The most painful thing I have ever done to myself.

I have a pretty good tolerance for pain, I often find out about cuts and bruises when someone else point them out to me. I also seem to tolerate big things better than small, and have been lucky enough never to have broken a bone or been seriously injured.  So to all of you who took shrapnel in 'Nam or Iraq and shook it off, please try not to laugh at me. 

Last week, I was reaching down to get something out of the cabinet under the bathroom sink when my middle finger slid across the edge of the door. There must have been something sticking out because I got a sliver of wood nicely inserted into the spot where you get a hangnail, right at the edge of the nail.  It hurt like you can't believe, and kept on hurting. Despite pulling all of the wood I could see from my finger, pieces remained under the skin causing swelling more pain. 

I have bumped my swollen finger off of everything imaginable, reminding me of the pain over and over again. Last night, the last piece finally worked it's way to where I could remove it. There is still some skin above the nail that should be beneath, or at least beside, the nail so I have another week or two until the pain goes away completely.  I have been sore before, I have had pain from operations, but this little sucker seems to be inflicting more pain that any of them.  I guess I understand bamboo under the fingernails as a torture tactic now.  

No pics?

There are a couple of things that come to mine. 

Boiling plastic on the back of my hand. It's a little sticky and when you try to get it off it pulls all the skin with it. 

3/4" long, 1/8" diameter bamboo splinter stuck down between my big toe and next toe.  I was in my early teens and at camp. The splinter didn't get dug out until after it was good and infected, a week later. That's when I stopped going barefoot, forever. To this day I wear shoes of some sort at all times. 

My worst splinter was a salmon rib bone. It went in about an inch. My knees gave out when I pulled it out and I dropped like a sack of potatoes. 

Corneal abrasion for me. Scratch to the eyeball. More painful than any torn ligaments broken fingers, etc. 

The other super painful thing that I deal with is a wart on the bottom of my big toe--it is actually right in the crease between my foot and the toe itself. I've had it frozen off, burned off, tried the duct tape--won't come off. Normally I don't notice it, but the wart grows and a callous grows at the same time, and eventually I'll be skating (hockey--reffing or playing) and I'll notice it. I have about 8 hours from when I notice it to shave it off with a razor. If I don't shave it in that time frame, it will become so painful that I can't walk on that foot. Shave it down, go another month or two, etc. When I was unemployed for about a month, I was able to attack it every day with freezing, some "wart acid" ,and shaving it. Thought I'd killed it for good. Nope.

In reply to mtn :

I used to have warts on my knees and elbows and tried everything. Freeze, burn, cut, the whole medical list. My grandmother suggested vinegar. Vinegar will take care of it. Soak a gauze pad in vinegar and tape it over the wart before you go to bed. Do it religiously every night. In a week or two it will be gone and it won't come back.

Probably when I had some kind of stones/crystals in my epidydimis and even though I'd taken a bunch of painkillers, I was so desperate for pain relief that I tried spraying Nut-Med (numbing spray) on my nutsack. Turns out that stings, really badly...with the combination of that stinging and the pain from the mere existence of the stones/crystals, I actually saw red static over my vision.

I've done some real zingers in my time including needing major reconstruction surgeries.

But, this one took the cake.

Finally, the fingernail completely erupted off the finger after this pic was taken.

I closed the segmented garage door once by grabbing the top edge of a segment instead of the handle. I'll never do that again. Got all four fingers in it at once.

Not a whole lot in the way of self inflicted pain, but I’ve had some pretty horrific medical related experiences. 

Back when I worked landscape in the summers I also was also the resident smokewrench.  I was welding a handle on the tailgate of a dump truck and had a really big weld blob spatter off the weld and go straight down my leg and into my boot. Kicking around trying to get my boot off for what seemed like eternity it finally settled and cooled on one spot of my foot.  I had 10-20 small first and second degree burns on my right foot after that ordeal.  I've burned myself pretty good several times welding but this was the worst.

All of my boots now have speed laces and I no longer MIG weld unless I am covered head to toe in denim, leather or kevlar.

In reply to mtn :

I had a rigid gas permeable contact adhere to my cornea & take a pice of it when I removed it. I still remember that pain & it was 25-years ago. 

Kidney stone may not have been as bad as a herniated disc, but its hard to tell.  Both sucked immensely and pretty much disabled me for a period of time. 

Besides the fall that nearly severed all the tendons in my right hand at the base of the fingers and tore my rotator cuff in the same go or the time I tore my ACL, outside MCL, and PCL at the same time skiiing, this one was painful, extremely minor, self inflicted, and dumb.

I once sliced the head off a pimple on my chin shaving then, rather than use a septic pen to stop the bleeding, rubbed an alum bar on it. The resulting pain caused my vision to tunnel so badly that I fell on the floor of the bathroom. The worst part, since I was over seas at the time, was that I got some sort of Afghani fungal infection in that spot and took it home with me. It took a few months to clear up with a steroid cream and I had to explain to the 110lb Romanian doctor wearing a track suit why I was such a dumbass (she was pretty awesome though.)

I don't know if this counts as doing it to myself but...  I had knee surgery, sports accident so that was my bad.  Surgery was botched by the doc.  Big time. 

After 6 weeks of an immobilized knee the normally sliding tissues were a mass of adhesions.  I could not bend my knee.   3 months of physical therapy, each time breaking a little more of the adhesions, wonder doc decided to order a forced bending.  Normally this is done under anesthesia I found out later.  Not wonder doc.  He told the PT to do it at his office.  3 people held me down and the PT forcibly bent my knee.   I was young and didn't realize what was about to happen was not the right way to go about doing it.

I passed out from the pain, I think I saw Nazis it hurt so bad.   The knee swelled up to 3 times it normal size and turned all shades of black, blue, yellow, red.  The only relief was Vicodin and ice, sometimes it took a Jack Daniels chaser the pain was so unrelenting. 

After 6 more weeks of very painful therapy I got to where I could walk without crutches. 

   I did research, found a decent surgeon, and he fixed the screw up and I had a relatively pain free recovery.    First doc eventually lost his license because of drug abuse and multiple people having similar problems with his lack of prowess.

Pete Gossett said:

In reply to mtn :

I had a rigid gas permeable contact adhere to my cornea & take a pice of it when I removed it. I still remember that pain & it was 25-years ago. 

Yeah, I was 5 or 6 when I had mine. Still gives me the shivers when I think about it.

For comparison, I also remember the pain from my tonsillectomy which was at 4 years old--the earliest pain that I can remember, probably one of about 10 memories from before age 5 that I have. That was nothing compared to the corneal abrasion. 

(For anyone wondering about the tonsillectomy, it was bad, but it isn't that painful when performed on a child. Once you get to about age 9-12, it starts becoming a major surgery)

Cousin_Eddie said:

I've done some real zingers in my time including needing major reconstruction surgeries.

But, this one took the cake.

 

Finally, the fingernail completely erupted off the finger after this pic was taken.

I smacked the base of my middle finger nail on a frame rail as I was removing a driveshaft.  No big deal, except it wouldn't stop bleeding under the nail . By six hours later, it hurt so badly I was able to run a needle under it to relieve the pressure, because there was no more pain available.  

Billy Crystal's old SNL song "I hate when that happens" seems like the right background music for this thread! SNL Linky

Compound fib/tib fractures with 100% tears of ACL, MCL and Achilles. It's the only time I've lost consciousness from pain. 

I once poured boiling bacon grease onto the hand and arm. Get into the skin and it continues to burn for hours - nothing you can do about it. Fun times.

Completely severed my left ACL. Then walked 3 miles back to the van immediately after doing so. And the fact that it wasn't repaired until 4 years later didn't help. 

Arthritis is fun.

Strand of metal off of a woven cable under the fingernail. Hurt for a month. 

I have taken some serious hits and that dropped me faster then any of them in terms of total pain. 

captdownshift said:

Compound fib/tib fractures with 100% tears of ACL, MCL and Achilles. It's the only time I've lost consciousness from pain. 

The thing with any breaks or tears that I've ever had is that they hurt for a minute, badly, but the pain is quick and then adrenaline takes over. The overall injury can be worse, but the pain itself isn't horrible.

I’m sure this is a painful and confusing time. Keep your chin up and the gash clean and dry. In a week or so, the bleeding and discomfort will stop, and you’ll finally be a real woman!

Ooh, I just remembered one: when the storm window broke diagonally & came down slicing my right wrist - severing the ulnar nerve, tendon & artery - it didn’t actually hurt much at all. However, in the ER a bit later when he was digging around in the open wound looking for any slivers of glass, that berkeleying hurt!