Physical Signs of Extreme Pain: Weird Edition 👽❤️🩹🤷♀️
I've made some pain reference posts over the years, but apart from passing out from pain, I haven't gotten much into the just plain weird shit the body does when it's really hurting. Time to fix that.
Fireflies: Sure, seeing spots is a thing. Black spots on the edge of your whumpee's vision, getting closer in slow pulses when they're having trouble breathing and struggling to hang onto consciousness. But when they just straight up hurt, your whumpee can get weird little floating things that flash like fireflies or tiny pieces of metallic silver confetti drifting around. In my experience, they've been linked to effort--they tend to either start or multiply fast when I stand up or otherwise try to move when I'm in unusually intense pain.
Shivering: Not because your whumpee is cold or in shock, but because their muscles are taut to the point of strain (because the body responds to pain with muscle tension), and when those muscles can't tighten further, they shake. It's the same mechanism that makes your fists shake if you're angry and clenching them past the point they can reasonably be clenched, just all over.
Teeth Chattering: No, seriously. In my experience, it mostly tends to happen as the shivering escalates, but I've had it just start up on its own when I get slammed with a spike in pain out of nowhere like cramps, or if I'm late taking a dose of my meds. I hate it because in the first place it's annoying, in the second place it's very noticeable, and in the third place I have absolutely no control over it. Clenching my teeth doesn't stop the muscles from trying to make them chatter, it just makes them (even more) sore. Also it's hard to talk, and I bite my cheek and tongue. A lot.
Ear Stuff: A ring that your whumpee feels as much as they hear. It's not a tone like a lot of tinnitus is, it's more like the pressure-changing "sound" you'll get as a plane takes off. And it feels like it's physically inside their ears, like someone has taken the world's heaviest, smallest ball-bearing and stuck it in their ear canals and it's trying to pull them down into and through the floor.
The Air Hurts: Your whumpee gets an all-over feeling like someone pressing lightly on a bruise, and the more they think about it, concentrate on it, the more their brain becomes irrationally convinced that the air has become dense around them and that's what's causing it. Because nothing is there, there is no external pressure, it's just pain signals behaving in a goofy way, and their brain is scrambling for an explanation. They might subconsciously pull their hands or other exposed skin into their clothing, or hunch over and pull everything in toward their chest to "protect" their skin from the air around them.
Have chronic or acute traumatic pain? See something missing from this post? Add on!
