What is the most pain you've ever endured?

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

Misdiagnosed VP Shunt failure resulting in adult hydrocephalus for roughly a year and a half. Feels like your brain is literally going to pound out of your skull at any moment, every heartbeat causes your entire head to throb.

Thankfully, the brain has its own ways of protecting you, I honestly don't remember much of that year at all. It's a big blur, and thank Christ for that It's interesting in that my pain threshold has been permanently increased by a huge amount. Only on rare occasions will I notice a hangover. I tore my meniscus and most of the cartilage in my right knee at a party one night (showing off trying to threshold-carry a woman I liked around the place ) and after resting for about half an hour I went out and danced on my incredibly unsteady leg. Could barely walk the next day, went to A&E and after they made a note of all the different structures I'd managed to tear in that one movement, they couldn't believe I wasn't so blinded in agony that I'd have gone straight to hospital. Only realised I was in actual trouble the next day when I got out of bed and immediately faceplanted - it hurt, but far less than one would expect from a knee which is literally unable to support body weight.

I've since been warned that this makes me more susceptible to injuries, particularly with heavy lifting or exercise - I just don't get as much of a natural warning sign to stop doing what I'm doing, as most people do. It sounds great until you've done your rotator cuff in for the bajillionth time and you can't even figure out when it might have happened

Not to the same extent bit my brother has a similar thing. He has a connective tissue disorder which first manifested in his hip, he was off school and bedridden for most of the year he was 15 while they figured out what it was and got the inflammation under control enough to put a plate in. He's just turned 24 now, twice a year he gets steroid injections directly into the joint :eek:, he said he was bricking it going in for that because he'd been looking it up and saw people saying it was an easy 10 on the pain scale but it was a doddle to him. He's eventually going to need a double hip replacement but the longer that can be put off the better partly because of his age (he'll need more than one over his life so the longer the first one is delayed the fewer) and because of medical science, hip replacements are so widely used that the surgery and the prosthetics themselves advance very rapidly, the hips available to him in four years will be vastly better than what he can get now.

But his consultant's advice, and I quote, is to wait until the pain becomes "actually unbearable rather than very severe". His pain threshold is totally out of whack, I suppose he's living with degrees of it for ten years as well I've seen him get like, gnarly fcuking burns when cooking and things like that and he barely glances at them. His tolerance of painkillers was very high for a while too, at one point he was on something like 6 tramadol and 12 paracetamol in a day, when he only weighed about 7 or 8 stone, so he has to be conscious of that given the amount of surgery he's likely to need later in life.

petes wrote: »

Gout, had it in the big toe as most sufferers do but I also got in my fingers and elbows at times.

I've permanent joint damage (not serious) in one finger from it

How did you get it and how did you get rid of it?

My father had it and used to be crying aloud from the pain of it.

petes wrote: »

I probably drank too much. Beer etc. contains high levels of purines which are converted to uric acid.

Yes, my father was an alcoholic but he had it before he descended into full blown alcoholism - so it was probably beer and rich food for him.

He did get rid of it too eventually.