I have had kidney stone, childbirth, and broken bones, also once a torn Achilles tendon, all hurt bad, none were as bad as a bad migraine. That is the worst pain I've survived. So bad I got hallucinations, crying and puking up anything even a bare sip of water, nothing but pain exists. Migraine is by far the worst physical pain I have felt.
I’ve tried to explain the pain to my partner. She doesn’t understand that pain that intense makes you nausea. I also can’t remember simple things like what month it is, my dogs name, her name, like it’s crazy because your in so much pain. Luckily that have been significantly less frequent since I’ve moved to a different area of the country and I’ve gotten better at preventing them by catching them early.
Mine got less intense after menopause and the worst ones were when I was on birth control pills, though I didn't know that until I stopped taking them. I thought menopause might end them (as mine were primarily hormonal), it didn't but menopause plus continuous daily low dose MHT has come close, but less intense has been interesting - before I didn't understand when the doctor would ask how bad is the pain, I would say Migraine, like what is the question? There is no scale, it is a migraine. But post menopause they do vary.
I learned that one of the things a migraine does is fuck with serotonin receptors so you experience the pain without any accompanying euphoria, that is part of why it hits different from other pain but the way I've described it to people is imagine the worst hangover you've had then multiply the headache part of it by about 10x.
A pain so great that your fingers stop working and your limbs go numb and everything in your body triggers a throb but you can't stop crying because it hurts too bad.
Uuuuuuugggggghhhhhh. I'm really happy that you're able to have them significantly less frequently. That's a huge boon. Hopefully you can be migraine free moving forward!
I'm only glad that my migraines are very mild: scintillating scotoma to warn me the pain is coming and a tylenol500 and Advil every 2 hours with a good hit of caffeine will tamp that down. Soon as the vision is back I'm almost back to work.
I was once running along a wharf and slipped while landing a jump. Stuck the landing briefly, but then my feet went up and I went down. I lay for a moment mentally checking feeling in the lower extremities and dreading the point when I had to move and run to catch my boat, but I did all that without much issue.
It's been generally ignored for 30 years, so it's hardened up nicely between the sacrum and ilium and generally abused the rest of the back with the gait differences. That's why when I super strained it one morning by merely bending forward, I was the only one in the exam room who was surprised it was gonna do that.
It's the only time I've had morphine (baby morphine 2mg) and it didn't really do much that was positive -- too weak to dull the pain and already hitting me with gut issues. Riding out recovery on the lesser Tylenol/Advil stack was a challenge but I couldn't take the gut side-effects from the opioids.
Waiting on a programme to strengthen that up has been fun since the hillbillies made the doctor's quit during COVID, but I'm in a stable state and obviously here to post snark and spelling corrections; so we're good!