What is the most physical pain you've ever felt? Not necessarily the most gruesome injury but the cause of the most acute, intense pain you've experienced?
— Charlotte Clymer🏳️🌈 (@cmclymer) February 7, 2019
You’d think it’d be some of the stuff I did in the army. But no. The worst pain I’ve ever experienced happened this way.
My girlfriend at the time did not like sour cream. I do. Thus, she decided to include sour cream in my version of a dish and omit it in hers. Reasonable, I’d say.
Readers, she did not bother to check if the sour cream was off, and the taste of the other components masked said foul sour cream. I ate it all, the entire dish including the vile sour cream. You’d think this version of food poisoning would cause the usual stomach distress and multiple trips to the bathroom but that’s not what happened at all. Instead, for around eight hours it felt like multiple hot knives were being stabbed into my abdomen while Godzilla sat on me breathing plasma to heat those knives.
To say that it was painful would be an understatement. I thought I’d known pain before in getting beat bloody and having my ankles twisted in the sand on an army jump. This pain was a whole other dimension of suffering. Before when I’d experienced pain I wondered how something could be so agonizing that one would pass out. That day, I found out.
Though I did not actually pass out. I wish I had.
My gf asked if we should go to the hospital. I said, through gritted teeth, “No, because it’s in the wrong place for appendicitis and if it’s an aortic embolism I’d already be dead.” That’s when she mentioned the sour cream, we checked the date on the discarded bottle (six months in the past), and the mystery was solved.
I don’t believe anything could be more painful than whatever my stomach was doing that night because my entire universe was consumed by pain. I had maxed out the pain meter and then jammed the valve open.
Check the dates on your sour cream, people.