.
I've got about five of 'em. Most pain, I'll go with:
Working construction in a snow storm. Up on a ladder on the second floor exterior, attaching 45' x 4' sheetmetal encased insulation. That's when the ladder went down. All the way down. Big industrial aluminum thing. Landed on a concrete loading dock. I landed on top of it, face down. The 16" drill bit and some of the 14" screws I was using ripped me in a few places. Left foreleg was split to the bone. Yeah, it looks pretty white through the gash. One post of the ladder made a nice crease through my right eye socket, split my right nostril, upper lip, took out several teeth, and knocked me a good Mike Tyson across the chin. Nice bloody mess. One thing They don't lie about: face wounds bleed like a river.
Anyway, I lay there, in the snow and ice, rolling bits of my teeth around in my mouth and trying not to swallow them. The cuts in my tongue were pretty trivial but, anyone who's had them knows, they can sting & swell and generally annoy you.
So, they get me to the hospital, and everyone's cheerful because I can recite my name and phone number and I know my mother's name (bonus). A bit of skull poking out through my eyebrow but, again, still pretty cheerful because it's not like in pieces or anything. They cut all my clothes off, since I'm strapped immobile to a backboard. I mean. they're cheerful, but not so stupid as not to take precautions against spinal trauma ...
Yea, and that's when they get an intern to insert a catheter to drain my bladder. Can't let me pee by myself; they want it collecting in real time in a clear bag so they can check for bleeding.
So the 6 inch gash on my leg (that was through heavy blues jeans and long johns) and several piercings around my groin and belt line (Did I mention the drill bit & the screws? In my carpenters apron, conveniently across my junk?) all get triaged and sterilized and bandaged. Nothing stitched (yet) because the wounds will need to drain for a few days.
By now I'm sore. If you've read around, you'll hear stories about those big .50 calibre machine guns used to shred jeeps and such. I knew a Viet Nam vet who told how they'd use them from helicopters to rape anything that moved, or stationary targets that looked promising. The deal is, if you hit someone in the arm or something peripheral with one of those .50 slugs, you stand a better than half chance of killing them. The hydrostatic shock of the impact blows back the blood pressure and sends a shockwave through all the body fluid; that does a hell of a lot of damage, often fatal.
I experienced a similar effect. Taking a 40 foot or so face plant on to concrete basically rocked every cell in my body. Every bone, every nerve. My eyeballs hurt, the roots of my hair hurt, my balls hurt, my toenails hurt. And I'm thinking "OKay, this sucks. But at least I'm alive and it'll get better."
My surgeon in charge wouldn't authorize use of painkillers. He said that since I was an emergency case without any medical records, he wouldn't even allow novocaine. Can't accept the liability risk in case I might have an "adverse reaction" to the meds. Which is more stupid than dogshit because I've got a mouth full of fillings to prove my dentist has used at least novocaine safely on me for years.
Speaking of dentists, this is when a guy shows up to clean my mouth out. Three top front-right teeth shattered, several others with fracture lines. Two he can put a temp cap on until I see my normal dentist. But the third is split down the root, so he decides that's coming out. Whips out a small screw device, screws it up the center of the root (that is, straight up the nerve), then yanks it. Felt like he was taking my right eyeball with it. Just typing this and I can, again, feel the top of my head twitch.
Well, the dentist has had his go; taps in a temporary root post and he's made his $1000 for 20 minutes of horse surgery.
Now a plastic surgeon arrives to start stitching my face back together across my skull. Still no pain killers. But, this guys is good and thorough. He's putting in three layers of fine stitching to get all the muscles & skin of my eye socket back in place just right. I love the guy to this day, there's barely a mark, and most people wouldn't even know it if I don't point it out. But, it took about 120 stitches and somewhere over an hour.
I'm certain at this point that I've really rode that dragon as hard as anyone could have. Tears leaking a river through the blood but, hey, I managed not to scream or carry on. Feeling good ...
Oh. Yeah. There's still the right nostril to reassemble. You ever see China Town ..? Remember the scene where the mafia guy sticks a knife up the protagonists nose and ventilates it ..? Yeah. That was me. Except it was more a crushing & tearing injury instead of a nice clean knife cut.
Seriously. That was the real icing to the day. I'd rather get 25 stitches through the tip of my wang. I know for a fact it hurts less.
Still managed not to scream out loud, but not by much. And I sure as hell didn't stay nearly as still as he wanted.
Putting my upper lip back together was a breeze after that. Most of that was internal from where the broken teeth had sliced it up a bit, so the work didn't need to be so fine and only took about ten quick stitches.
I walked out of the hospital that night. Basically it was about a 14 hour marathon. I walked like a zombie. Literally, every cell and joint of my body was in so much pain I couldn't move better than a 120 year geriatric for about 6 or 7 days. I was 21 at the time, in absolutely top athletic condition, and it was one of the luckiest days of my life.
I also wrecked two motorcycles and managed to (barely) walk it off, both times; my right shoulder has been in constant pain form one of those for about 25 years now. Some nerve or another got ripped and dislocated and it feels like an ice pick is stuck under my shoulder blade most days. I stepped on a nail protruding through a board, which proceeded to pierce the center of my right foot (as in, two inches protruding through the top of said foot). I've also dug paper-thin shards of glass out of that foot with a razor and needle-nose pliers. I was mugged in Feb 2009 and ripped out most of the tendons and ligaments in my left knee; took four months to walk again, and it's still not (and never will be) healed. Had a cat bite me in the forearm a few years back. Had purple and green and red streaks of infection running from wrist up through my armpit and across my ribcage, the arm was swollen nearly as thick as my leg. That was with a heavy series of antibiotics; took about three weeks before the fever broke I could use my right arm to lift a glass of water.
Yeah. Fun times.
