent it all the way back. Broke it right at the joint. I knew it was broken, I told the gym teacher and he brushed me off. Told me to sit on the sideline and it would feel better. Came back the next day and shoved my cast in his face with a big ‘told you so.’
I only had my two front adult teeth for about 6 months when I made a deep dive into the shallow end of the pool. Cracked both of them right in half. Later in life I dropped a fry basket into the deep fryer and coated my hand in hot grease. Broke a toe one time and another I had a defective contact scratch my cornea…when driving…in the snowstorm…
Haven’t had much acute pain lately but due to various health things my legs and feet hurt to much to walk some days.
@therealjrn I hear the leg pain. It sucks. Some minutes it’s okay, other minutes it’s so bad you have to grab something to steady yourself.
No telling when. It’s always a party in your body. It yells “SURPRISE!!!” and you’re down.
@lisaviolet Yep. Gettin’ old aint for sissies.
@lisaviolet @therealjrn also had a scratched cornea (wore hard contacts forever). That was excruciating
@lisaviolet @llangley @therealjrn I was helping my kid practice softball pitching. I turned to catch a wild one and stabbed my eye with the top of a chain linked fence. Gouged the cornea. She did make it that evening’s game on time but only just barely since I had to go to to the ER first. Then because I made the mistake of telling them I had to drive they refused to patch it. That was agony sitting in the dry, dusty dirt at the stupid game with a gouged eye and no eye patch.
@Kidsandliz @lisaviolet @llangley I made the same mistake. I continued my drive into work, but when the cocaine drops wore off I had to leave to go get cotton balls, medical tape, and an occlusion patch.
The amazing ready to explode gallbladder was pretty bad. I knew what the pain was, it would usually go away after a few hours, but after a week of pain it was obvious waiting wasn’t working. It was a Sunday, I told my husband he needed to take me in, it was that bad.
He said “can you wait an hour until I get this thing done?”
The are you kidding me response was “no”.
In the hospital four days, two surgeries. One to clear out the gallstones that were stuck in the duct, the other to get rid of the gallbladder. I was NPO (no food or drink) and they had me on a drip. The drug was dilaudid. I remember thinking “people take this stuff on purpose?” Hated it.
But I think the last sciatica flare up I had was the worst pain I can remember. If you’ve had it, you know what I’m talking about. You can’t sit, you can’t walk, you can’t crawl, you can’t lay down, without pain. Natural bodily functions would have me close to passing out (especially after taking the oxycodone; one of the side effects hit me pretty hard). Muscles affecting other muscles. It was so bad, my blood pressure was going nuts and my vision was blurry. That really scared me. I got to go to the hospital in an ambulance. Took over a week to get better, opiods, ibuprofen, steroids…
@lisaviolet wow, that all sounds horrible! And I hear really bad stuff about sciatica problems.
@lisaviolet Dilaudid - I had that after one of my cancer surgeries. Made my eyes jump around so I couldn’t read, watch TV, nothing. I also hated it (although liked that it blunted the pain), but like you I can’t see why on earth someone would abuse it.
@Kidsandliz I remember sitting in bed in the ER room, you know, that room with all of the beds with curtains around them and I had my elbow on my leg, my chin in my hand and just out of it. And I remember thinking about the show Intervention and people getting addicted to this, why?
At one point during my stay, I asked the nurse if they could cut the amount I got in half (they did). If it had made me sleep, I guess it wouldn’t have been as bad. I don’t remember any physical things, like you experienced.
When I was a kid (between 9 and 12 maybe?) I went to the doctor for an ingrown toenail. Not my first and not my last, but the only one I ever saw a doc for.
Long story short, the doc was dumb and I had to go back because it wasn’t healing right. He had numbed the area the first visit, but now he was just going hogwild. He was poking things and cutting things and it all hurt like crazy, I had white knuckles gripping the chair and trying not to cry. At some point, he pulled out a stick of Silver Nitrate. It looked like this:
According to wikipedia, Silver Nitrate was known as
the stone of hell. I’m here to tell you, it hurt like it. It was like he was jabbing a red-hot ice pick, a needle full of acid, and a tube of hundreds of microscopic angry bees into my toe all at once. It was pure concentrated anguish, and he was applying it to my bare nail bed.Thankfully that was the last visit.
Breaking my tailbone 2 years ago, horrible pain, no way to cast and no way to be completely comfortable for about a year
@cardiganb My middle husband did that falling down stairs (of course it was cat related) and it never was really the same. To further screw himself, he did this two days before the birth of our son. Hospital armchairs are not the best places to sleep with a broken tailbone I’ve heard.
@KittySprinkles oh eesh nooooooo
Sounds like I’ve had it pretty easy in comparison. I did have a wisdom tooth that needed pulled because it was jacking with the nerve or something. That was maybe the most agonizing simply because there wasn’t much I could do for it except wait for the appointment to remove it. Not the most “painful” though.
The day my son was born and while we were still at the hospital my brain decided it was going to take some time off causing me to have a seizure and dislocate both of my shoulders, fracturing my left. The left shoulder required surgery.
The pain came in short bouts first when feeling the weight of my arms pulling me down, then with them being popped back in and dislocating again when rotating and then popped in again. Surgery wasn’t too bad until I had to remove the arm sling.
I I cut my thumb nearly to the bone. That didn’t hurt much, but the after the surgery it hurt like hell.
But probably an abscessed tooth hurt the most.
@craigthom I’d agree on the abscessed tooth (well in my case tooth root and it had spread to the bone). I found it really hard to disassociate from mouth pain which somehow made it worse than equal intensity pain elsewhere.
I had a motorcycle accident and something (the shifter?) penetrated my left leg just below the kneecap. In the ER they said they needed to test to see if my knee was compromised.
They injected this blue dye behind my kneecap to pressure test the joint. I’ve never felt anything worse. I was swearing up a storm and they left it for an hour, saying my body would absorb the dye. After an hour I told them it still hurt like hell and begged them to take it out, so they got a big syringe and sucked it back out. Instant relief.
Tl;Dr it’s not good to store stuff behind your kneecap.
@djslack Having worked for the DOC, I can tell you there are some weird places people store things.
@djslack @therealjrn “prison wallet”
@djslack I had a CT scan done for the lung stuff and they injected me with iodine beforehand. Not painful, but a very odd and uncomfortable warming sensation. Especially around the anus vicinity for some reason.
@djslack @medz Were the doctor’s hands on your shoulders?
@therealjrn Not that I recall.
@medz that’s very good
@medz Yeah the contrast fluid they inject you with is nasty in a weird sort of way. Causes kidney damage too sometimes. I am in the middle of dealing with that (too many CT and PET/CT scans due to one of my cancers) but at least that doesn’t hurt.
@medz The iodinated contrast they use for CT scans is pumped via pressure injector. It causes your vessels to dilate rapidly resulting in that warm flush. Most people say they feel like they’ve peed themselves.
I am hating this thread. But I can’t stop reading it…
I have to add, just because it’s on my mind constantly lately. The worst I’ve ever experienced I think wasn’t even my own. I’d say that belongs to being there when my son’s hand was destroyed in a drive belt. Nothing I go through will ever be worse and yet he handled it a hundred times better than most adults.
Nearly four years out and the whole thing is nearly resolved. I can’t fucking wait.
@KittySprinkles Your poor son - and you.
@Kidsandliz Oh almost entirely him. He’ll never have more than 70 ish percent of the hand use. Poor kid, one helluva trauma.
@KittySprinkles I can’t even imagine.
@KittySprinkles Ugh! There’s no room in there for a hand. How old was he?
@blaineg He was 13. It was a broken exercise bike. He tried saving a friend from an out of control drive belt because the teacher wouldn’t come over. Bike had no guard and no brake. Degloving is an ugly, ugly thing.
Shingles. On the 1-10 scale, about 300. It won’t kill you, you just wish you could die so the pain will stop. The fun thing was the pain showed up several days before the rash (this is apparently quite common), so it took four days to get a diagnosis beyond “I dunno, try taking this”.
Internal bleeding in a kidney. Part of my ITP (no platelets) excitement a few months back. Around 15 on the 1-10 scale. The doc said the reason anything with the kidney is so painful is it’s surrounded by a tough sheath, and it cannot expand. So any swelling, inflammation, etc. is amazingly painful. Mine started like a stitch in my side, like maybe a pulled muscle, and rapidly escalated from a minor annoyance to debilitating pain. Fortunately it subsided after a few hours, and never returned.
Heart attack. Kinda like an elephant sitting on my chest at 2am. Along with pain radiating into my upper left arm. A solid 10/10. But the Potassium IV they gave me in the ER… WOW, it was like liquid fire pouring into my arm! By far the most painful part of the experience.
Worse than pain: Losing control of my mind to prednisone for three months. No sleep, no focus, no concentration, no energy; or manically hyperactive. Nothing in between.
“Of all the things I’ve lost, I miss my mind the most.”
That was so true, and I was so glad to get it back!
@blaineg Yes shingles. OMG kill me first if I ever get it again.
@blaineg “Elephant sitting on my chest” was exactly the way my dad described his heart attack.
Also, I agree about the prednisone. I was prescribed some once and I was climbing the walls. Crazy thoughts (like “jump in front of a bus” level crazy), couldn’t sit still, etc. I stopped it two days into a two week course in spite of the warnings not to. Never again.
@blaineg @macromeh Yeah that stuff isn’t the nicest. I was give prednisone during chemo. I hated the couldn’t fall asleep aspect of it, especially when I felt so crappy and it would have been nice to sleep though some of that.
@blaineg I’ve nursed friends through shingles, misdiagnosed for three days at first. Agony isn’t even close to the description. Now that the Shingrix vaccine is on the market, I got the first of two shots last month. Those who have had shingles CAN get the vaccine. It’s effective in preventing more attacks.
@Kidsandliz Right there with you, Sister. I had it circling from breast bone to spine around half my torso – directly along the bra line. I still have residual pain from nerve damage.
Water skiing. Hidden stump just below the chop. Chin plant into the ski. Or maybe the stump? Dunno. Knocked the breath out of me, and a couple of teeth. Well, didn’t exactly knock them out as much as snapped them off. Many other teeth cracked. Extremely painful, but I t didn’t become excruciating until a couple days after the accident when the real pain took over.
On another note, I discovered extraction of broken teeth is excruciatingly expensive. Implants even more so. So I’ve been walking around looking like a hockey playing crackhead for the last 2 years. One day I’ll manage to scratch together a spare $30k and get my smile back.
@ruouttaurmind A flipper is about $3-400. Not ideal and you have to take it out to eat, but at least you then look “normal” and I, at least, found it stayed put (had an upper one) just with suction. I lost a next to front tooth due to the bone around the root channel being absorbed many years after a root canal. Finally got an implant. The implant feels weird, but it is so nice to actually not have that gap or deal with eating when you don’t want to take the flipper out (like, for example, on a job interview).
@Kidsandliz The oral surgeon suggested a flipper when I nearly fell off her chair after receiving the quote for extractions ($7k FML).
She said there were a couple extractions she could do right away, but she recommended holding off on removing all the damage until I was ready to do either implants or dentures. Then she suggested the flipper as sort of a cosmetic measure until I commit to a plan.
She also told me if I was going to bite the bullet (gum the bullet?) for implants, I should wait and do that, rather than dentures as a temporary solution. Something about the potential for bone in my jaw to do funky stuff after the teeth were extracted and possibly causing complications later when I pursued implants. IIRC, there was mention of bone grafts and other unpleasant sounding stuff.
@ruouttaurmind To keep your bone healthy it needs pressure on it when you chew, otherwise it thins. I had to have not one, but two bone grafts to get my implant (they put in powdered bone - not your bone - I chose not to ask where, or from what, it came from. It doesn’t actually hurt all that much after they do it although they do want to buzz you to do it and to drill in the bone). I had paid for the implant, was set to go, then got 2 cancers in one year, chemo through the next, trashed my bone marrow, nearly needed a bone marrow transplant, and it took until last year for the oncologist to clear me to get it done. Thus the really thin bone where tooth had been gone all those years. The tooth next to it was starting to be affected. Because the money had sat at the dentist all those years I could actually get it done (My finances were in the toilet after the cancers gigs and I never would have been able to afford it otherwise, for 19 months after the cancers mess I was living in someone’s shed so I could afford health insurance and medical bills. That was not a fun time in life). So yeah the smart move is to leave the teeth in your mouth. The flipper, even if you only wear it when you go out, is no biggie and hides the mess pretty well when you don’t want people to notice.
I had an ingrown toenail that became badly infected such that the entire nail had to be removed. The infection prevented the anesthesia from working fully, so I felt a good bit of it. The doctor said it was the grossest ingrown toenail he’d ever seen.
I think my doctor used the silver nitrate too @Moose.
@eonfifty It’s rarely a good sign when the doctor is impressed with something.
Had I been awake the most painful thing I have ever experienced is probably a cardioversion (times 2).
To save Googling, imagine having a pad placed on the chest and back (on either side of your heart) and getting shocked straight through it.
/define cardioversion
Something went terribly wrong.
Not the definition I was looking for, but that describes how I got in that position.
@jst1ofknd “Something went terribly wrong” would sum up most of the events in this topic!
@blaineg
I’m kind of surprised that I haven’t heard a story starting with “Hold my beer”.
Like someone else shingles (during chemo for cancer #3 - follicular non-hodgkin’s lymphoma). 5 nerve roots (affected the top of my chest, arm, side of my neck and head up into my hair line). Pain lasted 6 mo (fortunately for me went away, for some people it never does) although even now all that skin is not quite “right”. To get an idea of the pain imagine putting your hand in a fire and keeping it there, then imagine the pain you get when the dentist hits a nerve drilling. Have that pain shoot up the side of your neck and head once a second for months, 24/7. I had to struggle not to flinch each time. Even one strand of hair, slight air movement blowing on my skin was excruciating. You do not EVER want to get shingles. Ever. If you ever have had chicken pox get the Shingex shot (and not the old one). You need two of them 2-6 months apart.
A free tram flap reconstruction was about 10 days of serious agony after breast cancer #1 (made breast cancer #2 seem like a piece of cake).
@Kidsandliz Damn shingles sound like a true nightmare.
@KittySprinkles It is. You don’t ever want to get it. Ever. Get the vaccination if you have had chicken pox. @blaineg speaks the truth about where it sits on the pain scale.
This was in the middle of chemo and that particular chemo was busy killing my liver and bone marrow (both eventually recovered but the nausea from the liver stuff was pretty horrible, never mind chemo nausea) and I remember just sitting there and sobbing one day over the shingles, chemo misery, running a fever for 6 weeks, having to work full time through the entire mess (no sick days)… I had reached my breaking point that particular day - shingles was just the icing on the cake. Of course then you figure out how to pull yourself together and keep going and fortunately time blunts the memory a bit.
My kid was mortified when we drove 2 days to an extended family gathering and I was driving with my shirt off and had just barely wrapped it over my boobs (tucking it behind my back) to keep the clothing off my skin where the shingles were. A couple of truckers honked at us as they passed (after paralleling me for a while) us on the highway. One tried to convince me, by pointing, to get me to pull off the highway at an exit. Um nope to that. I didn’t even care at that point because of the pain of even wearing a shirt.
@blaineg @Kidsandliz @KittySprinkles I don’t remember ever having chicken pox. Do I need to get vaccinated?
@blaineg @KittySprinkles @therealjrn You can get a titer level done to see if you have had them - or at least I think you can - not sure if the chicken pox vaccination interferes with that test being accurate if you don’t know if you have had them or the vaccination for chicken pox.
Depending on your age and whether or not your parents believed in vaccinations you may well have gotten a vaccination against them.
You’d only need the vaccination if you had had chicken pox because what happens is that the virus sits dormant after you have had chicken pox and if you have a suppressed immune system, or even just because no reason, the virus can reactive and then you have shingles.
@blaineg @Kidsandliz @KittySprinkles I don’t have one of those star-scars on my bicep so I might not have been vaccinated. My mom & dad were pretty conventional so if I was supposed to get a vaccine, I probably did though…hm. I guess I’ll ask my doc next time I go in.
@therealjrn Nope that scar, or lack there of, has nothing to do with it. That is the smallpox vaccination scar. They stopped giving that one here when they eradicated it from the USA and most of the rest of the world.
Google says the chicken pox vaccination was licensed in 1995.
@Kidsandliz @therealjrn I’m one of those oddities, ok in far more ways than one. I’ve had chickenpox, a few times.
@Kidsandliz @KittySprinkles You’d best shag on in and get the vaccine Kitty!
@KittySprinkles Well get the new shingles vaccination. Who knows it may stop the re-run of chicken pox too.
@Kidsandliz thankfully my last go round was in my 20s, so it’s been 30 years. But the first one was full blown, the other two were mild.
@blaineg @Kidsandliz @KittySprinkles I got shingles in my 30’s…was not as painful as I’ve heard horror stories about…my brother got it in his 20’s…guess it runs early in my family…or its really stress induced…either way…glad to have it earlier as it wasn’t as painful as I’ve heard…so lucky there…but got vaccinated after the fact
@blaineg @Kidsandliz @KittySprinkles @therealjrn Your choice. Shingrix is recommended for you and people who have had shingles and…
@Kidsandliz @KittySprinkles @OldCatLady @therealjrn I’m on the list for Shingrex, they’d run out and weren’t expecting to get a resupply for a few months. Which I guess is about now, so I should follow up with the doc. Thanks for the reminder.
@amehzinggrace I’m glad you had a milder case. Shingles does seem to vary a lot, both where it appears, and how severely it hits.
A friend was hit by shingles when he was in the Army in his 20’s. He stood up under a heavy truck mirror, and hit his head hard on a bolt end. A day or two later shingles struck, originating from the scalp wound. His ran from his scalp, down and around his neck, and encircled one eye. They were concerned it could cause eye damage, but fortunately that didn’t happen.
Botched root canal done by a sadistic endodontist.
@heartny
I broke my tailbone once.
Long story short, I ran as fast as I could, jumped as high and long as I could and landed flat on my ass. It hurt to stand, sit, breathe, lay down, talk, think, sleep – it hurt for 6 weeks straight. After that, it ached for another 8 weeks or so before things finally started feeling normal again
Nose surgery for a broken nose
Third degree burns on my legs when I was six years old. I vividly remember that pain so many years later. Was in the hospital for a good stretch, then went home with bandaged legs. I also vividly remember the itching of my legs as they healed in those bandages. While the itching was in no way comparable to the actual burns, it was awful in its own right.
@pitamuffin How’d you get burned like that? When I was a kid I had a friend who had her nightgown catch on fire playing with a candle and her pain from being burned like that seemed never ending (along with the skin grafts and other agony she went through). Sorry that happened to you.
@Kidsandliz I was standing around watching a few older kids (one was my brother) who were doing dumb things with matches and fuel for r/c cars. Just a horrible accident. I have a very distinct memory of the other kids running home and my poor brother being left to tend to me and the little fires around the yard. He was only 12 – had to be a nightmare for him as well.
Having the chicken pox at age 28 was the worst pain I had ever experienced. Then at age 37 I had shingles. They were painful but I think the chicken pox were worse. Then I broke my tailbone by falling while getting out of a pickup in the middle of a snowstorm, that was super painful as well.
Well, telling all the gory details would definitely be TMI, and it’d also be mentally painful to recount something that was so traumatic, so I’ll spare you the full horror story.
Suffice it to say:
Excisional hemorrhoidectomy.
Yeah, your imagination can probably fill in some of the blanks; just know it was worse than you could imagine.
The surgeon told me it’d be 3 weeks of excruciating pain followed by 6 weeks of severe discomfort.
He wasn’t kidding or exaggerating.
It has been said that it’s worse than natural childbirth without drugs.
I believe it.
I took pain meds the first few days, but the side effect only delayed the inevitable and made it far worse than it would’ve been otherwise.
I ended up in the hospital twice for excessive bleeding, so I also had to stop taking ibuprofen.
It was Tylenol or nothing.
Moral of the story; eat plenty of fiber and don’t push or strain when you poop.
You don’t want to get to where I was, trust me.
Parasites
@Felyne Go on…
@therealjrn terrible GI pain for a years, diagnosed with SIBO. So bad that when I ate I was in a fetal position moaning. I’ve had all kinds of tests for Parasites over the years, nothing. Used some regular protocols from my ND and got a few out. Found out about this herb, Mimosa Pudica and heard about a protocol using it to get rid of them. Supposed to be 30 x’s stronger than any allopathic drug, but safe. So I tried it b/c I was so miserable and MD’s were failing me. Almost every day for 3 weeks I got out things that looked like slugs 3-7" long and 1.5" wide. Then a 16" worm and smaller ones. Almost had my GB out but discovered the worms were blocking it. Dr Jay Davidson, the doc I got the protocol from, has everyone of his patients with any autoimmune diseases do the parasite protocol first. It’s been about 10 years since I’ve felt this good, like a new human being. Ready to make a purchase on Meh!
child birth…never again
@amehzinggrace Respect.
broke my leg when i was 19/20ish, had been asleep for…15 hrs(working third shift retail, had 2 concurrent days off! WHOO!) was awoken by the ringing of the telephone, got up to answer it, not realizing my leg was asleep. get about 3 steps in, and SNAP! both bones, just above my right ankle.(MAYBE 2 inches).
did i mention my bedroom is in the basement, and I’m a large and heavy fellow?
Call my mom at work, but she’s already left (this is pre-cell phones) so i call my uncle who lives near by.
he gets here the same time she does, tells her what’s going on, and they rush downstairs.
now comes the fun part, a woman in her mid fifties and a slightly younger heart patient have to figure out how to get my lard but up the steep set of stairs(basement is 10’ deep)at one point, i say, well we don’t know for certain that it’s broken, so why don’t i try to put some weight on it, and help.
DEAR GOD IN HEAVEN!!!
That was the worst pain I’ve ever felt.
they got me up the stairs, into the car, and to the ER. sure enough broken, and because i had been asleep for so long beforehand, i had essentially fasted, they were able to get me right into surgery.
one side has a plate and 5-6 screws, the other 2 screws.
still there 19yrs later.
wow…in typing this i just realized i’ve had this hardware in my leg as long as/slightly longer than i didn’t have it…
Worst lingering pain: Herniated L5-S1 disc. There were days I could barely move and had instant tears just trying to get out of bed. It mostly resolved itself without needing surgery but I feel it once in a while. Infected/abscessed tooth definitely had it’s moments.
Worst instant pain: Accidentally kicking the corner of the wall by my tub and breaking my little toe. That one dropped me instantly. After catching my breath I taped it to the fourth toe and went about my life for the next 8 weeks until it healed.
@cinoclav I know I tear up when I have to get out of bed
Flipped a car, and my arm was still out the window.
@cubedweller I know a guy that happened to. Big tank of water on the back of the truck sloshed when going round a corner a bit too fast. He only has 1 arm now.
Slammed my pinky finger in a car door. Doesn’t sound too bad right??? Well it ripped the tip of my pinky right off the bone which was exposed broken and barely hanging on. After passing out and mashing the tip of my finger in the dirt, that wasn’t the worse part. I got a ride to the hospital, the tip was unsalvageable and they had to clean all the dirt out with a special wash. That, my friends, was the worse physical pain in my entire life!!! It felt like someone was jamming a jagged ice pick into the tip of my finger and twisting it! I drifted in and out of consciousness from the pain. They had to snip the bone,( luckily I was out for that part). And 6-8 weeks later I was back to somewhat normal minus a half inch of a pinky finger.
A Navy dentist didn’t finish a root canal and put in a temporary filling and told me to come back next week. That night the tooth went hot. Got in to see the Flight Surgeon the next morning who sent me to the dentist attached to the Blue Angels. He told me that I had an abscess under the tooth. He said he could drill down through the temp filling and drain the abscess. Oh and by the way, shots won’t deaden the pain and the Navy doesn’t do gas. He drilled so fast smoke was coming out of my mouth. When he hit something in the tooth that broke his burr I about came out of the chair it hurt so much. But the best was yet to come. He said he could give me antibiotics and the infection should go away in a few days or he could pull the tooth. I told him to pull the tooth. And once again shots won’t deaden the pain. They had four Corpsman hold me down while the dentist pulled the molar. No shots, no gas. Afterwards the dentist found what caused the issue. The first dentist couldn’t finish the root canal because he had broken off the tip of his file in my tooth. That caused the abscess and was what broke the second dentist’s drill.
TLDR: Navy Dentist fucked up resulting in four Corpsman holding me down while the dentist pulled a molar. No shots, no gas…
@Mehrocco_Mole Fuck that - you win.
@Mehrocco_Mole Yikes. Have you spent all the settlement money yet?
@medz You can’t sue the military for medical malpractice when you’re active duty.
Passing a kidney stone. Started out feeling like a pulled muscle. Then it got worse. Kinda lame, but it’s not a contest, right?
@mike808 My dear brother (may he rest in peace) got kidney stones twice. He said they dropped him where he stood, ending up crying like a baby. ouch.
@mike808 I passed a stone last November. I was asleep one minute, and the next, I was writhing in pain in the floor. I puked – a lot. It was like getting kicked in the balls over and over again. I honestly thought I was going to die. After about 2 hours, I finally called my dad to drive me to the ER. In total, the pain lasted about 3 hours and then I was fine. I passed another stone about a week later and it was nothing in comparison.
To be honest though, breaking my tailbone was somehow worse. I think because the pain lasted for 3+ months