What was the most painful moment of your life?
My answer:
I donn’t know if it was actually the most painful, or if it’s objectively as painful as it felt for me at the time, but I remember the first time when I stood up after my Achilles tendons lengthening surgery as pretty damn painful. I say I don’t know if it was actually as painful as I consider it to be because I had no idea that it was going to be painful at all, so it was quite a huge shock for me and it’s absolutely possible that because of this it felt a lot more painful than it would’ve been otherwise. I was in casts for six weeks after the surgery, they went all the way from my lower thighs to my feet so that it was just my toes that stuck out, which meant I couldn’t even bend my knees or anything. Later on when I had them removed, from what I understood it turned out that there was no need for them to be as huge as they were and my surgeon was quite overzealous, and perhaps otherwise my leg muscles wouldn’t have been affected as much as they ended up being. Then, after I had the casts removed, obviously I was unable to walk and at the beginning even moving my feet too much felt rather painful, and I had to wait some more time before starting physiotherapy because the physiotherapist I was to work with had a full schedule, so in effect my muscles were dormant for more than six weeks. Then when he came, right on the first session, after wriggling my legs around and having me do some very light exercises, he wanted me to do a few squats. I was a bit surprised, and so was my Mum, and wondered for a brief moment how I’m even gonna do it when I can barely bend my knees, but I figured that, well, he’s a physiotherapist, he probably knows what he’s doing. I suppose he wanted to get me back to normal as quickly as possible since I was already out of school for months and it was really dragging on. So I stood up rather confidently, and even though I did it with a lot of help on his side, as soon as I did it I felt that searing pain go through my legs, and especially my feet, it was quite excruciating. I did manage to do these squats and as many as he wanted me to do, though they were far from your normal squats of course, but it was quite a horrific experience and, though it kept getting better every time, it continued to be yuckily painful for several more months and sometimes I can still feel a relatively small but still painful residue of that if I move my left foot in an awkward way, as my left foot has become quite a bit weaker from my right after that surgery for some odd reason. If that doesn’t classify, I think that’ll have to be one of Jack the Ripper’s (which is how I call my period) more aggressive moods. Jacks can be generally fairly shitty for me, by which I mean probably shittier than average but definitely still manageable, but there were two or three times when Jack went quite extreme and I was seriously wondering what was wrong because not only did I have awful cramps going all the way from my tummy through my back and thighs and it felt quite literally like my insides were being ripped into pieces, but also in all of those instances my bleeding was quite noticeably heavier than usual, and it tends to be heavy to begin with so not much fun really. Normally when I have a Jack that’s hard to function with but possible to live with I just take something for the pain, get a hot water bottle and Misha and go to bed, and even better if I can fall asleep and sleep the worst through, but those few times when it was really bad I wouldn’t feel comfortable in any position, whether lying, or sitting or standing and nothing worked for the pain even a little bit. Still, I consider myself lucky because there are women in my family who have had such painful periods that they have made them faint regularly.
How about your most painful moment? 🙂