Would death from a pulmonary embolism be painful?

It depends. My pulmonary embolism was extremely painful. Think about it like this: when you breathe you get a very sharp pain, so sharp it startles you, and when you get startled you automatically take another breath. A never ending cycle of pain. Mine was exactly like that. I survived three days with it. Pulmonary embolisms don't kill you when they are in your lungs, the clot would be thrown to either your brain or your heart, and that is where it would kill you. If you only had the clot in your lung for a few hours and then it went to your brain or heart then it wouldn't be too bad. It would hurt a lot in your brain and it could burst a vessel which would cause death, or it would cause a heart attack which would be much more survivable.

I'm looking at this answer above me and I find it so misinformed and so wrong, that I need to post this. PEs hurt. Yes, they are painful. Small or massive, they hurt. Not all PEs completely occlude blood flow, some restrict it. Contrary to what the person above wrote, "Pulmonary embolisms don't kill you when they are in your lungs", a PULMONARY embolus IS in the lungs!! This is why it's termed "pulmonary". And make no mistake, yes it can kill. Emboli don't stay in the lungs for "a few hours." PEs originate as DVTs primarily in the upper leg. Cerebral emboli usually originate in the left atrium of the heart . An embolus in the brain doesn't necessarily kill and the vessel it's in doesn't burst either. This is an ischemic stroke and people can survive them. I have no idea where this person got the idea that a cerebral embolus wouldn't be too bad. There really are not emboli in the heart. This is where they sometimes originate, such as with atrial fibrillation and chronic heart failure. The mitral and aortic valves are large enough to accommodate a partial thrombus. Generally, it's a piece of a thrombus that breaks free and migrates, not the entire thing. If a small embolus were to be passed through the aortic valve and lodge in the coronary artery that branches immediately off this artery, this would occlude blood supply to a portion of the heart and result in an acute myocardial infarction. I'm afraid the person above me knows very little about human physiology, DVTs, PEs, and emboli in general.