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  • Fucking Crohn's Disease sucks. All of my "adventures" with it have been painful, but the one that takes the cake:

    A couple of years ago, my GI wanted me to do a pill endoscopy test, which is where they basically have you swallow a pill that has a camera embedded in it, and it takes pictures while it traverses your insides. You're supposed to naturally "pass" it like anything else you eat, but in my case I did not, and it got stuck. My GI did not believe me, and it just kept getting worse and worse. To put a timeframe on things, this happened in early February of that year.

    I had ER trip after ER trip throughout that year, they determined that it wasn't going to pass on its own and needed to be surgically removed, but since it was not "life threatening" they couldn't just wheel me into an OR immediately and have it done, it had to be scheduled. Took forever to find a surgeon to schedule me under. One of the times that I was in the hospital due to this, the doctor on my "care" team wanted me to do what she called a "supreme bowel cleanse" to see if that would dislodge it. I was hesitant to do it, but I was pretty much willing to do anything at that point to end this nightmare, and only because she promised me that if it didn't work, they'd take me into surgery and do it the old fashioned way. That ordeal was terrible, I've had Crohn's since before I was a teenager, I'm very used to doing colonoscopy prep - this was far worse than that, the pain was unbearable and the amount of bowel cleanse that they gave me must've been right at the border of their ethical limits (or at least, I imagine that has to be a thing, right?) and plot twist she did not hold up her end of the bargain when the pill still did not pass, instead she gave me a few days worth of pain meds and discharged me the next day.

    My condition continued to get worse and worse, yet my operation wasn't scheduled till early July. The hospital that the surgeon worked for agreed to pre-admit me into their care 2 months in advanced because it got to the point where I could barely even hold down regular water and I had to be put on IV nutrition with a PICC line and all.

    Fast forward to the operation day, they ended up having to do two surgeries in one go, the first being to remove the pill, and the second was to try to fix the damage that had been revealed on the camera. The moment I woke up from the operation I was screaming in pain, and begging them to put me back under (which they could not do). They kept giving me pain meds and I'd end up passing out eventually from the pain, wake back up, and the whole ordeal would start again. Eventually they put me on one of those self-administered pain med pumps where I could click a button every so often and it would give me some pain medication through my IV.

    I didn't end up going home until the very beginning of September (first week I believe), and I had arrived there sometime in the middle of May. I will never do one of those pill endoscopy tests ever again. I also switched GIs since my current one at that time had refused to listen to me when I told her something was wrong at the beginning of the "experience".

  • Spinal Stenosis. Woke up one day feeling like my back was not only broken, but that I could feel the broken ends grinding against each other.

  • Kidney stones. I've had the tips of two fingers on my left hand chopped off, and even that didn't come close to the feeling of a kidney stone rattling down the pipework.

    I have Medullary sponge kidney, which in short makes my kidneys a stone factory. It's a love/hate relationship at this point. On the plus side, I've found drinking at least 2 liters of lemonade every day has done wonders to stop my kidneys from feeling like they're trying to kill me all the time.

  • For me personally it was getting some of my arms skin getting shoved between two desks that I had my arm resting on after someone slammed them together tightly during high school

    Left a red line that took a while to go away

    Edit I just remembered something wven more painful then this

    I'm going to copy paste my comment reply to someone else below

    "You reminded me of the one time I was visiting my uncle as a child and I ended up puking in the car because the sun was hitting the back of my head in summer, and this was Australian summer where It can get hot and humid

    I don't know if it was a migraine but it was painful as fuck"

    There was also the time i got rope burn from tug o war in primary school but the car headache that was potentially a migraine was more painful

  • 6 vertebrae, 4 ribs, base of my skull, scapula—fractured; it is a pain that has never faded and never fundamentally changed in 10.5 years. I can't escape it for even a minute. It is like a sword in my back, my spine feels like a twisted and knotted towel, and my mind like a voice shouting over the pain. Thanks for asking.

  • Small stuff compared to some others on here, but noteable for being 100% self-inflicted and fairly warned. Not me, I watched someone stick almost a quarter cup of wasabi in his mouth. It was the first time he'd seen it, was warned by multiple people, and did it anyways. His eyes rolled back into his head. He vomited. He passed out briefly. Someone had to drive him home because he was basically acting like he was intoxicated.

    He said later he figured it would taste like pistachio ice cream.

  • pancreatitis. I spent half of my 2021 in the hospital. it's apparently more painful than childbirth, it made me faint and my skin was yellow.

  • Three herniated discs in my back causing sciatic pain. It wasn't that the pain was bad on a moment-to-moment basis, but that it just want on and on and on. It was agony to sit down, so I had to stand in my cubicle to work. It was painful to lie down, so I ended up getting about 4 hours of sleep each night. I was taking several grams of ibuprofen, acetaminophen (yes, I'm lucky I didn't destroy my liver), and naproxen sodium daily, just to be functional. This went on for over a year.

    The fun part is that when I first starting having sciatic pain, I was pretty sure that it was my back, because I hadn't done anything that would have injured my leg. I had really good insurance at the time, but my doctor refused to order an MRI or even an x-ray; he thought I was trying to get a prescription for drugs. It took about 15 months of pain, and multiple visits to my doctor, an ER, and even attempting to see a chiropractor (who was at least self-aware enough to realize that he shouldn't touch me without an MRI first), before a scheduling error got another doctor in the practice to look at me, order an x-ray, and then order an MRI on the basis of the x-ray. Within about two days of the MRI being read I had received a referral to a neurosurgeon, in less than a week he was asking me whether I wanted a laminectomy or a spinal fusion. (These days I'd be opting for disc replacement), and I was recovering from surgery about a month after that MRI.

  • I've had a few teeth get broken in half horizontally without getting fully knocked out.

    Runner up is a wrist fracture at multiple locations, and the two don't even come close - the teeth were WAY more painful.

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