Personally, I’ve never had a migraine, but I’m a little bit worried because my grandmother, my mom, and all of my aunt’s on my mom’s side get terrible migraines. If they’re hereditary, I’m pretty much out of luck.

Then they asked me if I wanted any pain medication, I said no, and they started me on morphine.

Migraines are a 7 or maybe an 8.
Herniated spinal discs hurt, lie still, breathing gently and wanting to scream. That starts off at ten and after a few hours comes down to an 8, in a week gets to a 7 and stays there for aslong as it takes to heal (months).
Broken jaws hurt, but are kinda funny aswell.
Ripping skin off of your eye balls, twice in one week, hurts, 10 to start and that settles to a 5 in a few hours.
2nd degree burns to face and arms, 7 to start, 9 when shock wears off and after a few hours, maybe 6. After a week, 9 when it is exposed to sunlight.
Shrapnel, not penetrating deeper then the skin, 4.
Getting staked in the foot, 5.
Getting stabbed in the hand, 8.
Listening to modern pop music, 11, 10 after using a 15mm spade bit to remove ear canals and drums.
(ranked using http://www.tipna.org/info/documents/ComparativePainScale.htm)

I could keep going, but, I have things to do today.

Broken wrists are more painful than I expected, I suppose in the same way as when you damage a part of your body that you don’t often think about but use almost constantly. It took me almost six months to be able to open a door with my withered hand again.

Kickboxing, eh? we have a ninja in our midst.

And the reason, or so I’ve been told, that coffee helps is because the caffeine helps the ibuprofen get to your brain faster by making your heart beat faster.

Worst pain I ever had was when I broke my hand and part of my wrist kickboxing (as a sport, not in a fight.) I’ve actually just gotten used to the migraines and seizures, and it is somewhat disconcerting.

Though neither of them have ‘so painful I’m delerious and passing through consciousness’. Perhaps there’s no point in asking if someone reaches that stage.

deadlytoque – both of those sound awful, especially the kidney stones. Did you get to keep your appendix or was it kicked out of your abdomen like the freeloading former organ it is?

Chris – Your dad has my sympathy, a friend of mine suffers from a ‘bad back’ (somehow it never conveys just how serious and painful the condition can be) and, like migraines, it seems to be a condition that a lot of people assume you’re faking, when in fact it is seriously painful. I think that conditions like that should at least come with a visable rash, just to inform people.

*just gave me an idea for a comic… I’ll do it this week*

I think I’d rather have a nosebleed than a migraine any day. People don’t think you are faking nosebleeds just to get out of work.

I know I can set them off through eye strain and lack of sleep… the two things I’m constantly faced with.

Apparently orange-flavoured chocolate is a potent trigger for some… for others it’s just being smacked repeatedly around the side of the head.

Here’s something that explains how the scale works:

http://www.tipna.org/info/documents/ComparativePainScale.htm

There it is. Apologies if this is a re-post. My computer is acting up.

I seem to recall on of my friends who works at a hospital tell me that they have a little chart with smiley-faces on it, but rather than smiling, they have faces that are contorted in various levels of pain, and they use that to diagnose pain in non-verbal patients, or before they get a translator.

I used to get them quite a lot. The first time I had one, I had the same reaction as you, Ad, I thought I was dying an’ all. Nowadays I get the occassional headache that I can sleep off, but those migraines meant intense pain that you can’t sleep through, and it wouldn’t die down until I’d been sick, for some weird reason. Grown out of it now though

The only time I’ve been to A&E was in the 6th hour of what would be a 7 hour long nose bleed. It’d been so long I was dizzy and covered in blood that we couldn’t be arsed to clean off because I was still bleeding. But I didn’t get the scale question because it didn’t hurt.

I remember the first time that I had a migraine and the visual disturbances came – my line of thought was similar to yours, but as it only started with the disturbances I thought ‘well isn’t this great, I’m going to have to learn to live with weird eyesight for the rest of my life’. When I realised it was a migraine (after the beatings had kicked it), it seemed better than what I thought, but I soon came to realise how bad migraines are…

For the past few months I have luckily not had any migraines, but before that they usually came in phases of around 1 week with 5 migraines, and then possibly two months without any. Thanks for the sympathy

Toothache… I can understand these stories of people trying to remove teeth with shotguns. It’s a ‘in your face’ sort of pain (no pun intended) that is very much with you.

-M

I know of a couple of people that get the visual disturbances, often caused by migraines, without getting the headache. I suppose I’m saying that there must be different types, perhaps with different underlying causes.

I take it that you must get them fairly regularly, and as such you really have my sympathy. Before I had one I assumed it was just like a bad headache, and I suspect many people see them like this. The truth is that a migraine is closer to being repeatedly beaten around the head for several hours.

If your answer to the question ‘on a scale of one to ten, how much pain are you in’ is ‘Urrrrmph, arrr’, then you’re a ten.

I had heard that you folks call it an emergency room. I also heard that instead of doctors you have clooneys.

i’d say the worst pain i’ve had was a toothache, i couldn’t think very well, and i started walking in circles