The real hell is when you start the sweating and shallow breathing. It's bad enough that your shit tube is being ripped open while you lie on the bathroom floor, but now you've got to be soggy and miserable and panicked. What the hell, evolution?

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I feel like I know that gas pain you speak of, and It doesn't top my list...

improperly anesthesized root canal: 9
Ankle rolled over so far that i was standing upright and could read the bottom of my shoe :8 (would be a 10, but luckily I passed out.
The really bad gas thing:7
Baseball bat to the side of the head. 5 (It hurt, but the scrambling of my senses, combined with the immediate sensation that I was about to die was way worse than the pain. Probably the closest I've come to an out of body experience.)

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Huh. Never had a root canal, but I've had pretty extensive drilling without any anesthetic at all several times. Navy dentists sucked so bad at finding the nerve (to inject the novocaine into) that I actually preferred they just skip it entirely; a missed novocaine injection is three or four hours of your jaw hurting like a mule kicked it (4) whereas the unanesthetized drilling sucks while it's happening (6 or 7) but stops hurting immediately when the drilling is over.

Your baseball bat to the head sounds like my prybar to the head. Everything just went completely gray, I couldn't see, and I didn't remember it until somebody told me about it later but I kept saying "fuck, fuck, oh fuck, shit, fuck, shit" etc etc for about 30 seconds or so until the lights came back on. The corner kick to the nose was almost that bad, but not quite, even though it did liberate enough blood to *completely* soak the front of my jersey.

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also I'd like to add how odd it is that I know grown-ass men who have never so much as been in a fistfight, yet I'm reading your list of pain and it seems completely normal to me.

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Fight Club, man. Too much of the Ikea lifestyle. If you're getting in fights or getting cut up or bruised up doing hard work your life isn't perfect.

I've always admired and aspired to be more of the grizzled sergeant than the officer, the machine shop foreman than the suit-wearing owner. Which makes for sort of a weird contrast with a career in IT. I don't really fit in either world on a full-time basis.

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Recovering from childbirth - 10

Childbirth isn't actually that bad as the adrenaline kind of numbs your whole body. The after effects, however, the organs shrinking and moving back into the normal places, the healing of the massive tear in the vaginal area, the need for a bottle of hot water to replace toilet paper, yeah... not so much fun.

By the way, we have known each other since before LiveJournal existed, so I think you may come across entries that you've forgotten about, or didn't read because we weren't speaking at the time, but nothing that predates any of your knowledge of me. That is weird, since we've never actually met in person.

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don't get kidney stones

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I've heard that doctors say they are a reasonable referent for a 10. I don't see any reason to disbelieve that.

Rightly or wrongly, when a friend had kidney stones and I was trying to think what it must be like for him, I imagined it as having really bad gas of the dick. Or the bladder really. But "bad gas of the dick" sounds funnier.

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i second kidney stones. (but not the dick gas part) ;p

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yeah my dad had kidney stones 5-10 years ago, hope that never happens to me.

also not sure how much sci-fi fantasy kinda books you read but if you do I suggest "The Name of the Wind" to read, its very good and a decent length

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Name-of-the-Wind/Patrick-Rothfuss/e/9780756404741/?itm=1

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My grandmother had 8 kids, and said that kidney stones hurt at least as bad as childbirth. She is also funny as hell when she's on narcotics, but thats only slightly related :-)

My dad has had kidney stones four times. The last time they couldn't break them up because of the type of stones he had developed. I guess they were sharp, so the doctors solution was to put a 'stint' in his urethra and feed him lots of special foul-tasting liquid. Three months later he was still in pain and the stones hadn't passed. I forget how they finally fixed it, but it was amazing to see him walking upright again.

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You could take up ameture Jogi bear wrestling to pass the time.

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It's kinda funny...I've been in so much pain for the past 2 years that nothing really feels like pain anymore. It's like I've suddenly become a scientologist and convinced myself there is no such thing as pain. Now it's just moods. If I'm in a bad mood, it's like a 10 on the pain scale. No shit. I'm not buying everything advertisments sell me, but depression really does fucking hurt.

Might also help that I'm so narc'd up that I probably wouldn't care if I broke my leg. But that's probably why the mood thing affects me more. Narcotics don't get rid of the pain; they just adjust your caring level. So the worse mood I'm in, the more I care about my head hurting.

This probably doesn't make much sense, but little that I've written in the past two years does, anyway.

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I think I can kind of get a grip on it actually. I tend to be largely unimpressed with pain - feeling injured scares me, but pain itself is generally not such a big deal - and for the rest, I was on oxycontin for a while after the wisdom teeth came out and, uh, yeah, holy shit does that ever change your brain chemistry.

I think the hardest thing for me to understand intuitively is being in a bad mood at all when seriously narc'ed up. I wasn't on the oxy long enough to develop a tolerance; I don't think I physically COULD have gotten in a bad mood during that week or so. I know that would have changed had I stayed on it longer, but during that week I honestly think had I been told that I and everyone I loved was dying I'd have been like, that is sad, but the world is full of beauty, I am so happy that we got to experience it for a while.

Oxy is some scary shit.

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whereas I'm like, if anything dares to penetrate my pink cloud, i want to rage.

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Once you gain a tolerance, that love-everyone-I'm-in-the-best-mood-in-the-world develops into a I-can't-believe-I'm-on-this-shit-forever-and-it-doesn't-even-make-me-drunk kinda funk.

I used to LOVE any type of opioid, but now they do absolutely NOTHING to me. It's very very sad. Kind of like what a heroin addict must feel.

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I can understand that. I'm very aware of the danger of losing things. Anything I immediately love that much, I'm thinking warily about what it will be like when it no longer works anymore. I only did E once, but it was the most mind-blowing chemical experience I had ever had. And as soon as I came down enough to be halfway rational, my first thought was "I can not do that again for at LEAST six months."

After a week on Oxy, I started looking curiously on the internet to see how available it was and in what prices. The difficulty of finding it - and the price if you did - fucking staggered me. (Along with the dosages. Obviously no real user would even have bothered looking at the pitiful little 5mg doses that had me high as a goddamn kite and in love with the world for my brief little week.)

I was honestly almost as relieved as I was disappointed. Drug suppression usually really pisses me off, as it's an excuse to blame things rather than people. And people, in my experience, generally either will self-destruct or they won't. Someone who will self-destruct will do so with or without any particular drug. Someone who won't will either quit taking the drug entirely at some point, or will keep it in check. But Oxy was waaaayyyyy different than any of the strictly illegal drugs of my experience. I still like to think that I would largely do a good job self-regulating, I am a careful person. But unlike most drugs I'm not so certain that its unavailability isn't a good thing.

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Waking up from abdominal surgery feeling like they gave you tylenol and staying that way for 18 hours : 1,000.

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you know, I do have a nice new 50" tv you're more than welcome to bum some time on ;-)

most painful experience. . .

physical? 4th grade, getting cornered by 5 guys, held, and repeatedly kicked in the balls by all of them

otherwise

well I don't like talking about brandon dieing anymore

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Long Winded. Gas. Heh.

When I think back to times I've been in pain, bad gas after spicy (and undercooked) Laotian food actually is near the top of the list. Especially the sweat and passing out on the floor in front of the toilet bit. I thought I was fucking on the toilet, and that bothered me a lot.

I've had a wrecking bar to the head I'd rate about a 7. The blow brought me to my knees and left a baseball sized lump on the back of my skull. It also had me seeing stars for hours. The kid that hit me left before I was even standing on my own feet again... which was probably wise considering my mood at that moment. We'd been sharing a confined workspace (hallway) and he didn't look behind him before taking a particularly stupid-wild swing at some old plaster.

Sinus headaches that wont respond to Sudafed or aspirin: 7

Infected in-grown toenail getting ran over by a pallet jack: 6

Joint pain from Lyme disease: 4

Probably a lot of other things I've either blocked out or just dont recall after the fact. Sharp pain never seems as bad when I think about it a year later... its the dull long term pain I remember.

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Of all of the injuries I've had that required a visit to the ER or the clinic, probably the broken metacarpal hurt the least. Fourteen years old, Shotokan class, free fighting. I threw a punch at the same time the sasquatch sensei paired me with threw one and our fists collided. Mine lost. Classic boxer's fracture. It was sore, but the only actual pain happened when the doc reset it. I'd give it a 5.

Worst ever was just before Thanksgiving of '97 when I ran my hand through a machine at work, crushing it between a coat roller and its doctor roller. Fortunately they had been gapped sufficiently so as to not break any bones, amazingly. Still some pretty good soft tissue damage though. When the doc gasps and winces when he looks at your affected hand, you know you fucked up. Gave that one a 9. Demerol is some mighty good shit, lemme tell you.

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I didn't know you dive: that kicks butt. I'm getting certified now - I'll be Open water certified in 1 week.

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