Most excruciating pain in my life

Abdominal pain is quite common among Chron's patient. Today I suffered the most excruciating pain in my life.

Today between 5-6PM before dinner, I started abdominal pain. Within 2 minutes, my pain increased very rapidly. I rushed to the bathroom and try to empty my bowels, because my experience tells me this will help. Then the intensity of pain went through the roof: this is the most severe pain ever, I was sweating, shaking, at one time dizzy and almost passed out, but I didn't. I passed some formed stool followed by very loose bowel movement. Within 10 minutes the pain started to decrease and after half an hour, it almost completely disappeared.

I have infrequent abdominal pains. Maybe I can go 1 to 2 weeks without any abdominal pain. Even when the pain happened to me, the intensity is only one third no more than one half of what I experienced today. The last time I had intense abdominal pain was 6 years ago. That was like 80-90% of what I experienced and probably lasted 20 minutes.

Have you experienced extremely intensive but short abdominal pain? Can you share your experience? What would you do in situation like this? When I went through the pain today, words like "intestinal obstruction", "bowel rapture" and "intestinal strangulation" came to my mind. But those are all guessing, maybe this is just the normal spasm pain associated with Chron's. Is it because I am getting older, my pain tolerance has decreased?

Thank you for your reply. I have lots of narrowing in my small intestines caused by long term scarring. Maybe I had a temporary "complete" bowel obstruction yesterday.

The last time I had a partial bowel obstruction (that's my guess) was like a year ago, when I had waive like pain that comes and goes. The "partial obstruction" pain was intermittent. On a scale of 1-10, partial obstruction pain was like 6 or 7, but last 4-6 hours. But yesterday, my pain was 10, and it lasted about 10-12 minutes.

So yesterday my pain almost stopped shortly after 6PM. By 7:30PM, I had my dinner of solid food. I probably ate 80% of what I would normally eat last night. But I experienced very little feeling of nausea last night, like what I normally experience during partial obstruction.

I have a scar tissue and narrowing in my ileum. If I don't chew well or swallow fast I do experience extremely intensive abdominal pain. One time a peace of apple caused obstruction and I had to be hospitalized with tube in the nose. That was Not pleasant. Maybe a scope is due for you.

Thank you for your replies. Yes, I keep a diary of my digestive issues including possible food triggers. So far there is no clear trend that my abdominal pain is getting worse. The severe pain that I experienced a week ago rarely happens, because when it happens, I remember it. Most of my abdominal pain this year has been mild.

My Chron's symptoms have changed a lot from last year. Last year in 2019, I was seriously considering small bowel resection due to frequent feeling of bloating and nausea. But I didn't do it. In 2020, all bloating and nausea never happened. This year I have infrequent mild to moderate abdominal pain and sometime loose BM.