What's the worst medical treatment you had to endure?

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.

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?

My grandfather had a bad case of flu. Went to the hospital and they put him on IV fluids but found out he was allergic to something. Fucked him up good and wouldn’t accept he was having issues until it was too late.

Had to traych him up so he could breathe.

Blew out his kidneys.

Basically significant organ failure. He walked into the hospital for the flu and they mistreated him, and he never walked out. Came home in a walker and a dialysis schedule and breathing out of his neck.

Took him 8 years to die after that. He was basically a corpse. Grandmother sold her business, sold their lake house, sold their classic car, all to try and pay all of the medical bills and be his full time caretaker. Just an awful situation.

I’m only calling this the worst because I was young enough for my other procedures that I don’t fully remember the pain.

I developed a cyst on my labia. Not a bartholyn for those with experience, higher up. I was doing the warm compress thing but it wasn’t helping. Within a matter of hours it went from the size of a pea to the size of a golf ball. Obviously I had to go get that dealt with.

You’d think the cutting me open and draining it part would be pretty bad. Or even the healing. Nope. Local anesthetic to the labia was absolutely the worst pain I can remember feeling. And I got my finger stuck between two gears one time.

The 3 minutes or so of agonizing, burning pain lasted longer than the time it took them to cut me, drain it, and pack it. My husband had bruises from me gripping him so hard and was bleeding from involuntary nails digging in.

Shockingly I didn’t even take any of the pain killers they gave me for recovery. By the time the numbness wore off there was no pain left. Trying to pee after was another story. Thank god for the invention of a Peri bottle.

But yeah, felt like someone set my labia on fire while also stabbing me with a knife. 0/10

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…

My cat even got it, and I had to deal with my cat crying in pain for almost 2 weeks while I felt so much pain I wanted to kill myself, but couldn’t.

I just peed in my bed, cause I couldn’t move without screaming

Edit; I was happy to pay for a new mattress rather than deal with the eye-stabbing pain of moving to the toilet

Either you don’t remember, or you never got the first version of Covid. Either way, consider yourself lucky. It was a magnificent horror show.

In the poor treatment category…

Long story short as I can make it and make sense, had a falling accident at work. I got hit in the head by flying piece of iron and gotten knocked off a scaffold, falling down 7ish? feet and belly flopped onto a concrete floor with my right arm under me. They x-rayed my arm, stitched the wound on my head, and said I was good to go. My arm… not sure how to word it… just felt wrong. I’m used to a lot of pain and have a high threshold, but something just was off about it. I asked the doc and they reassured me two doctors had looked at the x-ray and it was fine, but if it still hurt in a month to go to my family doctor.

K great. Go home, and for the next few weeks I do my thing, trying to use my right hand fairly often to help “walk it off” so to speak. After nearly a month of it not getting any better made an appointment to see my doc. (one month to the day of the accident.) Got another x-ray. I had barely got home when I got a call from my doctor, he saw the problem immediately when he got the pics. Turned out that when I fell, one of the bones in my wrist got dislodged and the tendon that attaches to it pulled it back into my carpal tunnel, pinching off the nerves to my thumb and two fingers. (Apparently our other two smallest fingers nerves run separate and to the side.) Sorry to any med ppl if I skewered that explanation. Perilunate dislocation is what they called it.

So basically, two different doctors didn’t notice the bone on the wrong side of my wrist. Me being the idiot I am, kept using it for a month like it was fine. I don’t like taking painkillers so I smoked a shitton of weed that month lol all because two doctors didn’t look close enough at an x-ray.

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.

As a zebra patient… too many to list lol

But the one that stands out is my original POTS diagnostic test. They did something called a “tilt table test”. They strap you on a table like a torture film, literally head straps and everything, and then raise the table vertically. The idea is to see how well your body adapts to gravity.

Normally I have pretty good compensations for my condition. I’ve learnt specific ways to stand, lean, and hold my body so that my circulation works… not well, but decently. I can get up to make toast every now and then, stuff like that.

The table bypasses all that. Immediately I suffered extremely bad effects. I could feel all the blood draining from my brain and my body and pooling into my legs. Couldn’t breathe properly, vision going white, feeling absolutely horrible. I can’t accurately describe the feeling of all your blood leaving your vital organs. It felt extremely bad, I felt like I was dying. Like a cold shower on the inside, hollowness, pain.

Worst part was, I was too weak to even ask them to cancel the test, or move to remove the bindings myself. Turns out you need blood to do stuff like that. I was completely paralyzed.

The doctors were like “wow this is the worst POTS I’ve ever seen! Usually when people say they have POTS it turns out they don’t, but man… hey let’s show Larry” and they leave the room to go find Larry and show them the interesting POTS patient. I could barely see on the monitor my heart rate was 180bpm and my blood pressure was 80/40mmol, which is very bad. I eventually lost consciousness completely. As I passed out I accepted that I was going to die right there on the stupid table because nobody noticed the problem.

I didn’t die (obviously). I came to when I was horizontal on the table again and they were unstrapping me. No idea how long I was out for, but fuck that. Nobody told me it would be that bad. “A bit uncomfortable” my ass.

After all that, I got my diagnosis for severe POTS after 10 years of confusing symptoms. Now I have some medicine that helps it not be so severe, so I guess it was worth it in the end?

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.

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.