Years ago when I got a colonoscopy my doctor told me I wouldn’t feel anything but I’d be awake. I felt every. fucking. thing. And it is not pleasant.

An antipsychotic for my schizophrenia. It leaves me like a zombie. In my experience, it’s kind of a chemical lobotomy.

The treatment wasn’t even mine. When I was a kid, we had an indoor-outdoor cat that ended up with a bunch of giant, oozing, odorous, pulsating sores on its neck. Turns out there’s a fly that lays its eggs in animals’ wounds and once the maggots hatch they burrow into the skin. Really gross. It was traumatic watching the vet pry and pull the maggots out of their flesh burrows.

I hate anything that requires a local anesthetic because of how often that stuff fails to work for me. Typically after several shots of local anesthetic, the doctor will say “it’s not safe to give you anymore”, either we stop here or we keep going but it’s going to hurt and there’s nothing they can do about it.

I’ve had my whole arm numbed up except the spot that needed to be stitched, granted the needles they used to inject the anesthetic were more painful than the needle they used to do the stitching. Another time I had to endure the pain of getting a wound cut open and the doctor digging around inside it with a scalpel trying to fish out debris or something.

Wisdom teeth. Sure I was knocked out but after the sedatives and stuff wore off I had nothing for the pain. They said I could return to work the next day, is that supposed to be a joke?

I had a couple of chest tubes removed that had been in for around ten days without any sedation or numbing. They had to give them a twist to break them free. I didn’t care, two weeks in the hospital and all I wanted was to get out of there.

OGD - camera to the stomach and beyond.

It’s unpleasant even if it goes smoothly. But he couldn’t get through the lower opening of the stomach so he rammed at it for 20 min. The chest pain, stomach and retching/vomiting was pretty horrible. Someone shoving and twisting a scope inside your guts is pretty unpleasant.

Oh and I’ve also had a wisdom tooth removed by a dentist who used a hand saw (rather than electric instruments) to cut the tooth into 3 pieces and cut into the gum to extract the fragments. My face was swollen for a week after and I was eating liquid food for ages.

I’m having breast cancer removed next week so come back to me then. Considering the biopsy hurt for weeks it’s going to be FUN, I’m sure.

There’s a pile of them.

An ear infection that either was staph or turned into it, requiring an ear to be reconstructed, a new ear drum, ear canal reconstruction, and the mastoid bone removed. There was a very real concern from the doctors that it was going to get into my brain. They cut my ear off of the side of my head, did the work, then sewed it back on. 10/10 for the doctors that did the treatment and fixed it all. -1000/10 for the different unrelated doctor that let the infection get that bad.

A 4mm kidney stone making its way out.

An ear infection (same ear as above) where the ear canal swelled shut, and the ENT and his staff held me down in his office on a table to force a wick into it to make the meds able to get into it.

Even though it was 30 years ago, the ear infection (prior to the reconstruction) is what I remember most vividly.

Dialysis.

I’ve done 2 kinds, the one you hear about (hemo) and the slightly better peritoneal kind. DeWalt with it for a year and a half (which is nothing compared to what a lot of people have to do).

It wasn’t the most painful thing in these comments, but it is one of the most soul-draining things I can imagine. In the same kind of way that chemo probably is. But that’s even more miserable.

And a lot of the treatments surrounding it are where the real pain was (I could go on a whole big comment/post about the pain, discomfort, suffering, other things that just sucked that I’ve had to deal with since 2020, both directly and indirectly related to this-it’s a pretty wild trip) but that’s not the question here.

The single worst part overall was the dialysis, because it hit the sweet (/s) spot between how uncomfortable it was, how much constant attention to it I was required to deal with, and how long it lasted.

I mean the longest thing I’ve dealt with is diabetes, but the dialysis beats that by far.

The shady doctor did my lab, put the needle on the arm of the chair. I had to ask him to get me a new one.

Or the other doctor prescribed me meds that interfere my HRT, twice. I had to look it up.

The doctor who circumcised me did a total hack job at it: cut way too much off, stitched it back together asymmetrically, and, as I’ve just learned in the last few years, probably severed the dorsal nerve, too. So that’s been a lifetime of basically no sensation in my glans, never enjoying sex that much, which has contributed to a few failed relationships.

As an american, it’s about every time I’ve sought medical help in the last two decades, only a handful of times.

E-rooms will misdiagnose you with something that isn’t even close to fitting your symptoms just to get you out of there, then send you a 2000 dollar bill for it.

I remember getting wisdom teeth yanked out, this might not have been the dentists fault, I was doing some prescription opiates, and they gave me fentanyl and whatever, I of course didn’t tell them of the big 200 mg morphine tabs we were getting. So I wasn’t fully anesthasized as I should have been. I was half awake with mouth full of gauze as the dentist is yanking them out, why, won’t, this, tooth, come, out, type of memory.

I had viral meningitis, and I had to endure a lumbar puncture. after falling down literally four flights of stairs to get to an ambulance, I had to endure that shit.

Oh my fucking God

And this shit happened during Covid, goddamnit.

Edit: but it didn’t hold a candle to the pain I had to endure during the first round of Covid in February/March 2020. 12 days of the most unimaginable pain…

I just peed in my bed, cause I couldn’t move

Ear syringe when I was a kid. Nurse must’ve thought jabbing this metal tube into my already-inflamed eardrum once wasn’t good enough, because she did it again.

Worst pain in general, though, was cluster headache. And if I’d been near a tall building at the time, I’d have gone to the roof and jumped off to stop it. Literally. Like five migraines at different points in my head at the same time. Nausea. Flashing lights. Dizziness. Sweating. Chills. Fun stuff.

CW: self harm, suicide

When I was a teenager i was experiencing extreme mental health issues from a double whammy of depression, ptsd, and issues with home life, leading to self harm and suicidal ideation/attempts. I ended up being committed to an inpatient psychiatric facility. It ended up being psychological torture more than anything, and really only made me better at masking. One of the worst things that stands out still is them putting everyone in a room to watch a video that was 911 recordings of siblings and parents finding their sibling/child after they’d committed suicide and calling 911 distraught and breaking down, interspersed with people talking about how other people are impacted and hurt by those actions. It boiled down to guilting us for what we were going through. Which, when part of your issue is already self-hate and guilt, just caused more pain than anything resembling help.