“No root canal for you,” and a note on pain

December 2, 2014 • 9:46 am

It looks as if I don’t need that root canal after all, although I really wasn’t fearful of it, as the only thing to worry about with such a thing is the expense. I’ve had one or two before, and there’s no pain involved, and from then on the tooth is fine. But I was spared the drilling, thank Ceiling Cat.

I’ve had far worse physical pain in my life, and before we get back to business I’ll describe the most painful experience I ever had.

TRIGGER WARNING: PAIN.  I will try a new experiment here and put the rest behind a “fold”: a first on this site.  Click on “read more” to see the post in its entirety. 

In 1986, before I arrived at Chicago from Maryland, where I had my previous job, I got to design my new lab and office, and order furniture for both.  The one thing I wanted was a very large oak desk, and that’s where most of my office budget went.  The day I moved in, my desk arrived. It was a beaut, and must have weighed at least 500 pounds.

Unfortunately, the University was too cheap to pay for movers to get the thing up to my third-floor office from the loading dock, so the departmental handyman and I had to do the job ourselves. We took it out of the crate, tipped the thing vertically, and just managed to squeeze it into the elevator.

When we got to the third floor, we had to life the desk up and tilt it—a tricky operation for only two people.  And, sure enough, we screwed up.  We (or I) dropped the desk, and its entire weight came down on the big toe of my left foot.

The pain was so excruciating that I passed out immediately, falling into a heap at the top of the stairs with blood gushing from my foot. At that moment my girlfriend of the time came by, eager to see my new office. What she found was a prostrate Professor Ceiling Cat, lying unconscious on the floor and bleeding profusely. Somehow I regained consciousness (I was told that I had been in “neurogenic shock”) and was taken to the emergency room of the University of Chicago Hospital, only a few blocks away. But because I was a new faculty member, I was not in “the system,” despite the fact that I had health insurance. So they couldn’t even look at me until I filled out a bunch of paperwork and got in “the system.” Meanwhile I was sitting in a wheelchair with a pool of blood forming around its base.

After more than an hour, I finally got in to see a doctor: a podiatrist.  They took X-rays and discovered that the entire toe bone (I don’t know which one) had separated from the rest of the toe from the impact. They also said that given the lapse of time from when the accident had happened (THEIR FAULT), they might have to operate because of the possibility of an infection spreading to the bone. But first they had to remove my toenail.

To do that, they first injected anesthetics directly into my injured toe. That was so painful that I fainted again (I’ve only fainted three times in my life, and that was the second). When I regained consciousness I was surrounded by doctors, who apparently thought something was badly wrong. Fortunately, it wasn’t. Then I sat there and watched the podiatrist pull my toenail off with pliers. Now that was something to see! Fortunately, I didn’t feel a thing. But she told me that my toenail would never be the same again as the nailbed was damaged, and, sure enough, I will have a deformed toenail for life.

In the end, it turned out they didn’t need to operate, and after stitching up the wound, they gave me a surgical shoe and I had to walk home on crutches, a distance of about ten blocks (the wound reopened and I started bleeding again, but enough of that).

The pain of that desk severing my toe bone, and of the injection put directly into the wound, constituted the worst episodes of pain I’ve ever had. And that was my first day at work at my new job.

The second worst episode of pain was when a juvenile (and supposedly tame) squirrel bit deep into the ball of my thumb with its incisors, but that’s a tale for another day.

Feel free to recount your own war stories below.

247 thoughts on ““No root canal for you,” and a note on pain”

  1. Ewwww that sounded horrible!

    I have not been so lucky with root canals. My first root canal was perfectly smooth. Way better than having a cavity filled. I went home all cocky about it. Then, even though the root canal was perfect, I still felt pain. I went to a specialist & he told me that most likely, the tooth was cracked so to stop feeling pain, it had to come out. I had it removed (was cocky about that too) then waited a year & got an implant drilled into the bone (also not a big deal – more cockiness) & then a faux tooth put on top.

    Then, this summer, my opposite molar started hurting more than usual. We decided on a root canal right then & since I was so cocky from before I was all for it.

    Well, this time it did hurt. They couldn’t give me enough numbing to stop me from feeling it though it did help quite a bit. It took 6 hours as well because it was a trickier root canal, partly because we had put a crown on the tooth earlier in hopes that that would stop the pain (suspecting the tooth was cracked). The crown also hurt at the time. My dentist figures the tooth was close to abscessing as there was a lot of bleeding so that’s why it hurt so much.

    Also, I figure all my nerves culminate in my teeth as I’m very sensitive there but not so much elsewhere. I recently had a biopsy with local freezing that didn’t bother me. In fact, I told the doctor that it was better than going to the dentist!

    My worst pain is probably when I had appendicitis as a child. That was closely matched to bizarre uterus pain I got as a young woman where my uterus went into spasms. Once, just before a date, I had this happen & threw up all my spaghetti & meatball dinner. 🙂

    My dad crushed his finger in a machine when he was in his 20s. They were cheap because he would receive a greater payout for losing the finger and they didn’t properly take care of it. His finger has a weird tip with the nail growing around it. He said it hurt like crazy.

    I think teeth & fingers/toes hurt so much because of all the nerves there. Fingers & toes also tend to bleed like crazy.

    1. I have had a few of those uterine spasms – feels like a charleyhorse of the uterus – and always right out of the blue. Not a lot of fun…What happened with your date??

      1. Sorry to hear about your spaghetti and meatball experience. Had you believed truly in the Flying Spaghetti Monster He would have smiled upon you and relieved your uterine spasms.

          3. Ha ha but it was pre mass internet usage so the noodly one wasn’t that well known. Not like today.

    2. Until I read your horror story I didn’t know why root canal had such a bad reputation. I’ve had horrific dental experiences, all right, but root canal has always gone smoothly – compared with drill-required dental work generally, almost pleasantly.

      The worst part, from my point of view, is the anaesthetic injection beforehand: needles terrify me.

        1. Yeah, that’s for sure. I had to have several in my palate in the summer for filling a cavity between my teeth. They had to do it because I could feel the drill.

  2. Being given a lumbar puncture by a junior doctor in France who thought I couldn’t understand him telling the nurse it was his first. Had I not understood it may have hurt less. I’m very suggestible.

    1. Recently, I had a steroid injection into some neuromas that I have developed in my stump. The jabs were in the very sensitive part of the stump, with one being on the stitch line( or what is known in my family as the “seam”). I have had far worse of what I would call “injury pain” but rarely something that was such an instant shock. Still don’t believe the doctor when he said that he had given me a local ….

  3. I was quite fortunate to sustain very few animal bites in my almost 40 years of Veterinary Medicine, but lost a nail or two in home repair…..decided it was more advantageous to leave to experts….less painful too.

  4. When I was working at Chichester Cathedral, we closed for two weeks over the summer. On the last day in the morning we were lowering rubbish bags from the tower, & the hoist we used was on the scaffolding above me. It is one of those hoists with a ‘dead man’s handle’ that you have to push down on a lever to raise the hook, then raise a bit to lower & take your hand off to stop. So it is dangerous anyway. I was using a loop of rope around the rubbish bags (stone-filled) but as I lifted the bag over the toe-board on the scaffold the guy above started to raiise the load, catching my thumb between the spindle of the hook & the scaffold tube – crunch!

    Oh well, a visit to A & E (no insurance needed, thank NHS!) & they put a thumb ‘spica’ on with sticky plaster but no sling. By the time I had carried my bag to the station & got back to the parents in Norwich, my hand had swollen up hugely as no one had told me to keep it raised! After a week though my allergy to sticky plasters had asserted itself & the skin on the thumb was completely sloughed off… 🙂

      1. Are you thinking of The bricklayer’s lament by Gerard Hoffnung? There are recordings of it on Youtube.

          2. Just FYI, the Mythbusters reenacted this story too – sadly debunking the beautiful myth but still well worth seeing.

  5. I think toe was also my worst pain. The first time I was diagnosed with gout, the podiatrist put my foot under a fluoroscope/x-ray/some doohickey so that he could see the needle going in. He had to remove some of the fluid between the toe bones to verify his diagnosis. So I was alternately fascinated at watching the needle move around inside my toe, and thinking, “wow, that’s cool” and then realizing that there was a needle moving around in my toe and thinking, “wow that really hurts”.

    1. Yeah, I forgot about my gout attack. 7:14 AM. I remember looking at the clock when the Gout Demon chomped my big toe. I thought I’d been stung by a scorpion! Sudden, biting and unrelenting. If you Wiki “gout” you’ll find a 17th century or so drawing of a swollen, red foot being chomped on by a spiked-tail demon. Yes, it’s exactly that.

      Took 2 days with an ice pack and Advil to subside and now I take allopurinol. Always something.

      2. I had repeated gout attacks throughout the 1990s, mostly in my feet, usually the left. The pain was so intense it hurt to even put pants on. I remember having to take a bus to a clinic on a snowy February day wearing sandals – no socks. In ’95 I got an attack in my left hand and wrist. In the space of an hour, my hand looked more like a cow’s udder than a limb and my forearm looked like Popeye’s. I’ve got it under control now (yea, allopurinol!), but the many attacks left my feet somewhat arthritic. Advil never worked – I had to use prednisone.

  6. Pain to digits seems to be the worst! Very concentrated nerve endings or something?
    My very stoical son had to have an ingrown toenail removed when he was about 15. The first 6 novocaine shots to his toe did NOT take, so the doc finally just pulled the sucker. Bear did not faint, but he did say it hurt like hell…mainly the needles..

  7. I will try a new experiment here and put the rest behind a “fold”: a first on this site.

    Nice, and thanks! This will make the landing page easier to peruse. Sometimes it can be difficult when there are posts with many photos.

    This will also lead to more hits as users will be encouraged to click on articles when they want to see more.

  8. Given that I am an above-knee amputee and have had a hip replaced I might refrain from commenting !

  9. Recent bout of what I suspect was sciatica.

    One major abdominal surgery and a few broken bones pale in significance.

    To give you an idea, I broke an ankle running and never bothered going to emergency.

    The second time I broke an ankle (running again) my wife forced me to go to emergency but I refused painkillers and a cast.

    I would cheerfully break both of them again rather than go through another episode of the nerve pinch from hell.

      1. I suffer from neuromas and the best description I can give of neuropathic pain is the sensation of having a bare wire which is connected to the mains, being shoved into your soft flesh and then having the electricity turned on and off. Repeat at 15 second intervals for anything up to 24 hours …

  11. My own experience is somewhat different. I had a finger crushed in junior high shop class. More recently I had a car backfire through the carburetor, spraying my hand with burning gasoline.

    In both instances I felt no pain for the first half hour or so. It got pretty bad after that.

    After the fire, I was left sitting on a table in the hospital emergency room. My wife noticed I was going into shock and got me to lie down. I did not faint, but I came close. It would have been a nasty fall. My brother in law recently died after a fall in a nursing home. Never go to a hospital without a friend or relative.

    1. My dad fell when he was in the hospital. He had thoracic surgery & went to use the washroom. He had to carry a pole full of junk as he was all hooked up with IVs & drainage tubes. Of course, he fell when no one was around. He did manage to get up & didn’t hurt himself.

      My dad’s friend fell when he was recovering from a stroke when he also used the washroom in the hospital. He laid there for hours wondering what to do then realized he had his phone on him. He had the number to his phone in his room (which seems odd) so he rang it until someone picked it up.

      1. It’s amazing how long you go in the hospital with absolutely no attention whatsoever. I guess they save it all up in order to wake you up every hour at night for one thing or another.

        1. Yeah, my dad said he was happy to come home mostly because he couldn’t sleep there and he wasn’t going to heal if he was sleep deprived like that. The machines went off all the time for stupid things like batteries being low & he was in a room next to the elevators. He said the cleaning staff were the noisiest as they’d argue about what they had to do in front of the elevators. He would just get to sleep & then at 7am the physio people would want him up to walk around. At one point he just flat out refused to get up.

          He had to stay an extra week because he developed a clot in his lung, which is a common side effect of that type of surgery.

          1. Your poor Dad!

            Oh, yeah, those stupid beeping machines that no one responds to for hours! Arrgh!

  12. I used to think i was a tough guy. Raced motorcycles for years, many crashes, an extended stay in intensive care for one doozy of a crash. Broken bones, plenty of road rash (chicks dig scars). Nothing comes close to the pain I felt from kidney stones! Absolute agony. The only way i can describe the pain, exquisite…

    1. I’ve had them. A woman from an insurance company was taking my medical history, and I mentioned kidney stones. She asked if I needed surgery; I said no, I passed them. “Oh,” she said cheerfully, “so you know what it’s like to give birth!”

      1. I had a dog that passed kidney stones. When he did he ran around all happy afterwards. Poor guy. Animals put up with a lot of pain in silence.

        1. My first kidney stone was the worst because I didn’t know what it was, I was just in constant pain. I’ve passed several since and know the drill – drink water constantly, walk around complaining to get sympathy and wait for it to “come on down.”

    2. Stones. Ditto. Sweating, nausea, the feeling that my guts were being drawn. The sort of pain that it would be dangerous to have a loaded gun nearby because that might have seemed a reasonable alternative. I am amazed that I didn’t pass out.

      1. I’m scarred shitless of getting kidney stones as I’ve heard how painful they are. All the comments here just add to my fear. No calcium supplements for me…though I don’t know if that matters.

        1. Well, opiates help a lot. Also, though painful, it does stop eventually and you feel fine.

          1. If I ever get them, I’ll go to the Dr. immediately and get doped up. I think a lot of people just suffer through it w/o meds.

  15. I first must mention Dominic’s stating a place in England I have nothing but good memories of and that is Norwich. Many long years ago while in the service but that would be another story.

    Right along with Jerry’s great toe pain I had a good one while a kid living in Scottsdale. Riding on the handle bars of a bicycle, the fellow driving the thing went over a bump and I slipped over the front with my foot managing to go over the front wheel and on to the pavement. The asphalt soon ground through the tennis shoe and then into the big toe. There was no need to remove the nail because it was gone. I wish I had passed out.

    1. Catching your toe in spokes of a bike is bad too. I can’t believe we used to ride around on our bikes when we were kids with only a bathing suit to protect us.

  16. Worst pain in my life was when I broke my wrist (radius, ulna and scaphoid). The second worst pain was when I got to the hospital and because my fingers were going blue and numb they had to reduce the fracture immediately.

  17. I’ve also had toenails removed, and I agree the pre-surgical lidocaine injection is excruciating. My surgery was purely elective: I wanted to put an end to chronic, infected ingrown toenails. The surgery worked, but it hurt like hell.

    1. I had that surgery done as well for the same reason. In my case, the podiatrist botched it by not effectively destroying the nailbed so now the nail is deformed. Ugly thing that nail.

  18. Jaw surgery to correct terribly crooked teeth and a bad overbite. The surgery included surgically breaking my upper jaw to move it, drilling into the bone under my eyes (to hook the wire to that would keep the jaw in place), splitting my hard palate, moving my chin forward by cutting my chin bone in two places, and breaking my lower jaw to move it forward. I had a plastic splint over my front teeth that didn’t allow even tomato soup to go through–I lived on Ensure. The pain after the surgery was pretty bad and I looked like I’d been in an auto accident and had head and facial injuries unbelievable swelling, black eyes, etc.)

    Of course that was nothing compared to natural childbirth.

    1. I can’t imagine what it was like to listen to the surgeon(s)’s explain that all that was ahead of you!

  19. In April of 2001, I tripped on a curb and pitched onto a corner of a brick wall. With my full weight behind it, my left arm hit that corner just above the elbow. I was dazed and fell. A few moments later, I tried to raise myself, but my left arm bent in two places. After rolling over and sitting up, somebody called an ambulance (fortunately it was the fire department, not a private service). When the paramedics pulled my arm straight to put it in a brace, it was the worst pain I’d ever felt in my life. After that initial wrench, I had to put up with the arm being injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and X-rayed. It was not a simple break; the humerus had shattered five centimeters above the elbow. I spent the night drifting between pain and the morphine drip, and was operated on the next day. The hospital’s OTs gave me a poorly-fitting and badly made splint, and when I returned to the family home, I discovered that while I was in the hospital, my sister had evicted me*. As a result of having to move out, I was back in surgery the nest week. When that surgery was evaluated, the doctor told me that my arm would be permanently broken and that there was no more he could do.

    The pain was nearly constant, and I had no relief – I am resistant to almost every OTC pain medication from aspirin to acetaminophen to ibuprofen. I finally got referred to another doctor who said that he wouldn’t give up if I didn’t. From 2002 through 2006 I had seven additional operations. Screws and plates didn’t work; an external fixator didn’t work. Meanwhile, I was living in casts that nearly immobilized me for about half that time. The final surgery, #9, involved a bone graft from my hip. When I woke up, the pain from my hip was worse than the original fracture. When the cast finally came off, I had gained a lot of weight due to the inactivity and had developed lymphedema in my feet, yet another source of pain.

    During that time and since then, I learned a lot about my ability to put up with pain. From 2006 until a few months ago, I dealt with almost constant pain in my feet (from the edema), and a recurring ache in my arm (especially when there are changes in the weather). A couple months ago, with all other avenues exhausted, I tried acupuncture as a treatment for my foot pain. For the first time in years, I experienced a substantial reduction in both pain and swelling, and can now walk distances greater than half a mile. Now when I am asked to rate my pain on a scale from one to ten, what I feel as a 2 or 3 is what others might report as a 5 or 6.

    The worst emotional pain I’ve ever felt was when my wife died, but that’s another thing altogether.

    *I felt it was not coincidental that my sister was the assistant head of that hospital’s OT department. In the spirit of Clarence Darrow, I look forward to reading her obituary. If I attend her funeral, it will be for the sole purpose of sticking a pin in her to make sure she’s dead.

      1. Yeah – it’s like they say about being able to pick your friends but not your family. I haven’t had any contact with my sister or her family since that time – twelve years now. She used her power off attorney for my mother’s estate to sign the family house over to herself. She still owns it and her daughter’s family live there rent-free. There are people who have known me for years who don’t even know I have a sister. I sometimes joke about the situation (like my crack about the pin) to keep it from getting to me. The worst thing, though, was that when our mother died, she scheduled the funeral on a day that I was scheduled for surgery (on my arm) and I wasn’t informed until the day before.

        1. Wow, E.A., it’s hard to even imagine living through all that, let alone emerging with your humor intact. I hope the acupuncture continues to provide respite.

    2. Wow. Although it hardly seems an adequate response, I’m sorry to read this.

      If it existed, I’d suggest someone send this thread to that omnibenevolent god theists are always prattling on about. If this (and the stories here are just the tip of the shit-berg that is suffering in this world) is benevolence I don’t want to know what malevolence would be!

  20. I had to unsubscribe from this comment stream. It gives me the creeps, all this pain talk.

    First time I’ve ever “unsubed” on WEIT!

    2. It freaks me out too but I feel I must read it. I think I’m going to wrap myself in bubble wrap the next time I go out.

  21. My own worst pain…

    …several years ago, I was riding my recumbent bicycle home from work at about dusk. Fully lit up, with taillights as bright as those on a car plus a single headlight again as bright as a car’s, reflective shit everywhere, the works.

    I was doing between 20 and 25 mph in the lane closest to the curb, not quite keeping up with rush-hour traffic in the 40 mph zone but not that much slower than average.

    Some idiot made a left-hand turn behind me from a side-street into the rightmost lane, was speeding and passing traffic on the right and yakking on a cellphone when she plowed into me from behind, not even touching her brakes until after the impact.

    I have a vague recollection of seeing headlights in my rearview mirrors, and then of painfully sitting on the pavement with the bike wrapped around me, confused about what direction I was facing. Not much more of the crash scene, and then another vague recollection of laying in the ambulance as they put an oxygen mask over my fact. Next up is of shivering from cold as they wheeled me on a stretcher through the hospital, as a cute cop asked me some questions (and I never did catch her name). Then of being manipulated into a large but too-small machine that goes, “Ping!” so they could take pictures of my innards, especially my right arm that I was certain had been broken. Things start to clear up after that…turned out it wasn’t broken but my shoulder was dislocated, and they had to briefly administer a general anesthesia to reduce it.

    But that wasn’t the worst pain. Not even close.

    The worst pain was in the physical therapy in the months that followed as I worked on regaining full use of my arm. Had I secrets to tell, I would have told them gladly — and this was a process repeated a few times a week for months. Finally, as progress was clearly reaching its limits, I had surgery…which put me right back to where I had been after the wreck.

    And the therapy after the surgery was, perhaps, even worse than the therapy right after the wreck…but this time, recovery was at turbo speed. Not much longer, my right arm was better than it ever had been. Indeed, I’ve recently developed some slight discomfort in my left arm somewhat reminiscent of what I had in spades in my right, making me wonder if I might eventually have to have similar surgery in my left…but that’s a loooooong ways away, and hopefully will never happen if I’m smart about building even more arm strength and flexibility (which, when it comes right down to it, is “all” that physical therapy really is).

    b&

    1. Wow, that’s bad, Ben.

      I had a colleague who was hit by a car (I have been too; but nothing worse that scratches and bruises, thanks Ceiling Cat, so not worth mentioning) on his bike.

      He was coming out of a T intersection (3-way stop), turning left from the base of the T. He had stopped and was pulling into the intersection as a woman pulled up on the right-hand T. She looked right at him (he thought she made eye contact, hence he kept going) and then drove right over him. Luckily, it was all low-speed and he had just bruises and cuts — but bad enough bruises that he was in bed for several days.

      She said she didn’t see him! And she probably didn’t. This was before cell phones.

      But your discussion of PT brings one more bad pain incident to mind:

      I had wrecked up my knee and one of the things they wanted to do was loosen up the upper head of my fibula in PT, so that it would slide better in the joint (like it’s supposed to). I had earlier buggered up the fibula by breaking the other end of it.

      Anyhow, to “loosen it up” they needede to push on it (fore-aft relative to the body) — real hard! One problem: The fibula has a large nerve running on top of it, right where they needed to push.

      Holy moly did that hurt. I had to make them stop. But that initial loosening plus a lot of exercises did eventually loosen up the fibula.

    2. My dad got hit on his bike – not bad, just enough to knock him off & bruise him up. The jerk took off too. A guys stopped and said he’d chase the guy who hit him down if he wanted but I think my dad was too shook up to bother. He didn’t ride his bike after that.

      I too stopped riding my bike in my dad’s neighbourhood when I lived there. It is too dangerous – no bike lanes, stupid drivers, way too dangerous.

      I’m glad it wasn’t much worse for you despite how awful it actually was though.

      1. Fucking cell phones and driving! I hate that. Hopefully she immediately hung up and called 911 (since we know G*d wouldn’t have). What a horrible accident and experience.

        1. I don’t know if she called 9-1-1, but she stopped and was cited by the police and the works.

          I’m sure she had no malicious intent, but she still wound up working me over much worse than if she had taken a baseball bat to me. I just hope I was her last victim.

          b&

      2. That was my second time getting hit by a car. The first time, somebody clipped my elbow with a rear-view mirror, and I was knocked unconscious when I hit the pavement with no memory of the actual incident. The driver didn’t stop, but somebody happened to be watching from an office building across the street and called 9-1-1. Fractured left elbow from that one.

        I’ll admit that I didn’t ride my bike all that much after getting rear-ended, even though insurance paid for a complete replacement. Probably been over a year, now, since the last time I rode.

        Part of that is because, not long after getting rear-ended, I started telecommuting exclusively; before that, I was mostly commuting by bicycle. With much less need to travel, period, it became much easier to just be lazy and take the car wherever…plus there’s still the gunshy bit….

        I was starting to get enough out of shape that the doctor wrote me a prescription for statins after a physical a couple years ago. That’s when I got serious about exercising again and not long after found bodyweight exercises, which have been the perfect fit for me. I’m now in the best physical condition of my life, actually….

        b&

        1. Glad to hear you are exercising Ben! So important. I ended up getting a (health-club quality) treadmill for my basement.

          The weather is always good in my basement.

          I tried stationary bike; but I couldn’t stand it.

          I like walking uphill on the treadmill. It’s also my only practical way to train for my annual trip to the mountains.

          I can’t run due to knee injuries (well, even when I was 30 years younger and very fit I couldn’t run — something in my legs always went bad on me).

          I too used to cycle to work, around the year. I rigged up an auto headlight and taillight (plus strobes) powered by a motorcycle battery that I charged every night (this was in Seattle — very dark and wet during my commute from October through April). Never hit by a car (I crashed under my own power a few times — I rode fast). But I finally gave it up in winter when I got pneumonia one winter.

          1. I’ve never been one for running. As the yolk goes, I run when chased. I was a not-bad weekend warrior type of cyclist, between the daily commute and keeping up with the pack on the Saturday morning breakfast rides.

            People don’t realize that hiking can potentially be very aerobic activity, even at a slow pace, if the slope is steep enough and you’re wearing a pack with a bunch of water and what-not and a ten-pound cat slung across your shoulders. There’s a ridgeline in Phoenix South Mountain park that I’m fond of hiking, and it’s quite the workout, getting me near my maximum heart rate in spots despite a steady slogging kind of pace.

            I don’t think I’d do the treadmill thing, though…squats (and variations on the theme) work the same sets of muscles without the expense. Tabatas of speed squats are as good as any sprint on a treadmill, and sets of one-legged squats better than an uphill treadmill session. But different strokes for different folks….

            b&

    3. Yikes, Ben! I am so sorry you went through that!

      OTOH, you could have been killed. I assume the woman faced some criminal charges? Did she ever try to contact you?

      1. She never faced criminal charges. Police cited her for some sort of moving violation, and her insurance company paid for all my medical bills, a new bike…and an hefty down payment on my house. I never had any contact with her.

        I came out of it in great shape, but it’s not an experience I would recommend nor choose for myself.

        b&

        1. I hope she learned her lesson–but why does anyone need to learn something like that from experience? Isn’t it just obvious when you’re driving a potential death machine?

    4. A car ran me over too. I hurt real bad, but there was four inches of snow on the ground and I was literally saved by the fact that I looked like the Michelin man with mega gloves and boots, otherwise hospitalization would have been required.

      1. Snow has some really interesting physical characteristics. Definitely some non-Newtonian dynamics going on. I’d say you were lucky for your experience…but real luck would have been for the car to have come nowhere near you….

        b&

  22. My worst pains have all been dental, which probably means I should be thankful to have not suffered passing-out pain. My first root canal – I think the dentist was incompetent. As a child, having two teeth yanked out. Both of those were close to unendurable, even with drugs.

  23. Oh and longest sustained pain was 2 years of migraines non friggin’ stop! While commuting for 2 hours a day & working 8 hours and having a mean boss that if I went to the doctor to have my condition looked at, made me make up the time by coming into the office and staying there until the time was accounted for. I was salaried as well at the time.

        1. I’ve known people with chronic migraines, but never anyone who had them for such a sustained period of time. What hell…and I could see how a lame-ass boss could add to the pain as I imagine stress only exacerbates the problem.

      1. I think it was just pure stubbornness. I wouldn’t do it again. I fear when the migraines start increasing (I get 8-10 each month) that it’s going to be like that again.

  24. When I was 16 working for my uncle in construction, I was manning the 50 ( or so ) gallon cement mixer which had a large circular gear mechanism with teeth about 1″ deep. Get ready…
    It was necessary to help it manually and I got my index finger caught in the mechanism. Luckily, my reflexes where quick enough (at that age) to prevent a complete mash. But the top of the nail was compressed severely. The pain was noteworthy but not as bad as the following day when the swelling and pain drove me reluctantly to the doctor. It throbbed as if to explode.
    It was quickly lanced and soon returned to near normal with just a mangled nulula… a reminder of the event for the next 40 years.

    1. Smashing a finger is got to be one of the most frustrating pains as well. I don’t know why…like stubbing a toe. I hurts like hell AND just pisses you off!

  25. Please do not start requiring an extra click to read the rest of a post.

    One of the things that I have really liked about your website is that I could read every post by simply scrolling down. I would read, or at least skim, every post. But if you start requiring an extra click then I am in the position of having to decide if I want to keep reading….and some of the time the decision will be ‘no’ because the first paragraph or two just doesn’t grab me. Quite a few of the posts on this site have started off “meh” and then become much much more interesting in a few paragraphs – which is a perfectly fine approach when reading/skimming the entire post is easy (and is often ‘a best way’ to approach a topic).

    Unfortunately putting most of the post ‘below the fold’ requires one to make that first paragraph into ‘click-bait’….which is a lot of the problem with the Huffington Post, Salon, Freethoughtblogs, and a variety of other places.

    I can very definitely understand an occasional exception for something like this ‘pain post’ which has some disconcerting information in it, but please do not start doing this with most of the posts.

    1. Agree. I’m much more likely to read a post in its entirety if I don’t have to click and wait, especially since Apple’s OS 8 has made my iPad quite baulky.

      1. Some iPads had a bad time with the upgrade – I thought Apple released an update to fix that.

        1. 8.1.1 ( I think) is a tiny bit better than the previous 8s, but still seems slower than the 7s.

  26. My wife assures me that there is no worse pain than a kidney stone, and as I was present throughout that episode, I am inclined to believe her.

  27. well, the job didn’t get any worse, did it? 🙂

    my worst pain, gallbladder attack while driving in second to last semester of college. Result, one inch diameter stone being removed during winter break.

    and it isn’t “click bait” if you have the will not to click it.

  28. My worst pain actually came from root canal surgery. I was given anesthetic, but it didn’t end up numbing the entirety of my tooth – it seemed to at first, but as the root canal went on, it started to twinge. I was happy to grin (well, so to speak) and bear it, but it got worse. I wanted the procedure done (for dull reasons, the dentist was quite some drive away, and it was a hassle to get to, but worth it as it was an NHS place and cheaper in the long run). Anyhow, the tooth became hypersensitive, such that the slightest touch had me involuntarily recoiling in pain, thus making the continuation of the procedure not possible. It was a pain I have not felt anything like before or since, and that includes other dental woes. The tooth itself proved very problematic – the root canal was needed because of the wisdom tooth that had impacted into it, it had bent the roots of the tooth, which made it all the more complicated. However, what was left of the tooth lasted for five or so years, before it all had to come out in a thankfully painless and quick procedure!

    1. Arrgghh! So many tooth-related stories!

      Was anyone else indelibly traumatized by Marathon Man back in the 70’s?

      1. I never saw that movie, but in 1984, I had my wisdom teeth extracted. The stitching in my gums was botched, and after I got home, bled so much that I woke up choking on a lump of clotting blood. I had to go to an ER to have it re-done.

  29. OK … Thought about not commenting but changed my mind …

    The very worst pain I have ever suffered was the day following I had had an operation for a hip replacement. The regime normally involves getting the patient out of bed, using their good leg to take the strain and then to carefully put some of your weight onto the operated leg – but not much. I had the problem that I couldn’t fit my prosthesis as I sat on the side of the bed and when I tried to stand I put all of my weight on my new hip (crutches were out – to use them I would have had to stand on my one leg). To cut a long, and extraordinarily painful, story short, I was lifted back into the bed, followed by a hefty dose of oramorph. The next day a different regime was tried involving a frame upon which I could support my weight using my arms. Why they hadn’t thought of that in the first place ….

    1. Ouch! I hope you got good pain meds after! My first question to all doctors/dentists, etc. is what is the plan for pain management? I hate pain. I don’t want pain if I can avoid it & I always follow my doctor’s instructions on how to avoid pain. My dad let the pain get ahead of him when he had his thoracic surgery & I told him, “always follow the pain instructions; never let the pain get ahead of the medication as it’s hard to catch up!”

      1. Some folks (not me) are afraid of pain meds. I guess they think is leads to addiction or somehow reflects on their personal fortitude. What kind of a namby-pamby so-and-so are you? Can’t you take a little pain? Or a lot?
        I figure, I’m not trying to prove anything, so load me up with whatever you’ve got doc. Make me numb ’till its over.

        1. Yeah me too! If they could put me in a coma safely & still have me heal the same with no side effects like bed sores & pooling blood, etc. I’d be all for it!

          2. clicky thing no give morphine fast enough!

            cripes, I think I was the last person in the US to get a gallbladder operation with the big 7″ incision. Damn things are all laparoscopic now. I was clicking it a lot, especially when my then friend/now husband came to visit and made me laugh…..

        3. OTC pain meds don’t work for me, and the only ones that do are the kind that could become addictive.

      2. I was offered (apart from the oramorph which was extra-curricular) paracetamol/acetaminophen, ibuprofen or tramadol. I throw up if I take a single tablet of tramadol so it was down to what are in the UK over-the-counter meds!

        1. Boo!

          My friend’s dentist constantly gives her percocet. Seriously, percocet! My dentist gives my stupid tylenol if I’m lucky. I totally agree with this from the dentist for the pain I’ve had & wonder if my friend’s dentist has a lot of people who go to him just to get the drugs.

          1. One of my past dentists would let me control the laughing gas. Oh man, I started to LIKE the dentist!

            Have you ever looked at the patterns in the diffusion covers over the ceiling fluorescent light fixtures? I mean, REALLY looked at them? 🙂

            After a couple of visits during which I’m sure I inhaled half a cylinder of nitrous each time, they stopped offering it.

            Hey, doc, I just did what you told me to! 🙂

          3. Sometimes you gotta wonder about doctors and other medical staff. Talk about a lack of observation and tactics. C’mon people! Sorry you had to go through all that.

            Though all the comments about the drugs made me smile. Laughing gas….hahahahahahaha pun intended. 🙂

          4. I developed a fear of needles (because of a mishap while giving blood), so I stopped taking novocaine for simple dental procedures like fillings and such. For something like an extraction or a root canal, if I can’t do without a local, they have to put me under.

  30. Worst pains:

    #1 by any large measure you’d care to name: Having lidocaine and a steroid injected into the sciatic nerve opening between whichever two lumbar vertebrae those are. There was already far too little room in there, due to a bulging disc. That already hurt so badly that I had spent the entire previous 3 weeks in the fetal position on my side (only) and the only thing keeping me from grinding my teeth 24/7 was over-medicating myself (about 50% over) with percocets.

    They had me over a fluorscope (thank Ceiling Cat) and the first few little dye injections hurt like the dickens to begin with — they needed these to be sure they had the right spot (oh, YEAH doc, you got it!!!!).

    Then the doc says something like, OK guys! And two large orderlies lie on top of me, one over my legs, the other over my upper body. I’m thinking — this is interesting — and then they hit me with the real dose.

    And for about a month (well, it was probably about 2 seconds) tried to erupt through the ceiling (hence the large men on my shoulders and legs). I have no words to describe how painful it was.

    I had been in bed for the three weeks, in fetal position, unable to find ANY position to relieve the pain, with pain exactly like having a blow torch run up and down my leg, constantly (not to mention the pain at the disc site).

    That pain from the bolus put every pain I’ve ever had in the shade by orders of magnitude. I had no idea pain like that was even possible. They had to give me epinephrin to stabilize my BP.

    Luckily, it was very short-lived — because of the direct effect of the lidocaine. I was able to stand up straight (dripping with cold sweat) for the first time in a month and walk to a recovery room.

    The steroids took over from there, and with lots of physical therapy (many years), the bulge eventually reabsorbed as they told me it would (3-4 years) and I’m fine now.

    And: No more trying to lift 400-pound objects anymore!

    The rest in a further post.

    1. OK, second worst: Having my infected hand cut open from the back side of one knuckle to the palm side — with no anesthetic. And I was 11 years old. And then they smushed my hand around to move out the pus. They made my Mom leave the room. It was bad. My hand was swelled up and 2X normal (this happened really fast). I got 2-3 antibiotic shots in the rear (didn’t even notice them!) and a course of several oral antibiotics.

      After the infection was cured, I was very lucky not to lose any part of my hand. All the outer skin layers sloughed off and I had no fingerprints for a few months.

      Third worst: Ice-climbing (frozen waterfall climbing) in my 20s. The tip of my index finger smashed between the ice hammer’s handle and the ice. I shattered the distil pad bone. Doc says — nothing we could about it — it will heal on its own. I walked around for 3 weeks with my finger held above chest height (the pain was too severe from the blood pressure if I held it below heart level). It swelled up about 2X normal. When someone would stare at my upheld finger, I would say “We’re number one!!” which usually brought a smile.

      Forth worst: Tearing up my knee while telemark skiing. Ouch, bad, bad, bad. Couldn’t straighten the knew for a few days. After knee surgery, I got it back, mostly; but it got less stable with time and I don’t use skis at all anymore.

      It’s a very good thing that we can’t really remember pain, in detail.

      1. Ewwww – when I was 12, I smashed my hand down on jagged glass (I was trying to close a sugar container with the spoon inside & it shattered). I went to my doctor’s office & he stitched it up there without anaesthetic. I just missed my tendon so happily didn’t lose movement in the finger. I still remember pulling up my hand to look at it & seeing the white tissue just as the blood started to surround it.

        I don’t want any gross hand experiences to top it – especially one like yours!

        1. I had a similar experience but with the foot. I rolled my VW Beetle and the right foot was pulled off the tibia leaving a gleaming white bone sticking out. Yuk. Oddly the pain was very minor, shock I guess. After the surgery to re-affix the foot, pain meds kept me relatively happy.

          1. You describe your pain episodes very well. It was actually difficult to read. OUCH!!! While hospitalized last year for asthma complications, a patient next to me had a sciatic nerve problem- bulging disc like you or similar. I felt so sorry for him. He was in utter agony, curled in the fetal position, just moaning and quietly weeping. Scarred the shit out of me how much pain that nerve can cause.

      2. “It’s a very good thing that we can’t really remember pain, in detail.”

        …or there’d be a lot more only children.

        I’m sure that must be a very old joke.

        Man, jblilie, I think we need to wrap you in bubble wrap!

  31. It was cold, and I was wearing a thick knitted jacket when I started to make tea and when the kettle loudly whistled… I stupidly removed the whistle. I got all the 100ºC steam in my sleeve where it was trapped, and my forearm was fairly cooked. Oh, I remember nothing worse than that: broken bones or tooth abcsesses are faint breezes to compare (and I had my share). My wife drove me to the hospital; I don’t remember the official grade of the burn, but for three weeks I had to go to the hopital every day to be peeled out.

    1. Once when I was in university & at my boyfriend’s place, I drank a lot of long island iced tea & thought it would be cool to mix long island iced tea with real tea so I boiled the water. I then poured the water over my hand in my drunken stupor. Oh the pain! I had to sleep with my hand in ice water all night. I remember my stupid boyfriend being angry at me for leaving the party to go lie down with ice water. Yeah, that relationship didn’t last.

      1. My wife opened plastic wrap over something she had microwaved and the steam hit her hand — only for a second or two. Even with that little exposure, she was scalded baldy enough to need vicoden to sleep (I save my extra vicodens to put in my first aid kits — just in case).

        So, I am really glad I’ve never had a serious burn. It must be terrible.

        1. Yeah I think burns are the worst pain because they just keep on hurting. I hope I never have a really serious burn! As a kid I once spilled hot soup on my leg. I pulled off the pants & it took my skin with it. I still have the pink scar.

  32. 5 weeks ago I had a triple cardiac bypass. I would never have believed how painful having your sternum, (breastbone), sawed in half and your ribs then spread wide open to expose my heart and lungs could ever be. To say it was excruciating with every breath is an understatement. 3 days after the surgery a doc came in to remove the 3 tubes that had been inserted at the end of the procedure below the sternal incision. I watched as he pulled 3 16in long, white, bloody tubes that slowly uncoiled as they left my body. They were 1/2inch in diameter. This remarkably did not hurt. “You’ll feel better once the tubes are out because they have been rubbing against your heart and lungs as they were coiled inside you”. The doc informed me this as he pulled them out of me. Not so! I barely noticed a lowering of the pain. The thing about bypass and open chest pain is that it hurts with every breath. If it were my hand and I could stop the pain by not moving my hand, I would have gladly done so….but no, the pain was with every single breath, no matter how shallow I tried to make them. You have to breath, at least 12-16 times a minute. And don’t get me started on coughing or sneezing!
    I am home now with no pain at all and I am grateful that I had the procedure so I can get on with my active life again soon.

    1. That sounds like absolute suffering. And on top of that, with major surgery of a major organ, there is a fear for your life. For some (like me) a very high fear factor. At least my worst pain experiences weren’t that life threatening.

      1. Oh yeah, I want to add that I’m glad everything went well, you are out of pain and you are on the mend. 🙂

    2. How awful. It sounds like you didn’t get very good pain management at the hospital. I’ve known many people who have had that procedure and while not perfectly comfortable, weren’t in the pain you describe. I’m glad you are feeling better now!

      1. Diana,
        I actually had good pain management at the hospital. But it never seemed to stop the pain completely.
        I’m just glad I’m home and the pain has stopped.
        Peggy

        1. So awful! Perhaps the surgery hurt nerves as can happen with surgery or you were just unlucky with the meds. Glad the pain has stopped now!

  33. I tore my acl playing softball as a teenager but didn’t realise it at the time. I had to limp home a mile or more on a grossly swollen knee. No fun.

  34. What color are your eyes? That may have some bearing on pain tolerance. See http://www.anes.upmc.edu/news/2014/07/25_Dr_Belfer. In a small study, she found that people with dark eyes (brown and hazel) had a lower pain tolerance than light-eyed (blue and green) people.

    Personal pain: migraines and menstrual cramps. Nothing else. And I have green eyes.

    1. I read a study about red-heads having more pain for some things but less from others. I can believe it. I have some red in my hair (I’m a failed red-head) & I swear it’s weird how some things really hurt & others don’t.

      I have green eyes – they used to be blue but I finally acknowledged that they looked green (after looking at them really close to make sure) so I updated my passports to say “green”.

      1. I think one of the conclusions was a low tolerance for thermal pain in redheads. I’m a redhead (with blue eyes). I have a high tolerance for physical pain, but when a body part gets overly cold, it hurts quite badly. Lately, my hands have been screaming in pain when I drive home from work in the evening. On extremely cold days, the throbbing pain follows me inside and takes awhile to subside.

        1. I hate thermal pain! It aches like crazy! I made the mistake of forgetting my gloves yesterday & filling my car with naked hands. That was very painful.

  35. Bengay all over my swim suit. I put it on and swam in it. I did not want my team mates to know, so I toughed it out. TWO HOURS, non stop crying (goggles filled up continuously). The pain was near inconceivable in places there should never be pain like that.

    Upside: endorphins that come afterwards are quite pleasureful…though I would never recommend the experience to anyone.

    1. I have a buddy that was cutting up chilies and without washing his hands went and took a piss. After about 15 minutes, he found out just how painful a capsaicin burn could be. Though I would take that over Bengay in the shorts in a New York second.

      1. I cut hot peppers once, washed my hands with soap thinking all was good. Then I rubbed my eye. What the hell!

        1. I’ve done that too! What the hell is right! I’ve heard that washing with cold water instead of hot works better at removing capsaicin, though that seems counter-intuitive since capsaicin is an oil.

          2. You should coat your hands in cooking oil before handling them. Or, as I do, use gloves or bags when playing with any chili that’s on the cheeky side.

        2. Oh hayzeus yes. Cut up habaneros with bare hands for my dinner once. All fine. Went to bed about 3 hours later and got an eyelash in the eye and scratched it out with a well washed finger.

          I think that I spent 30 minutes straight crying!

          1. I moved out of the house at 19 and ended up in L.A. I have always loved to cook, so started cooking anything and everything once on my own. My family back then was pretty much “meat and potatoes” so I went towards Asian, Indian, Mexican and the spicier the better. Didn’t have any idea that peppers could do that. I made something (can’t remember) with the relatively mild jalapeno pepper and never washed my fingers after chopping. An hour after dinner, my girlfriend of the time and I went and saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. A half hour into the movie, all sorts or parts started burning inexplicably: fingers, eye lids, nostrils, cheeks. The movie wasn’t the best Dr. Jones installment, and the pepper pain didn’t help matters. Now whenever I see the title of that film, I remember my first bad experience with the feisty chili pepper. Now I always wash, but as the comments above attest, sometimes that’s not enough.

            Like you, now I wear gloves. Problem solved!

  36. Except for bike handlebars colliding with my face when I was 12, which caused me to bite through my lower lip with my front teeth and end up with the shattered pieces of one tooth in said lip, I have been relatively accident free. That injury actually did not hurt very much, but being told that I bit through my lip and was missing half a front tooth had me in tears. My mom promptly told me to “quit it” (crying). This wasn’t her being uncaring, but just a part of her personality. A doctor picked the pieces of tooth out of my lip later that evening, and the dentist used them to rebuild the tooth the next day. Rebuilt tooth is still going strong 19 years later!

    The worst pain in my life was due to a malfunctioning organ. Gallbladder attacks can be very painful, and the one I had this past February shortly after deciding to have the organ removed was the worst pain of my life – I guess it was giving me a parting gift. Imagine someone/thing twisting your insides from front to back and side to side just below your diaphragm PLUS radiating pain into the back of the right shoulder AND nothing will make the pain lessen (perhaps prescription pain killers would, but I did not have any of those). No tears with that gallbladder attack, or any of them, just a lot of moaning and groaning (and cursing!). Second worst pain was the phrenic nerve being irritated by the gasses they pump you with during laparoscopic abdominal surgery – more right shoulder pain. That one had me in tears! If my mom were alive, she would have told me to quit those tears, too, especially since she had her gallbladder removed the old fashioned way a few month after giving birth to me. Even with her stoical nature, I still “want my mommy” when I am in pain.

    Those gallbladder attacks, especially the last one, were so painful. I cannot imagine living with chronic pain to that degree. Hats off to those who do.

    1. I was accident prone (probably still am, I’ve just learned to avoid things better) that if it hadn’t been the 70s, the doctors would’ve thought my parents were beating me all the time.

      I smashed my face into a TV – those big TVs with the big knobs that were furniture-like when Mr. Rogers said to imagine what it would be like being blind. I closed my eyes & face planted into the knobs of the giant TV. Blood everywhere, spit bottom lip right down my face, ripped up gums. I was 2 or 3. I still remember my mom calling my dad’s work & telling them that “if anything happens to my daughter, I’m holding you personally responsible” when they balked at getting my dad off the factory floor. My dad had the car so we needed him to drive us to the hospital. I also remember the nice nurse with the fancy patterns on her mask. Luckily, the plastic surgeon was on call that night & he did such a fabulous job stitching up my lip/face that you can barely see the scar now. There are scars inside my mouth as well along the gums.

      Damn you Mr. Rogers! I trusted you!

      I think a week or two later, I ran down the hall, slipped & split my head open.

      1. We had that kind of TV when I was growing up. Glad I never ran into one, ouchy!

        I can count my bigger childhood accidents on one hand, thankfully. I had my baby two front teeth smashed backwards when my face collided with the back of one of my parent’s heads around age 4; they were later pulled forward by a parental thumb – everything’s malleable at that age, right? I slipped while dancing in the shower and busted my chin open to the bone around age 6; parental units put a bandaid on that one – all better! I fell and skinned the same knee repeatedly around age 10; my teacher dressed the freshly broken open wound (fall 3, I think) with gauze, later extricating the gauze from my knee tissue was not fun. And I had the bike handlebar mishap at age 12. Maybe that is a lot of accidents? My parents never made a fuss and I never broke a bone, so my childhood accidents don’t seem too hardcore to me.

        1. Your teacher fixing your leg reminded me of my jerk teacher.

          I went ice skating as part of a school trip at an ice rink. I’ve always loved ice skating.

          My skates hurt badly on the sole of the foot. I kept telling my teachers it hurt but they told me I was being a baby & I should just go skate, so feeling like I had no justification in feeling my pain & feeling sad for being thusly scolded, I went off & skated for the full afternoon.

          When I took off my skates, my sock was full of blood. The sole for my skate had somehow come out & a nail was pushed through the area that the sole normally covered. I was skating an a friggin’ nail the whole time!

          Now the teachers praised me for my steadfast resilience to the pain while also asking me why I didn’t insist they look at it.

          Ummmm, I was a 6 year old kid who had been admonished by authority figures for expressing pain. Why would I challenge said authority figures when they had many a time emphasized how doing so was a terrible, terrible thing & shamed me for even complaining?

          I’m still bitter about the whole thing today even though I didn’t have any real lasting pain that I recall (young people heal fast) because of the emotional abuse those teachers gave me for having the gall to say I was in pain.

  37. Wow…crazy stories people. Thanks for sharing.

    While downhill skiing at 7 years old, I was bombing down a hill, lost control on an ice sheet and flew off a 12 foot ledge into a ravine. The bindings (a rented pair of skis) were far too tight and the skis didn’t release. The result? A 270 degree spiral break of the femur 2 inches below my hip. I immediately felt a shriek of pain and saw that my right toe was pointing obscenely in the wrong direction. The pain was mind numbing and I just remember screaming and creaming. I was pretty far up the mountain and it took a long time (maybe 20 minutes that felt like 2 days) for the ski patrol to come get me. But then the real pain happened. They had to put my leg in a splint so they could carefully get me out of the ravine, and to do that, they had to twist my leg back to its normal position. Thank Ceiling Cat I passed out within a few seconds of that maneuver…the pain was obviously too much for my senses. When I woke, I was in a little medical room in the ski lodge where they gave me morphine and something for shock. My thigh was double in size, and the medical staff were really worried. I was still 2 hours from the nearest hospital, and we had to drive. The next 8 hours were pure hell as they took me out of one splint into another, took x-rays, and put me in traction. Lots of screaming, even with all the injected pain killers. I stayed in traction for 6 weeks, then put into a body cast for another 8 weeks and was walking again without crutches in about 3 months. But hey, at least I missed half of the 2nd grade. (I was tutored at home though, so I didn’t have to retake it.)

    I would like to add that my right leg has always been shorter than my left and resulted in chronic ingrown toenails of my big toe; it was constantly infected and made it excruciating to walk. Solution: a podiatrist ripped off my toenail with a pair of pliers. To plagiarize Jerry: “now that was something to see.” I too have a deformed toenail…the podiatrist botched the job and messed up my nailbed.

    I also ripped my scrotum open in a bike accident while pretending to be Evel Knievel. But don’t want to get into that one. Suffice it to say lots of pain and lots of stitches, but nothing compared to the leg break.

    2. A femur break is life-threatening. It can pretty easily sever the femoral artery.

      One friend in Australia was water-skiing (in the 1960s) on the Yarra River in Melbourne. it’s pretty narrow and turning was tricky.

      The friend’s wife was skiing and hit the bank of the river. She broke her femur. The friend gets her back in the boat and makes ready for more water skiing. (!!!)

      My friend then insists that they take the friend’s wife to the hospital. Amazingly, it took some time and shouting to convince him (to more or less save his wife’s life).

      Shortly before this was told me, I had been in New Zealand hiking in the mountains and had been repeatedly told crazy stories about the relative difficulty of climbing routes (for example, they would tell you it was “an easy day in runners and an ice axe” and you’d look at it and think: Never going up there there without ropes, full rack, helmet, ice screws, crampons, etc, and a tent).

      I was left seriously wondering whether folks in the Southern Hemisphere were super-tough or crazy! 🙂

      Maybe they were just sandbagging a silly northerner!

      1. If I were the wife with the busted leg, I’d beat my husband about the head with the crutches after for not insisting he take me to the hospital!

        1. WTF? That is dangerous and callous. Like Diane, I’d be wanting some payback.

          At the hospital, the doctors were worried about severing the artery, that’s why all the x-rays and small maneuvers to put me in traction and hell. Then they were worried that marrow would escape from the inner bone and create an embolism- it was quite a violent break. An orthopedic surgeon that worked on the Olympic U.S. ski team said it was the worst break he’d ever seen from a skiing accident. Yikes.

          1. Yes, Mark, this sounds absolutely awful. Your break sounds worse than most I’ve ever heard of. I’m sure it was horribly painful.

            So, did it damage the hip or knee? Do you have full use back (aside from the shortening and the toenail)?

          2. Since it happened when I was 7, I sort of adapted into the shorter leg. The knee was fine, but my hip was in a lot of pain for months after I stopped using crutches. Once the pain stopped, I’ve never had a problem with it, but it’s crazy flexible. It’s like being double jointed; I can twist that leg past “6-o’clock”. Through my growth spurt, it also caught up some. It was 2″ shorter the heeling process, and now it’s only 1/2″ shorter. I have full use, but it has caused some minor back problems. I’m 45, so hopefully it won’t become major when I get old and frail. I have a sinking feeling that my hip may become arthritic as this has been hinted at by doctors in the past.

  38. Oh. My. Gaaaaaaaaah.

    I have now come to the conclusion that my life has been comparatively pain-free. When I was four I suffered complications in a double-hernia surgery and also cut my cheek open on a table edge (I still bear the not-unsexy GI Joe scar from that one), later I broke a kneecap then re-injured it three years later, split my eyebrow on a table leg wrestling with a girlfriend and agreed to stitches sans anesthesia because the ER was running low, tore ligaments in my ankle and fell down a flight of concrete stairs while oggling a girl then re-injured that ankle eight or ten times over 30 years, got serious burns in various pyrotechnic and kitchen mishaps, got H2SO4 + KMnO4 sprayed in my eyes when I told my lab partner not to cover the flask and she obliged by taking out the stopper, and been laid low by multiple blows to skull or scrotum by pretty much every stick or ball used in sport.

    But I attended the natural birth of each of my five daughters. And now I have read this thread of horrors. My “worst pain” doesn’t come close to any of the above. You people are warriors!

    1. OMG those all sound extremely painful! So I don’t think you’ve had a pain-free life, even relatively so!

      I do see a pattern though – there seems to have been females involved in a lot of your pain. Perhaps marriage helped you there. 😉

  39. Vascectomy. During the procedure, apparently the first dose of local anaesthetic didn’t take, at least not fully. I nearly blacked out and the surgeon must have noticed my head roll off to one side then snap back. “Uh… are you OK? You’re not supposed to be feeling any of this you know,” he says. “NRRMP,” I replied, so he gave me another shot before starting the other side. What a relief. I was positively giddy from then on, from the endorphin rush I presume.

    1. Oh dear! You’d think the surgeon would have checked first. I’m so paranoid about pain that I make them check.

      I have finally learned, since I have nice dentists, that it is not okay to suffer through pain & you should tell your dentist to stop. I think because I was told to suck it up by mean dentists in my childhood that I thought that was just the way it was. My dentists have made it clear to me that they have no problem stopping & trying to alleviate the pain. Yay for nice dentists!

      Boo for your horrible initial vasectomy pain!

    2. I had a somewhat similar experience. Nothing like yours; but the doc says: You won’t feel anything. Buuuuuuuullllllllllshssshhshsiiiiittt doc!

      He was a little more careful (but no additional meds).

      But this wasn’t as bad as what I listed above. Getting kicked in the ‘nads when I was a kid was worse than this experience.

  40. But remember everyone, pain is your friend. It is an evolved trait lets you know who’s in charge in this world. Its the laws of physics that rule, not our egotistical notions of what we think we should be able to do with our bodies. 😎

  41. Ingrowing hair. Sounds minor but they had to dig about 5 inches into the top of a buttock, leaving a hole 1.5 inch diameter at top to 0.25 inch at bottom. It couldn’t be stitched so had to be packed. And then I needed a 2nd op because the first one got infected. It took 4 months (with repacking 3 times a week) to heal.

    There are worse, for sure, but I wouldn’t wish that on my worse enemy!

    1. Before antibiotics, you could’ve died from that. Imagine dying from such a bizarre ailment?

      1. The ailment wasn’t the problem, the gaping wound(s) left afterwards was. I know what you mean, though, in science/medical terms!

        I was given some fantastic morphine with the ops, though, but was on over-the-counter meds for the rest of the time. Not fun, really, but I can see why people are fans of opiates.

  42. I had a root canal and crown prep in one day took 3 hours.If anyone watches the show Scandal where Huck repeats over and over again 7:52 i mean for hours i tried it and it helped a little.My other thought was torture,torture over and over .

  43. Double Pneumonia and the Pleurisy that goes with it. Every breath becomes rather painful. It is impossible to sleep lying down due to the increased pain, so for a day I slept on a chair at a reclined angle to at least reduce the pain.

    Pneumonia is colloquially akin to slowly drowning in your own “snot” (mucus).

  44. That’s why I always put on safety shoes when moving something heavy.

    My own war story … probably when as I child I spicked a sponge with my mother’s fixing pins, then forgot about it lying on the floor and jumped on it, barefooted, from her working desk. The pattern looked quite interesting, though.

      2. They’re used in sewing, to hold the seam together while stitching. So they have no eye, and are about an inch and a half long. Leo English says those are qualled fixing pins.

  45. I am fairly tolerant of pain. So I was surprised by how much it hurt when I broke my leg playing soccer (football). It was called a “freak accident” by just about everyone. My foot and an opponents foot hit the ball at precisely the same time from opposite directions. He kicking the ball in full stride, me in a full speed sliding tackle. It was instantly the most painful experience I had ever had. Bones were sticking out the back of my leg just above the ankle.

    Turns out I broke both lower leg bones and broke the growth plate into five or so pieces. Instead of calling an ambulance my mother came to the field with the family station wagon to get me. As several people were loading me into the back my mother was anxiously hovering. “Darrell, try not to get any blood on the carpet!,” is the one thing I clearly remember her saying.

      1. Oh, it is something we laugh about still when telling old stories. My mother’s neatness and cleanliness is legendary. Given a choice between a diamond bracelet and a new high end vacuum cleaner, she chose the vacuum cleaner. Honest to ceiling cat, I ain’t making that up. And she already had a very good vacuum cleaner. Vacuum cleaners are to her as motorcycles are to me.

        But that day, she was distressed. Her admonition was just an example of how high stress can cause us humans to behave oddly. She was good at taking care of business in crisis situations though. She is one of those people who can put off the freaking out until after the crisis is handled.

  46. Dentist. London.

    I was a grad student and a dental checkup was part of the plan. So, I went in for a scraping and a checkup. Well, one of my decades old fillings was “getting a bit tatty” and needed to be replaced.

    He numbed the tooth but that wasn’t the problem. When he inserted a metal cylinder around the tooth and tightened it with a little screw, he caught a single mustache hair in the screw and wound it tighter and tighter. He had that hair nerve pulled to the maximum while I tried to “tough it out.”

    “Now, that’s wasn’t so bad, was it,” he chirped happily .

  47. Worst in relation to teeth….I have a genetic condition which meant I never developed a full set of adult teeth. It was spotted when I was around ten. I still had milk teeth until I was 26.
    I had 6 implants put in and three caps. While grinding one of my teeth for a cap we found that the anaesthetic hadn’t taken, so I had another injection, still didn’t work. Still feeling a tremendous amount of pain so third shot…still no effect so just told to breath deep on the NOX and hope for the best. Still felt the grinding but luckily it was happening to someone else.

  48. I’ve been spared the pain so many here have had.

    An experience of mine that sounds worse than it was to experience (although it was still bad) was tripping while running down a mountain, before it was fully light, with an energetic Staffordshire terrier tied to my right wrist, on a set gravel path. I tripped, fell 2-3 metres or so down the path and absorbed almost the entire impact with the balls of my hands and my front teeth (which I lost), with some trivial scratching to my chest.

    But it’s amazing how adrenaline can take the edge off pain. I’d say having chicken pox was much worse.

    1. Owch.

      I drunkenly fell down some stairs at a party and caught my front teeth hard enough to push the top ones behind the lower jaw. Luckily they didn’t fall out, but I did have to use a brace to bend them back into position about 10 days after the event.

      I was very lucky that the nerves only got stretched and not fully severed. Sucks that yours got taken out. 🙁

      1. Well, yes and no. I find my false teeth – screwed into the jaw with titanium – better than the real thing.

  50. Second worst pain in my life:
    While hiking in Arizona, stepped on dead prickly pear cactus that drove several spines through the sole of my shoe and at least halfway into the sole of my foot. Had to unlace and rip shoe off leaving spines sticking up through sole (wait, that’s not the painful part). Two weeks later, foot was getting worse. Went to podiatrist who had to do exploratory surgery for leftover cactus spines. Drove needle into foot abcess to administer lidocaine. THAT was painful. The exudate almost made the nurse pass out but at least the pain relief was instant. All healed now.

    1. Before I got to the crushed toe part, I thought of Brobdingnagian & the Big Bang Theory episode.

  53. THE worst: broken tooth when I was a kid. Excruciating. My mother thought putting Ora-Gel on it would deaden the pain. AAAEEEIIIGHAH!

  54. When I was a little girl, I was playing cricket and was placed up front to catch. Ha! I got hit right in the jaw, up close, by a flying cricket ball.

    Had two C-sections with only partial epidurals and that was after about 13 hours of labour for nought.

    Got bitten all over my hand by a feral kitten that I was trying to rescue. Stupid me saw the opportunity and decided to grab it — could not for the life of me restrain myself from the impulse, which remains a mystery to this very day. Had to get rabies shots just in case.

    Biggest pain was a broken heart.

    1. Oh, also as a kid, hit another kid who had stuck her tongue out at me, got chased around on the sidewalk in barefeet, stepped on big broken glass shards and got a deep gash in my foot. Also as a kid, got bitten by my St. Bernard who was having a fight at the gate with a strange dog. Tried to hold my dog against orders from Dad, and got bitten on my temple. Had to get tetanus shots at the hospital in my buttock and howled as I was little and terrified. Still have a little toothmark to show for my escapade.

      Had chronic attack of what looked like psoriasis, and the doc prescribed some cream I was allergic to. My skin peeled off all over my body like a burn victim, and then what was left hardened like shrunken leather gloves — could not walk or open or close my hands. Took many months to heal with the right creams, and suffering though the itch and the burn. Washing my own hair was like plunging my hands in a bucket of nails.

  55. Gosh. Reading this thread has made me feel very lucky. I’ve stitches for various bumps and scrapes, but honestly, the worst pain I’ve experienced is the arthritis I’m starting to develop in my shoulders.

    2. Actually, come to think of it, I did once sustain an injury that would’ve been pretty painful, but thankfully I have a strong vasovagal response and I was unconscious while it happened. Of course, it only happened at all *because* I fainted.

      It is a very gross story so I will stop there.

    3. Arthritis of the shoulders–don’t remember hearing of that before. Do you think it has anything to do with organ-playing? Or does it affect your playing?

      1. My shoulders & neck hurt all the time. You *could* say it’s arthritis but it’s probably constant muscle spasm. It’s partly from the spur on my neck vertebra (no idea how I got it) & partly from being a geek doing geek jobs (sitting in front of a computer) & computing to geek jobs. I go to a guy that does active release on it & I get massage therapy every 3 weeks – should be more but I’m too cheap. I just got a TENS machine & that helps a lot too. I put the thing on full blast too.

      2. It’s pretty mild, so it doesn’t affect my playing. Yet. :/

        I had an MRI to determine what was causing the pain. I thought it might have been a small tear, but it turns out I’m just not young anymore.

        1. That’s really discouraging, though! Well, I hope it stays mild for a long time.

          I know–when I got a touch of arthritis in my knee, I was sure I’d just wrenched it or something. No way could I have arthritis, uh uh… :\

  58. Lots of tooth pain here, so will join the fun! Car accident, and bit a steering wheel in the 60’s, sheered off seven teeth, with 4 requiring root canals. The worst immediate pain was not the teeth, but cleaning the paint and tooth chips out of my lips. Tooth pain came later with many hours in the dentist chair.

  59. Five years ago this week, I had a radical prostatectomy followed eight weeks later by a partial nephrectomy. After the first procedure, I had an incredible, burning pain in my central and lower abdomen that was relieved by nothing, not even narcotics. It was like being on fire, all the time. It turned out to be a form of cutaneous hypersensitivity. Even the slightest touch, like a shirt rubbing against the hair on my abdomen, triggered severe pain. There are no drugs available that ameliorate that type of pain. I only figured it out a week later when a paper appeared in Nature describing the population of neurons responsible for that syndrome. I was able to stop the narcotics at that point because I understood that they would not help, and I managed to live with it. The intensity of the pain did not decrease, but the affected area got smaller and smaller until, about six weeks later, it was mostly gone.

    The cycle was then repeated after the second procedure, but after that, the pain basically encompassed the entire upper left side of my abdomen, wrapped around my left flank, and extended to the mid-line of my back. It took six weeks before I could tolerate returning to work and sitting right up against a desk to look through a microscope.

    To this day, when I aggravate a small hernia that I have in that area as a souvenir, I have that sort of pain that can persist for a day or two.

    1. Is it true that personal experiences like this give doctors a new perspective on their patients? Or is that just a bunch of baloney you get tired of hearing all the time?

      1. I am a pathologist, so regardless of what happens to anyone else, I find that it really does not apply to me since I do not see patients.

        On the other hand, what I learned is that there are things that are worth being stressed about, and most things are not worth being stressed about. That is serving me rather well since we have multiple ongoing crises in our family, only some of which are related directly to health, but it makes my wife insane that I can stay so calm through all of this.

        1. Well, those episodes sound miserable! Rather reminds me of my mother-in-law’s post herpetic neuralgia. She could hardly bear to wear clothes; and it seemed to last forever.

          Congrats on the calmness, though. I think I’m getting better at it myself, mostly due to age.

  60. Well as long as we’re all grossing each other out…

    The gold standard for acute pain for me was having a nerve in an abscessed tooth cut, without a local. This came about because I have terrifying reactions to general anaesthetics. So my dentist x-rayed the tooth, thought the nerve looked dead, sprayed the tooth with iced water without causing pain, decided he was right, and said he wasn’t going to risk a local when it wasn’t needed. He was very reluctant to give me anything I hadn’t had, problem free, in the past.

    The drilling was fine, but the channel in the tooth was too narrow to drain the abscess, and needed to be widened. So the dental rasp hit the live nerve in the tooth, and I hit the ceiling. The dentist apologised, and offered me a choice. He told me he could give me a local, but given the odd behaviour of the nerve he didn’t think it would work. Or he could cut the nerve, which would be as bad as the rasp, but only last 5 or 6 seconds. Being irredeemably stupid, I told him to go for it. It was worse than the rasp, but he was right about the 5 seconds.

    But this pain pales in comparison to dystonia, which comes in waves, involves cramping and uncontrolled and sustained activation of the pain nerves across my whole torso, and typically goes on for hours. Fortunately for me, mine is just an episodic side effect of the neurotransmitter problems associated with my chronic fatigue. But I had a friend whose whole body was affected by dystonia all the time. I don’t know how she coped, or how she was so often so cheerful.

        1. I just had to go watch that clip, now. Like an idiot.

          arrrrggggggggghhhhhhhh!

          Yep, bad as I remembered…

          1. I must thank jblilie for reminding me of that. But I think I’ll chicken out on watching it again.:)

  61. When I was in graduate school, I slipped from a step stool while getting a large glass desiccator from a high shelf (why did they store it there). It hit and severed an anterior tibial tendon (fortunately missing the adjacent artery). It took four operations to repair it. (The fourth was done by a young surgeon who had just returned from Vietnam — as far as I know the only thing wars are good for is training orthopedic surgeons).

    Anyway, he took a chunk of the fascia lata from my thigh, rolled it up and made a tendon (the original was long gone from the initial injury and the previous operations), which he stitched into the ankle. I was in a lot of pain, mostly in the ankle, after that one, but fortunately they gave me morphine for the first few days. That was quite an experience: I’d start feeling overwhelming pain, get the nurse to come and she’d inject morphine and then I felt as if I were floating near the ceiling and looking down at someone in the bed who was in tremendous pain, but it didn’t bother me.

    That ankle is not as mobile as the other one, and sometimes it hurts, but it’s been working for almost 50 years and I can run and play reasonable tennis.

    1. That sounds miserable!

      It is amazing what surgeons can do–jerry-rigging tendons, for instance.

      “…as far as I know the only thing wars are good for is training orthopedic surgeons.”

      Orthopedic surgeons, trauma surgeons, burn surgeons, brain surgeons… Hey, why don’t we take some perfectly healthy kids and break them, so the physicians can get some practice? As compensation, we’ll call the kids heroes and give them a lot of lip-service gratitude.

  62. Last October I had an endoscopy to investigate the cause of a blocked bile duct. Unfortunately, our erstwhile “designer” put the common bile duct though the head of the pancreas and the opening of the pancreatic duct inside the bile duct! I awoke in agony, giving it a 9 on the 10-point pain scale only because I could imagine it being a 10. This is ACUTE PANCREATITIS! Felt as if a large fence post had been driven through my body just below my sternum. Then the uber-morphine patch kicked in. I was in no pain, but it was interesting to watch the hospital staff react as I watched my BP monitor as the pressure ended its fall at 50/35.

    1. Proof there is no such thing as “intelligent design”: What sensible designer would run the sewer lines straight through the middle of the entertainment district?

    2. Not being funny but you were lucky. My brother spent 3 months in intensive care followed by another 3 months on the ward following pancreatitis caused by a gall stone blocking the pancreatic duct. I was going to bed with my mobile by me just in case I had to drive to the hospital ……

  63. I have too many and they pale compared to others…I’ve done a lot of fieldwork and have lots of stories from that, but I also injured myself a lot when I was younger. I once removed and cauterized a Plantar’s wart from my foot when I was a teenager. I remember the cauterizing being very painful. I also stepped on a toothpick that was jammed in a rug and it went in about a centimeter and my brother yelled at me because I was crying. Sister’s rabbit bit through my finger. I’ve sat on, and broken, a bottle. I went for a few days but the pain got worse, so I had to have my butt x-rayed and glass removed. I thought it was funny. The doctor did not. I was surprised at how tiny the piece of glass was that was causing so much pain…like a large sand grain. Fieldwork: small boulder/large rock rolling toward me and hitting my shin, ant stings causing the lymph nodes in my groin to swell a lot, making hiking with a 30 lb pack not so great, scorpion sting to the back, wasp stings to the arm…that one made me black out…I literally don’t remember what happened for 2-3 mins after. I’m sure it was filled with expletives…had a little swelling (https://flic.kr/p/5UJZrN). I think most of my field stories are hilarious (now), and I want to put them in a book sometime, so I don’t want to spoil it with details. I guess I’ve been lucky at the dentist…I love going and I even have a dental implant. My toenails come off often because of backpacking/running. I was all freaked out when it first happened, but I guess marathoners and some backpackers have them removed before they go because of the pain they can cause during. Oh, when I had sciatica/herniated discs I had an epidural,which wasn’t bad – it just felt weird – but I also had prolotherapy…that hurt a lot. Like getting ready to turn over and get violent with the doctor. She was very fast though…I think I had 17-20 injections. Also, leg waxing near the ankle.

    1. epidurals are very weird…When it’s wearing off you swear that your legs are still bent in the fetal position when you can see they are out straight. Must be similar to phantom limb syndrome.

  64. Internal bleeding was my worst pain ever but I’m not complaining after reading some of the preceding comments.

    I will say that I was quite surprised by the pain of internal bleeding. I’d never seen it mentioned anywhere. They gave me two units of whole blood because my BP was so low.

  65. This is why steel-toed work boots are made. And anymore, when it comes to work boots, I only buy the steel (or equivalent)-toed jobs.

    1. Back when they first started using metal detectors at airports (mid-1970s?), my father did a lot of work-related traveling, and his steel-toed shoes (not boots – they looked like regular Oxfords) always tripped off alarms and got him pulled aside for a more detailed inspection. He may have been the first person in air travel history to have to remove his shoes in order to board a plane.

    2. Some time back, I bought a pair of “equivalent”-toed high-ankle shoes (fiberglass?) to wear when whacking weeds and the like. They’re fantastically comfortable, and I’ve taken to wearing them any time I wear long pants.

      b&

      1. When I worked at a park I would have to do some weed whacking. I refused to use the ones with a steel cable because I didn’t have safety boots. A big fuss was made but too bad, we had people who could do that work, if they wanted my help, they let me use the plastic ones.

        I also once physically grabbed the weed whacker from a girl who started turning the thing around so that the guard was now on the other side & the cable was exposed & close to her feet and ankles. Duh! I thought I was accident prone!!

  67. I’ve broken my neck twice. I’ve had surgery six times on my spine including a seven level fusion on my cervical spine, C2-T1 and I also have an artificial hip. I had dislocated my first right hip a few times which was pretty painful. I’ve also dislocated both shoulders, both knees and my jaw. The jaw dislocation wins the scariest injury prize because I didn’t know what happened until I was able to get it back into place. I also suffered from gout for several years and I was inflicted with it all over my poor body. The worst time it was in my knee, but I have a friend who says he got it in his eye socket and the pain was unreal (I thought it had to be in a joint, but I wouldn’t argue with a guy describing that).

    But none of awful injuries caused anything like the severe pain inflicted on me by a fake foot doctor. I had kicked my foot on a chair and that had lifted up my big toenail to the point that I knew I would lose it. It was black with blood beneath the nail and it hurt like hell (I know there’s no hell). The following day was important at my job so I was trying to go to work, driving down Rt. 1 in Greenwich CT when I spotted a large sign on a house that said “Foot Doctor”. So I pulled in. An older lady probably in her 70’s answered the door and said they were closed. It was only about 8am. She could see I was in pain though so she told me to come in and she’d treat me anyway. As she got my foot into a heated whirlpool bath I asked her if she lived in the house or was it just her office. She said she lived there. She took my foot out of the water after about ten minutes, told me it would only hurt a little, and then proceeded to try to cut my toenail off with a very large pair of what looked like a cross between scissors and pliers. Nothing delicate about her approach, she squeezed that tool like she was trying to choke a poisonous snake. I’ve never felt anything so painful before or since. The world went black. The only thing that stopped me from passing out may have been my fear of drowning. I must have been screaming as she asked me if it hurt. I asked her if she was completely out of her mind. She said she was perfectly sane, but she had been depressed since her husband, the foot doctor, died. She had watched him work so many times that she thought she could help me. I felt bad for her so I couldn’t yell at her and I made myself stop screaming. She was almost crying already (I was still crying) so I hobbled out of the house and drove to the emergency room.

    I have since learned how to remove my own toenail with very little pain. It would of course be better if I simply stopped kicking things and hurting myself, but I’m a klutz, I’ve always been a klutz and I’m afraid I may always be a klutz. There are worse things to be.

    1. Larry, how awful! But that was quite the story…

      I spotted a large sign on a house that said “Foot Doctor”.

      Not to be judgmental or anything…but I just don’t get an immediate sense of confidence reading that…;) I guess the fact that you turned right in is an indication of the magnitude of your pain .

    2. OMG that toe story is awful but broken you neck?! TWICE?! Do you have any pain there now?

  68. Two words: Intestinal blockage

    This will be a little graphic in some ways. In my early twenties I made the mistake of eating too many Pillsbury croissants, which may have even been a little undercooked. Suffice to say, the dough balled up in my large intestine.

    I was at work the next day, started feeling a bit unwell, and I hastened to the bathroom. It was there that the stomach cramps hit, painfully, every couple of minutes, as the muscles of my large intestine tried to move the doughballs followed by everything else I had eaten since, up and across my colon.

    Now I had experimented with biofeedback and trying to control pain. However nothing I did had much effect, and I found myself shaking up and down trying to help move things along as each new cramp hit. I was smart enough to figure out what was happening, and I even resorted to punching myself in the abdomen trying to dislodge the blockage and get things moving.

    Eventually, over the course of an hour or so, the mass moved down my colon, into my rectum, and I painfully passed the rocks, followed by a quick release of the dam.

    Fortunately no serious damage done, but I have had a bit more restraint whenever Pillsbury croissants have been available.

    That was my most painful experience other than receiving anesthetic for stitches in my face as a child. Whatever they used had me screaming and required them to hold me down for he injections, but at least it was quick.

    1. In my early twenties I made the mistake of eating too many Pillsbury croissants.

      This line would be great as the opening to a biography! 🙂

  69. Golly. I have had a few motor bike crashes and have endured the various injuries. No pain at the time with any of them. Cracked sternum was a pain.
    But, coincidentally I am just about finished enduring the regrowth of a big toenail after dropping a sawn log on it. Although it didn’t hurt as much as yours, it’s been infected and partially ingrown but it’s almost grown out.
    And, I’m in the middle of two root canals. It’s not so much the pain but yanking and poking, especially the suction thing. Some dental nurses are better than others in that respect.
    Yes indeed, pain hurts.

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