Fucking kidney stone.

Physical pain? I’ve had a spinal tap, countless perforated eardrums, dental nerve pain, broken bones and dislocated joints. You might consider me quite unfortunate and each of these is a story in itself. (The burst eardrum is definitely the worst of these, in severity and relentlessness) So anyway, I’m no stranger to physical pain.

BUT, I’m even more unlucky in that I suffered from a pretty rare condition called recurrent corneal erosion syndrome for three years after somebody poked me in the eye accidentally whilst he was trying to do the Saturday Night Fever move.
It’s hard to describe the pain, but I’m told it’s a contender for the most painful condition known to medical science. A woman once popped her own eye out with a spoon rather than continue to live with the condition. The cornea (layer of transparent tissue covering the pupil/iris) is pretty bad at repairing itself. Like the other tissues in your body, it attempts to bond with nearby tissue when it’s ruptured. (Think on how a cut on your hand heals). Except with RCE, the cornea preferentially adheres to the eyelid instead of itself. So, when you sleep, the front of your eye “heals” onto the eyelid, and then it tears open when you next open your eyes. Each time you sleep, the wound gets worse, until you can no longer open or close your eyes without agonising pain. So you are utterly sleep deprived, unable to blink for fear of the worst pain you’ve ever experienced every single time you do, and it hurts a good amount constantly anyway. It’s as good an example of your own body torturing you as you could ask for. And it goes on and on and on. There’s only one treatment which works, which is a type of laser eye therapy, for which the expense is very high. So I had to wait 3 years. The only way I managed to continue functioning was when I was allowed anaesthetic eye drops, which became like the air in my lungs. I would have to beg for them regularly, and I never had enough. Every night and morning I had to remember to squirt gel into my eye before closing/opening it, which would stop the healing effect IF I was lucky. Had the laser therapy not worked I don’t know what I would’ve done. It’s been eight years now, but it’s “recurrent”, so there’s no guarantee it’s gone for good. I wear glasses that I don’t strictly need now, to make sure my eye is at least partially protected at all times. Sometimes, especially if I’ve drunk alcohol and I’m dehydrated, I get a little reminder that it’s there. I live in fear.

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”.

Top 3:

• Shingles in my eye / face / scalp.
• Appendix ruptured while I was on the toilet.
• Kidney stones (multiple times)

Ok so here’s the kinda crazy part. I’m a sideshow and fire performer. I’ve suffered large burns, I can drill into my sinus cavity, I had my tongue surgically split, I staple myself with an upholstery stapler all the time.

Nothing has beat dental pain.

Got kicked in the balls when I was younger. It’s not pain, it’s something else. Of a different nature. You’re transported outside of everything, outside of reality. It was transcendental.

It’s a throw up between dislocating my arm while kiting and wearing both wrist straps for the brake lines. So my arm dislocated in mid air, fell to the ground, kite inflates but doesn’t take off and dragged me along the ground by my dislocated shoulder until I hit a rock.
Falling while climbing solo breaking my ankle and having to crawl out to find help.
And finally crashing while skiing and landing my hip on a rock, the ski patrol didn’t know if I had a spinal injury and couldn’t give me painkillers to get me off the hill, so they took me down a slushy bumpy spring slope on a sledge. Turns out I’d just fractured my hip so after the xray my friends dad the doctor got me loaded up with painkillers to make up for it.
Edit: that’s just some of the worst I can think of, I am very grateful that the human mind cannot remember pain.

Iritis/uveitis - My cornea detached due to the heavy pressure inside my eye. The most painful thing EVER.

Kidney stones - Close second

Motorcycle accident at highway speed that jammed gravel into my cranial cavity and left me looking like watermelon-head for 3 months - I’d still rather have this than kidney stones or iritis…

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