How to deal with extreme physical pain (2020)

I dealt with a large amount of constant pain for my entire childhood, and ongoing but to a lesser extent. It was essentially persistent pain with spikes of immense pain, all over my body.<p>My doctor very early on told my parents not to give me opioids, as they would ruin my development, become ineffective and I would end up addicted. So my relationship with pain is very skewed, I do essentially what the author describes, observe it but I do not always experience it, especially for stuff I have felt before. One of my less healthy coping mechanisms when I was young was to make the pain worse, so that the relief was comparatively comfortable.<p>It has made navigating unrelated health issues a bit more challenging, as I can&#x27;t relate to pain cues very well, and I tend to refuse pain relief meds in emergency situations which is not always the right choice (broken bones fine, final stages of appendicitis, probably want the meds)<p>One thing that I have sort of always recognized though is that the way others experience pain, emotional or physical, is unrelated to what I have been through, which I think everyone could realise. Just because I have felt worse does not mean someone elses pain is not every bit as impactful to them.

Please watch the documentary &quot;Pain Warriors&quot; to see what is happening to people with Chronic Pain and the other side of the &quot;Opioid Epidemic&quot;.<p>&quot;Pain Warriors&quot; is NOT a warm and fuzzy movie to watch. It is five stories, two being suicides one of which was my late wife Karen.<p>It is also a good example of how today&#x27;s Medical Establishment fails people. In Karen&#x27;s case each doctor did what they thought was in her best interests, and I have no issue with any of them. Yet the system as a whole killed her.<p>&quot;Pain Warriors&quot; can be watched for free on Amazon Prime, and TubiTV. It is also on iTunes, Google Play and Veimo for international viewers.<p>I receive no remuneration from the documentary. I&#x27;m simply trying to raise awareness of obscure conditions like Intracranial Hypotension due to Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF) Leaks. As well as raise awareness of how broken the Medical Establishment can be if you have an obscure condition or Rare Disase.

Good read and advice.<p>Scott, if you write about this in the future, please don&#x27;t say &quot;at least I&#x27;m not dying of X&quot;. People reading this might be, and you are basically saying &quot;well, at least its not that&quot;. Yes, people with cancer, and dying of cancer, read HN, particularly when the subject is pain.

I enrolled in Swedish Hospital&#x27;s Pain Services in Nov 2021. Four weeks, 3 days a week, 8 hours a day. Got a brain dump of all the latest science as well as tutoring on pain mgmt skills.<p>It helped, reducing my daily perceived pain from 8 or 9 down to 6 or 7 (with occasional spikes). And I continue to improve (very slowly).<p>Disregard their web site. The team doesn&#x27;t control their own web presence. Typical, right?<p>Their actual program is far more involved and innovative than what is shown.<p>I&#x27;ve been coping with chronic pain my entire adult life. I thought I had a pretty good handle on the latest science and techniques. I was surprised by how much new stuff I learned.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.swedish.org&#x2F;services&#x2F;pain-services" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.swedish.org&#x2F;services&#x2F;pain-services</a>

Not chronic pain like the author but I had many blood clots stuck in my lungs a few months ago. This lead to severe pleuritic chest pain, the worst pain I ever felt in my life. In the A&amp;E, I usually have a high tolerance to pain, so I was up and talking to doctors and nurses fine and calmly about the ache, but once the pain ramped up to a high point with involuntary spasms that just made it worse, I just immediately turned from calm but uncomfortable to loud, screaming while rocking back and forth and pleading with my body to stop hurting me.<p>Really, only an injection of tramadol did the trick. After I was admitted, they lowered the dose, so the pain came back but I guess the drug just changed my reaction to it, like it hurt the same but i was too stoned to care I guess. Really only treatment made the difference permanently. Pain killers (paracetamol that is tylenol) after being discharged reduced the pain that would come back from time to time at least to the point I could bear it while my body healed.

I had a testicular torsion. There was a bleed after the surgery, and I had a haematoma there for months that made the region incredibly painful during that whole time, I could not walk properly etc. The torsion itself wasn&#x27;t a picnic either.<p>This was a while ago now, and it&#x27;s interesting to see what sticks in my mind. In fact the part that was most traumatic in hindsight was getting a catheter inserted after the surgery. This was by any metric not the most painful part of what I experienced, but the context under which I had it done - scared that something was broken, alone, highly fearful - led to me being in a flat panic, very stressed, and this caused that experience in particular to encode as traumatic. I worry about how I will cope the next time I need one, it seems an inevitability one day.<p>One thing I try and practice is the Buddhist teaching: suffering does not come from pain, but from attachment to it. My personal experience seems to reinforce that.<p>You can uncross your legs now, sorry.

Previously:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24947498" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24947498</a> Oct 2020, 335 comments

When I was growing up I was was frequently subjugated to violence on a daily basis, over time I learned to zone out of reality, and remind myself that the bruising and cuts would heal and after some time (probably before I reached kindergarten) it just became instant, and I didn’t feel the pain the same way anymore, like I can feel pain, but isn’t something I remember and isn’t in my conscious awareness, like it’s happening outside my immediate focus in a way. Getting over the emotional trauma, on the other hand was a much more difficult thing and took over 15+ years to get over that, but thats a whole different topic.<p>But, even then, I am sometimes frustrated with how difficult it is for me to do creative work when dealing with certain types of pain like headaches, toothaches, fatigue. I could always do basic physical labor while in pain, even headache&#x2F;toothache&#x2F;fatigue, but trying to learn anything complicated or do intellectual work was harder. I was decent at endurance running, I think this was somehow related, I would basically zone out how my legs and lungs are burning, and how tired I felt.<p>However, unless I was extremely motivated such that then I could sort of hold onto the task in my mind and zone everything else out, it was next to impossible for me to do focus on it. For example stuff that is mundane, boring, tedious or something I don’t care about, it was very hard for me to get anything done while being in pain, for example I recently got 2nd degree burns all over my face and tore my rotor cuff again (not simultaneously), I was able zone out the pain, but it was hard for me to concentrate on work, or school, until the pressure of getting the work done became so high that I felt it was important to do it, and then I could push thru and get it done, but otherwise I wasn’t able to. I guess it’s like I was in some sort of survival mode, and if certain work didn’t feel needed for survival I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on it.<p>I always wonder how people with chronic pain can even get anything intellectually done, based on reading this, it wasn’t clear to me, but I guess it seems like he is holding a strong motivation to face the pain and succeed despite the pain, which does make sense.

It is surely not pleasant experience, I have diabetes and I had frozen shoulder on both sides, almost consecutively. Probably been 4-5 years in total, pain is very annoying - I&#x27;m not talking about not being able to wipe your arse, I&#x27;m talking unable to sleep, because of pain, in any position. The only good news is, from what I was told, it does not reoccur. It is strange experience to have such intensity pain for such prolonged periods. Probably nastiest for me, was experience of being handicapped, even such simple thing as severely restricted shoulder movements - bring MAJOR impact on everyday life and functions. Oh yeah, and drugs don&#x27;t work, well at least most of them...

During my worst gout flareups, breathing techniques helped a bit. There’s not much one can do when the pain is brilliant - especially if you don’t have drugs at hand, but very controlled breathing seemed to help.<p>Also helped me through a infected root canal. Anesthesia didn’t work, it was absolute agony. But focus and breathing helped.

I am literally in the hospital, waiting to be taken to the operating room for the same type of surgery, except on my ankle. I am not encouraged by this. The doctor said it will be a painful recovery, but they said that when I was doing physio to recover movement in my knee, and it wasn&#x27;t so bad.

I have a pinched nerve that causes sometimes pain and sometimes numbness in my right arm. Some months are better than others. I have sympathy for the author. We need better assistive software&#x2F;hardware and much more research. Good luck and vibes.

I know I can&#x27;t deal with it, and I have tremendous respect for anyone who can.<p>A few years ago, I had a kidney stone and a renal colic [0]. The pain was indescribable. It was surreal. A shrill, hyperbright, screeching, completely hysteric pain. I was in constant agitation and jumped around our apartment looking for some way out. I took the only pain killers we had (some aspirin and paracetamol), with no effect. I started to bang my head against the wall to counter the pain with a more managable pain. When the medics came, I was rolling on the floor, in tears, grapped one of them by the foot and begged for pain killers. They said they had to clear that up with the emergency room first, because they weren&#x27;t sure what it was. I screamed at them that it was most likely a kidney stone (I had read about kidney stones a few years before on Wikipedia because my father had one when he was my age, and the symptoms matched 100%). They said no, they weren&#x27;t sure. While they were talking with the emergency room on the phone, another wave struck me down. I almost fainted. Then I threw up on the floor and lay there, wailing, screaming, in my own vomit. The emergency room then gave them clearance to give me something strong. The second they told me that they have pain killers in the ambulance car I was up and ran down the stairs. My wife tried to hold me back because I was only wearing underwear at that point. I didn&#x27;t care and basically threw her aside. The focal point of my life at that moment was to stop. That. Pain. I remember the ambulance gleaming in the night like the holy grail. I entered, lay down on the stretcher, and then they injected me something I later learned was morphine based. I remember I couldn&#x27;t feel them touching me, or the needle entering, because the pain blocked out any other physical sensation. And then, almost immediately, the pain became managable, like a strong toothache.<p>The rest of the night is a fog. The next morning, the stone had passed and I returned home. I lay in bed for 2 days completely traumatized, just staring at the wall. I never knew such physical pain was possible without losing consciousness.<p>I now know that I cannot stand extreme pain. If I would have to endure the pain of that night for longer than 12 hours, I would kill myself.<p>Wikipedia has a depiction of a renal colic that is pretty accurate: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;de.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nierenkolik#&#x2F;media&#x2F;Datei:Devils_saw_away_at_a_colic_sufferer&#x27;s_abdomen._Lithograph_by_Wellcome_V0011745.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;de.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nierenkolik#&#x2F;media&#x2F;Datei:Devil...</a><p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Renal_colic" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Renal_colic</a>

As my grandfather said &quot;I can&#x27;t complain. Even if I did, no one would listen.&quot;<p>My view is it burdens other people, it&#x27;s boring, trivial, sympathy-seeking, and dumps problems on others they can&#x27;t do anything about. It&#x27;s better to be graceful than whine because the risk of competitive grievance storytelling is without end or fruitful accomplishment. There are bigger ideas, existential threats, and excessive suffering in other parts of the world like famine and summary executions.<p>I broke T-8, my nose, and had a one-part proximal humerus fracture. It wasn&#x27;t anywhere close to a &quot;10&quot; on the pain scale, maybe a 3.5. E.D. kept trying to push opiates and adamantly refused. A genetic test claimed I have a reduced pain perception but not convinced yet.

So... how DO you deal with it? My mom&#x27;s hip hurts progressively more. It&#x27;s destroying her. If anyone knows a remedy, not ibuprofen, I&#x27;d be glad to hear it. Internet and doctors say there&#x27;s nothing that can be done to cure it, which I refuse to believe. There must be something she can rub into the hip or drink or eat.<p>Her father had Reuma and he had a field of nettle im his backyard. He sat there for hours every day covering and beating his body with nettles. He got cured.<p>There must be a natural remedy. Doctors and the pharma industry have no interest im curing it. It&#x27;s a source of income.<p>So long story short, if anyone knows anything about hip pain, a remedy, please share.

It&#x27;s such a terrible feeling. I repeatedly herniated the two lowest lumbar discs throughout my 20s and early 30s until it just finally couldn&#x27;t heal any more. Too much volume was lost. It got to the point I was regularly throwing out my back and down for days from nonsense like getting out of a car and emptying the dishwasher. Finally, I threw out my back while putting underwear on one morning, and was suddenly introduced to an entirely new level of pain I didn&#x27;t realize existed.<p>It was spasms, but not like any kind of muscle spasm I had ever experienced before. They were regular and predictable. Every 30 seconds. It felt like I was being electrocuted, like someone had placed an electrode in my spine and was throwing the switch every 30 seconds. My entire body seized up. I was luckily near a bed and fell onto it, and I was just stuck there. For three days. I didn&#x27;t sleep. I have no memory of what I ate or drank. For three days, every 30 seconds, an electric shock came from my spine to everywhere else and seized up my entire body.<p>My wife, of course, wanted to take me to the hospital, but I was in too much pain to move, even if someone else was moving me, so I made her wait until the spasms stopped. Then I finally went in, got a steroid shot plus some oral prednisone pills, and eventually, two years, three surgeries, ten screws, two rods, two cages, and a whole lot of physical therapy later, I was basically functional again.<p>I don&#x27;t really remember it. I can&#x27;t envision the feeling. I just remember the sheer horror and helplessness.<p>The funny thing is, it&#x27;s not even actually the worst pain I ever experienced. The worst was waking up after the double fusion, apparently before they started the morphine drip. I don&#x27;t really remember this, either. It&#x27;s more like a dream than a memory. My wife saw me. I couldn&#x27;t see anything. I woke up and was screaming, begging the nurse to kill me, but thankfully this one was brief since I was hooked up to an IV already and she blasted me with fentanyl and I fell asleep and woke up the next time not feeling jack shit. But for maybe twenty seconds or so, I felt like you might imagine it would feel when someone just spent seven hours removing part of your spine, sawing a bone graft off your hip, and screwing a bunch of hardware into your vertebrae while pincers hold you open and your organs are all pulled out and on a table next to you.<p>It&#x27;s really weird what this does to you. It totally throws off your sense of what is normal. Like should I be in pain right now? I&#x27;m laying in a bed unable to sleep. It&#x27;s a mattress but it feels like I&#x27;m laying on stone where the fusion is. My entire left leg is numb and my foot is throbbing. But it doesn&#x27;t hurt at all. It barely registers as background noise. The muscles that attach there are hard as concrete because they haven&#x27;t moved in seven years, and they never will move.

This is seemingly another disease that seems to be influenced by sugar intake (due to the association with diabetes) and inflammatory processes of the body going haywire.

I have a friend who has dealt with chronic pancreatitis for 2 decades. He just recently finished a medical degree and is finally getting back to work. He needed constant pain medication when he would get flare ups to the point that doctors thought he was opioid shopping. I just always think of the old “there but for the grace of God go I” and hope they have what they need to get through it.

So, I get migraines. Fortunately, only every couple months, and for 3-4 hours, usually. But during that time, it&#x27;s curled into a ball, muttering, sometimes barfing from pain-level bad. I can suck it up and get basic things done, but I basically present as a crazy person in that time, because all of my mental energy is going into resisting the pain. I have different tricks like either accepting or rejecting the pain, or rolling around in my bed to distract myself from it.<p>I struggle to explain to other people what that level of pain is like, and often think that while it looks horrible from the outside (and is!), I&#x27;ve been dealing with that level of pain on a regular basis for my whole life, and it&#x27;s just somehow normalized. I guess what I&#x27;d say is it still hurts a lot, but it&#x27;s not traumatic by any means anymore. I&#x27;m just used to it.<p>I&#x27;m curious -- are there folks here who have migraines and some other experience with extreme pain? How do they compare? I was around when both of my kids were born and the description of the level of pain seemed pretty close to what I deal with multiple times a year.

if you haven&#x27;t tried, look into fasting(just water for a few days, maybe teas-but those can be problematic sometimes - I get heartburn from tea), if the pain subsides&#x2F;lessens within a week, there might be something in the diet that causes it. In that case I&#x27;d suggest to try some elimination diet.<p>If u can&#x27;t fast, try less than 500 ckal&#x2F;day

I do not know either the OP or the author but thanks for sharing this and to all of you who have done the same in the comments.

One mistake is getting a surgery &quot;just to see.&quot; Then you get your REAL pain.