There's a scene in Roald Dahl's autobiography part one, Boy, that describes the process of getting his adenoids removed without anaesthesia. Sounded terrifying enough that I'm glad we knock people out for that sort of surgery.

I had mine removed with only mild anaesthetics and I still have nightmares about that. It also didn't help with various nose and throat infection at all. In fact I had pneumonia couple years later so not much respect for the butchers that did this to me.

I still have, let's call them interesting, memories of Soviet dental procedures. I think that if I were to put them on film, modern audiences would call them "torture porn".

Hmm, my wife had them removed when she was a kid in Russia and says it was not that bad.

People have wildly varying sensitivity to pain.