What is the worst sickness you have ever had?

Diabetes and MS.
I scoff at chicken pox and hangovers! XD

A few years ago, I was sick for 3 months. To the point to where I could barely lift my arms when washing my hair (I was that weak. I was like that for the 3 months). I went through tons of medical testing and they even suspected Lymphoma.

After it was all done, they still didn’t know what it was. One doctor thought that maybe it was the swine flu.

I was in my early teens when I had gotten strep throat. It was the most horrible experience ever. I could barely swallow water. The pain on a scale from 1 to 10 was probably 9.5. I was sick for about 3 or 4 days. Don’t remember what medicine they gave me though.

This holiday weekend I developed a mild case of strep. The body aches and headache were just as bad as my throat. I am taking amoxicillin for it.

To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever had anything other than colds, fevers, and hangovers. When I realized I was actually not able to drink regular milk anymore, that hurt my stomach for a bit.

@lucillelucillelucille I’m not talking about diseases, just being sick.

A chronic infection I can not fucking get completely get rid of in the last 20 years. It has altered my life. My over 105 fever when I was little with the flu and miserable had less impact than being sick ongoing.

I was plagued with kidney infections as a child and teen.
Horrible pain, nausea, incapacitating in every sense of the word.
The doctors would just give me antibiotics and send me home.
It took til I was 21 for some brilliant urologist to discover I had a blocked ureter in my right kidney that had caused that kidney to blow up to about one and half times it’s size from the back pressure.

I had surgery and the blocked segment of the ureter tube was replaced. They was a chance that I could lose the kidney if it proved to be too damaged, but they were able to repair it.

I have a scar about 10 inches long wrapping around the right side of my lower waist.
I joked about being the woman who was almost sawed in half. lol

The scar has faded over the years, but the memory has not. A really painful experience.

Another surprise was when I got the surgery report.

When they said they were going to replace the segment of scarred tube I just assumed it was going to be some sort of synthetic tubing, when I was reading the surgery report it said, after all the prepping details, incision making etc. that the ” SPECIMEN was submitted from MORGUE #2!!!”

I have a donor kidney part! Thank you, whomever you were!

@erich1504-The flu? Chicken pox? Colds?Shingles?Hangovers?Sore throats?Broken toe?Disc fusion in my neck?Etc,etc,etc….
It takes alot more than that stuff to make me whine! LOL!
That is mere BS to me. Bring it on!

Galloping gut rot, basically shitting through the eye of a needle. Not good, uh huh.

The Hong Kong Flu. A 106 fever for 4 days shut down my kidneys and I was in the hospital for 2 weeks and while there I was read Last Rites. Crappy doesn’t begin to describe the agony and pain I was in…I wanted to die. Spent 3 months in a bed recovering and had to learn how to walk all over again at 9 years old.

@Cruiser Good God! I think you may win this one sir.

@erichw1504 Yep and back then pain management for kids were those damn orange children’s aspirin they only gave you a half of!! Barbarians!

@Cruiser

Yep, you were a lucky little boy, 100 years ago you probably wouldn’t have pulled through.

@Cruiser Those St. Joseph’s aspirins ruined creamsicles and most other orange flavored candies for me forever. It all tastes like medicine. Blech.

When I was stationed in South Korea in the Army in 1988, I had walking pneumonia and it was just about the nastiest I’d ever felt in my life. Painful chest pains and coughing, headaches, fever. All around miserable. I was 21 at the time and I think the sickness lasted for a couple of weeks. I took whatever meds the Army docs gave me and tried to rest as much as I could while the symptoms lasted.

As far as permanent illness goes, I was diagnosed with type II diabetes in 2006 and even though I don’t “feel” sick from it most of the time, it completely sucks to high heaven having it and it’s something I wouldn’t wish even on my worst enemy.

When I was seventeen I experienced the late stages of a widespread blood infection and went into septic shock. Septic shock is the late stage of septic infection in which the blood pressure plummets and organs start failing if immediate help isn’t received; it is very acute. The infection had gone unnoticed and untreated for over a week (largely due to an idiotic misdiagnosis at an emergency room), which is why it had managed to reach this late stage. Fortunately I was already in a hospital when I went into shock; I really don’t think I would be here to tell you about this today if I hadn’t been at the right place at the right time.

The first symptom of sepsis was extreme pain over my entire body, especially knees and other joints. I went to an emergency room, and because I had started a new medication recently, they told me it was probably a side effect of that paired with overexertion. They sent me away without doing any tests. The pain got worse…it was the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. This is coming from someone who has slept through passing a kidney stone. I went to a different emergency room. These doctors had the common sense to take some blood cultures and admit me overnight. I know now to ask for blood cultures whenever I have any strange symptoms. I woke up the next morning in the hospital extremely cold and shaking uncontrollably, and doctors and nurses started pouring in until there were 12 of them all in my room working on me. They put in five or six IVs very quickly and started pumping enormous amounts of saline in me to get my blood pressure up…due to their fine work I avoided going into into organ failure. Up to half of all people who reach this stage of infection die, and considering that I had been extremely ill and on immunosuppressants before this incident, I am so, so, so lucky I wasn’t one of them.

They put me in the ICU and got me on three or four simultaneous antibiotics. I got a couple of blood transfusions pumped through me at maximum speed, again to keep my blood pressure up. I had to get an ultrasound done because they were worried my heart might have been affected…I can’t remember much else in the way of treatment. It’s all very blurry to me. I do remember that I was a little bitch and was more concerned about the fact that I was missing a mandatory chemistry exam (I completely didn’t understand the severity of the situation until afterwards), and they ended up letting me take the exam in the ICU (everyone thought I was ridiculous). I’m not sure why exactly this happened, but I lost the ability to stand on my own, I was just so, so weak. I was still in a lot of pain and could hardly do anything on my own; it was a very uncomfortable hospital stay and I got frustrated with it pretty fast. I was in the hospital for a total of nine days, I think, which is incredibly short for what happened to me, but it took me the whole summer to get my strength back. This could have gone so much worse in so many ways.

@JLeslie Tang came to the rescue for me! I hated those aspirins!!

Pneumonia. I was in my late teens, and I knew something was really wrong with me, but my mom kept insisting that it was just a bad cold. I kept saying that I should probably see a doctor or go to the ER, since it felt like it kept getting worse, but my mother is notorious for downplaying any complaints we have. She’s just always been that way… “suck it up!”

Yeah, so, by the time I crawled up the stairs on my hands and knees and collapsed in the living room, she knew something was really wrong. She and my dad took me to the ER, where they said if we had waited any longer I would have probably died. I was barely getting any oxygen. The doctor basically said that if my oxygen saturation had dropped another 3% I would have essentially suffocated in my own body. I was in the hospital…. I think for just 4 days…. but I was so miserable. Then, of course, I developed asthma as a result.

@Cruiser The truth is lots of flavors taste like medicine to me. My husband thinks I am nuts. I don’t swallow pills well so I have taken a lot of liquid and chewable medicines. :)

@JLeslie I am like you as that time I was sick I had to take this God awful yellow liquid and tasted like fish in an old sneaker for 6 months and for a little kid that was pure misery and I will never forget that taste ever. Now-a-days it seems everything is in a pill or cherried up to be palatable. I hope I never get sick again!

Malaria, two sorts and both most unpleasant.

@Cruiser

Haha, ” I hope I never get sick again”..well..ya gotta die of something, hopefully it won’t involve sneaker fish medicine. lol

I hope for a sudden death, hopefully I will be clothed and not boiling away in my hot tub for days on end. haha

I had appendicitis when I was 47.

For two days I thought I had some weird constipation/gas thing going. While I was waiting for my afternoon doctor appointment though, my wife saw me in such pain that she said I was going to the Dr. right away. He looked at me for two minutes, touched my belly once, and said I needed to get to the emergency room right away for an appendectomy.

My appendix burst while I was being prepped for surgery. I was in the hospital for 6 days, and was off work for an additional two weeks. I felt a lot better about a week after I got home, but I had no stamina, just walking to the family room in my house would exhaust me.

Two years ago, I was 15 and I had chicken pox. It was around easter time. I spent all my easter hanging around the house and didn’t ever go outside because I was ashamed and it was just too painful.

And then again the year before I had a heart surgery. I was sick and was at the hospital for a month. It was around Christmas time and I was still healing.

Pneumonia about a decade ago. I used to get it for several years running but that one time put me in hospital for near two weeks, much of it on 24hr watch. That’s the first time I was really scared to die.

About 20 years ago I had a stomach ulcer. Three weeks of pain and sickness which ended in me being rushed into hospital for emergency surgery on a perfoated ulcer. The doctor told me that if I’d been 48 hours later I would probably have been dead.

The worst sickness that I can fully remember is the time I had the flu for a week in November 2007. I’m not kidding. That’s it. I’ve really never had anything worse than that. But this bout of the flu was pretty awful; I was in bed for a week essentially, missed a week of school, had a fever every day, could barely stand up, watched marathons of CSI Miami every day…on the 7th day I decided to see the doctor because I was starting to get a little freaked out about how long it was lasting and gee, the very next day it started going away.

Besides that, I did have a UTI when I was 5 and I remember the hospital experience was traumatizing and contributed to a fear of hospitals that I still have to some degree, but I don’t remember it all in full (thank God)...

I had Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever once that I got from a tick bite.

That sucked beyond all recognition.

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard

Did you have spots that looked like the mountain range? ;-)
Sounds exotically evil.

I seriously thought I was going to die, when I was thirteen years old.
I couldn’t eat or drink anything. Every time I stood up, I’d throw up. All I had for six days was water, and I threw most of that up every time I stood up.
I don’t know exactly what I had, but it was the most miserable six days of my life. Haha.
I also had Shingles when I was ten. I’m not sure if that falls into the cadegory of Chicken pox though…

@Coloma I guess that technically I had Rocky Mountain Tick Fever, which is different from spotted fever, but I remember feeling like I had been hit by a bus and my hands were covered in spots. When I first showed signs, the teachers at my highschool thought I had something called hand, foot, and mouth disease that all the jocks and cheerleaders had been spreading to each other. Totally wasn’t it, though.

The worst: Swine Flu.
I couldn’t get out of bed for a whole month. I ached all over and felt incredibly weak. My hair went limp and I sweated a lot as I was in bed with a fever all the time.
@Jude I think I know how you felt. :-/

Having the flu and pneumonia at the same time.

It was complete hell!

Sinusitis, 1976. That was bad enough.

@flutherother

Ick..I know, I have sinus issues a few times a year…blah!

I had Hepatitus A for about 3 weeks before I began feeling better.
It wasn’t how bad I felt, but how long it took to get better. That really beat me down. I began to lose hope of ever feeling better again.

Hong Kong Flu in the late 1950’s, Doctor I might have both Polio and Rheumatic Fever at the same time. Fever 106 and didn’t remember much from the week I had the fever.

When I had testicular torsion. It’s when the spermatic cord in the testicle gets twisted, which makes the testicle swell twice its size. It felt like I was being continuallly kicked in the groin for two hours.

I had pneumonia at age 8 for over a month. I was tented in the hospital for a week.

Wow! Sure are a lot of unhappy afflictions out there. :-(

I was run over by an evil pony when I was 10.
Innocent looking little guy, til I climbed on him and he took off like a rocket and dumped me and ran over me.

Numerous injuries from that one. haha

It’s a toss up between a flu of some kind and a bad urinary tract infection that brought tears before I even started to pee.

First horrible non-disease sickness that comes to mind:

Years ago I went to Guatemala through a volunteer programme, to help build mud huts and stuff. There are tons of stray dogs there. We were warned not to touch any animals. Did I listen? No.

At one of the sites, near some corn field um somewhere in the middle of nowhere, there was this tiny puppy that fit into my two palms, who was incredibly skinny, that I could not help but pick up and give some affection to. I knew that the puppy probably would not live longer than a month. I also knew that the local people tended to not like the stray dogs. One of the women kept whacking the puppy with branches to shoo him away from her hut. So, me being me, I wanted to let this puppy feel some love – even if it was only for a moment. I cuddled him. Whenever we were on break, he would come up to my feet and lay on them. I knew I should not feed him, that he would bother the locals more if I did. I would sneak off with him and give him tiny bits of food ..as he was so small and thin that I knew too much would make him sick. The entire 5 days that we were at that site, the puppy kept his distance until I arrived every morning. He knew better not to bother others at that point. We had to leave the site, families and this little puppy behind. I felt better knowing that the little guy got a taste of affection though.

So…about 2 days later, we were preparing to leave Guatemala (in a couple days). I woke up dizzy with the runs coming out both ends. I was sweating and writhing in horrid pain. I couldn’t join in the festivities with some of the local peasant children, which sucked. One of the other volunteers gave me something for my intestines and stomach. I don’t know how I got there, but I ended up sprawled out on this huge boulder near a clearing where the kids were playing. I remember laying there glancing, once in a while, with my droopy loopy eyes across the surface of the boulder ..watching the kids play with a tennis ball and our plastic drinking cups. I remember the side of my face sticking to the rock because I was drooling. The local translator appeared beside me once in awhile .. making sure I was not dead. Once in awhile I’d slur the word agua to her. I don’t recall getting back to my room. I was told they dragged me back, lol. I spent the evening in the fetal position with frequent trips to the toilet. I played down my illness to the others. And, it seemed to occur in waves. The day after I got home, back in Canada, I ended up in the emergency room at the hospital because I could barely hold myself up. I was so dehydrated and ill. I seriously thought I was dying. After spending the night in emergency quarantine, I found out I had a parasite (can’t remember the name at all). The doctors were certain it came from the puppy. They sent me home with all kinds of meds and pokes in my arm. I got better and lived to tell the tale.

And, no, I don’t regret befriending the puppy. Seeing him wagging his tail, after the first two days, was worth it. But, goodness, was I ever bloody ill.

@Plucky@Plucky
Wow, amazing story! I’d have probably done the same thing.
I traveled in Asia last year and we were told the same thing, to not touch any stray dogs or cats in rural areas as there was a lot of rabies virus in rural areas.

I didn’t, but, I did feed the street cats in one of the cities I was in.

@Coloma Yeah, if I could, I would have snuck the little guy back home with me. It would be nice, yet also frustrating, to be able to work with an international programme that helps these places deal with the stray animal issues. I think it would help both the people and the animals – which, in my opinion, is a win win. :)