Damn, this is going to hurt.

In My Humble Opinion
1

Something ever happen to you when just for the split second before impact, you think, “Damn, this is going to hurt.” Had a moment like that yesterday. A pallette was left on the floor in a transportation aisle in the airplane assembly factory I work in. 10 minutes before quitting time, I come around corner heading to my locker, trip, oh shit. All I could think of on the way down was how bad was this going to hurt. I even had time to hope I wouldn’t draw blood then I would be late getting off work. I crashed hard, landing on the edge of the pallette. It hurt. No blood letting, just a bruised ego. Popped up, put my stuff away and headed home.

Jump to 2:30 am this morning. Wake up in extreme pain in left hip area. Take 3 Advil, go back to bed, toss and turn till the alarm goes off at 4. Went to medical at work, have lower hip strain, told to avoid stairs and ladders for 2 days. No in plant parking pass though. Only reason I went to medical. Think I might take tomorrow off.

2

Epic bicycle collision/wreck in my early teens…

My Scout Troop was riding the C&O Canal towpath. A couple af years before, hurricane Agnes had come through the area and torn-up the towpath, and this was the first year that the towpath was accessable for it’s entire lenght, with a few exceptions. Some of the smaller wash-outs were handed by routing the path into the canal bed itself. Every year we made that run, it rained at least once. One morning, a bunch of us were rolling along in a tightly packed bunch on a section of solid, well-graded towpath. It was raining lightly, and had rained the night before, but the path was solid under a light coating of mud, and we were rolling! About 30 mph, in fact, according to the indicator on my bike.

Suddenly, a wash-out loomed ahead… No problem, we’d just run down into the canal bed, and then back up onto the towpath on the other side, just as we’d done any number of times before. As I turned down into the canal, I saw one of the riders ahead of me had spilled, and was just getting back to righting his bike. I hit the brakes, but missed the sudden “grab” of them taking hold… I looked down to see that they were packed-up with mud, then looked up to realize that I was about nail the guy getting back on his bike. I was going way too fast, and the ground was way too slick, to change course anymore than a couple feet… I got that icy feeling of “being along for the ride”, nailing the poor guy’s bike square broadside in the back wheel. The next thing I knew, I slammed, out-of-control, into a pile of construction forms stacked to one side.

The forms rose to meet me stop-motion (Or I slammed down onto them, I’m not sure… ), each frame of the sequence accompanied by a word:

“This.Is.Gonna.Suck”

30 seconds later I woke up, bikes whipping past on either side of me, and my victim was crawling up the side of a pile of gravel, his bike flung so 30 feet away.

It was the third most spectacular wipe-out on that trip down the canal!

3

True story: 2 weeks ago I decided to learn to ride my new 6-foot giraffe unicycle. 15 minutes into the session, I was bleeding from four different sites and ached from top to bottom. “Damn, this is gonna hurt” was my mantra when I took the thing out of the basement. I’m almost healed everywhere, so I’m going to do it again this weekend. With a helmet, this time…

4

This stopped me from dtrinking and driving. Sometimes it’s gotta be scared out of ya.

I was riding into town from my house on my motorcycle. IT was a beautiful August night so I stowed my helmet on my bike, wanting to feel the air blowing through my hair yadda yadda yadda. I had two bottles of wine in me…

I get to the intersection near my house. Stop sign. I stop. I start again, but shoot directly towards the curb. Not going really fast, but I’ve got some monster acceleration going. Front wheel hits curb and I knew right away, “Well, if I live, I’m going to be in pain. Maybe I should hope I don’t.” Half a second later I’m lying face-down on the sidewalk and my bike is miraculously stopped, engine propped up against the curb, virtually no damage except where the engine hit the curb (there’s still a silver streak there, two years later). My nose feels cold. I put my gloved hand up to it and when I pull it away, the black leather has turned purple and wet with blood. My upper lip hurts and touch my tongue to it. It’s split wide open where my left front tooth punched through. It’s hanging there. It DIDN’T hurt, but that was only because I was still drunk. And i skinned my right knee. No lights came on. Everyone was sound asleep. I roll my bike back home and go to bed, praying that when I wake up it will have been like a bad dream.

Next morning, my nose is swollen up, not broken, but feeling sprained (I know that’s not possible but), and I have a terrible fear of looking in the mirror. My pillow is soaked in blood. I took 4 aspirin and go back to bed. A day later the part of my lip that had busted open has dried up and turned black. I fear I’ll have a permanent dent in my lip forever since it didn’t reattach itself. I take out some scissors and cut it off. The bridge of my nose is a big scar.

Well, my lip grew back, a little stiffened by scar tissue. My nose is a bit crooked, and now I always wear my helmet and refuse to ride if I’ve had more than three drinks.

My father’s ghost is my copilot I swear.

All these stories though, are not going to be enough to deter people from doing stupid stuff. You gotta feel the pain yourself before the wisdom comes. If you are smart enough to learn from the mistakes of others, congratulations.

5

I was t-boned in my car some time back. The old lady nailed the passenger side door. I saw it coming and I tried to get out of her way, but the old goat was just to fast for me.

The impact spun me 360 degrees around in the oncoming lane.

Oddly, the impact wasn’t my concern. I felt pretty good during the entire thing and knew in the back of my mind I was going to regain control of the car and be just fine.

THEN… I had a “damn this is going to hurt moment”

There was no shoulder on the oncoming lane side of the road. It droped down about 10-15 feet with no guard rail. I also noticed a very large telephone pole coming at me. My choice was to try and stop the car OR hit the pole to avoid going over the bank.

I whipped the wheel and nailed the brakes and stopped the car just touching the telephone pole.

The next day I could hardly move my neck. My back felt like it had been kicked and both arms felt like they went through “the rack”. What I thought was going to hurt wasn’t what ended up huirting. It was the impact that messed me up.

Oh yeah. And the car was totaled. What a mess.

6

A-ha, ha, ha.

7

Oh, and my “Oh sh*t” moment was also a vehicular accident, in my truck, I wasn’t drunk just stupid, and the moment took forever and I remember hearing the tires scream, and feeling the chassis lift and jolt as I swerved away from the water side of the bridge and in my mind, I kept hearing the poem I had tucked into my visor flap, the one by Vlad Mayakofsky, the one he had in his coat pocket when he killed himself, the line about all being silence. I felt strangely calm and muted in my dread. After the accident, I through that melodramatic poem out and put a picture of my little cousin up. Haven’t had an accident since, thanks, coz.

8

When I got pinned between two vehicles in my driveway two years ago it happened so fast that it went: “God, he’s not really going to hit me, is he? Yesheis—OW OW OW OW OWOWAHHHHHHH!!!”

What happened was I was going to go pick up a friend, and had to take my parents’ van since I was babysitting for a 2 and a 4 year old (their baby seats were in the van). But my car was parked behind the van. I was in a bit of a hurry, so I wasn’t thinking very clearly. So I threw my keys at my then-15 year old brother and asked him to move my car so I could back the van out of the driveway. (Should have moved it myself and got him to buckle the kids in; hindsight’s great, ya know?) I went to put the kids in the van so we could leave–picked up the 2-yr-old and started to walk between the two vehicles.

Well, the instructions I’d given my brother were very vague: “Turn the car on, put it in drive–no, reverse, you’re backing out–you’ll know which is which by the little letters on the dashboard.” So he put the car in drive…and I just had time to see him coming before he hit me. Pinned me by the knees between the two vehicles…he put the car in reverse right away but I was still pinned for several seconds. As soon as he got the car away from me I dropped the little guy and collapsed in the driveway. And started screaming like heck, which I think scared everybody else as badly as it scared me! My brother pulled the car out into the road, but didn’t know to put it in park, so just turned off the ignition. The car rolled into the neighbors’ front lawn.

Then he came and picked me up out of the driveway and helped me over to the lawn till the ambulance came. I’ll never forget how good it felt to have strong arms lifting me at that point! I thought it was the neighbor–I didn’t think my kid brother was that strong. I don’t even know who called the ambulance. I was shaking like crazy. Could hardly walk; it hurt like heck, but apparently I hadn’t broken anything. When we got to the hospital, I was treated by a doctor I sometimes work for, which I was glad about as it made me feel well-taken care of. I had awful purple and blue and green and yellow bruises on both knees for weeks afterward. I’m all recovered from it now, except my knees hurt in a weird way when it’s cold or wet.

But I gained something from the experience (besides nervousness around cars): I now own the pair of hospital pajama pants they sent me home in (they cut off my jeans). They make great pj’s!

9

I’m about 12 years old, at my grandparents’ house in the hills in West Virginia. They’ve got a BIG pile of firewood, neatly stacked for the coming winter. My brother and I are out back, tossing the frisbee.

He throws it over my head, past me, and I start running for it. I’m running as fast as I can; I mean a dead sprint. The frisbee is floating down to me, and I catch it, and just when I grab it, as I’m running fullspeed, I start to turn my head to see where I’m planning to slow down and stop.

Well, as I just start to turn my head (all this didn’t take more than a half-second), I see that I’m heading toward the woodpile, again at FULL SPEED, leading with my forehead. It looks like a wall, IS a wall for all intents. I tried to duck, I tried to get a hand up, but I was RIGHT THERE, maybe three feet away and closing, when I looked up, and that was the “Oh god, this is gonna hurt” moment.

BAM I hit it, head first. I recall how my head crumpled sideways against my left shoulder when I hit.

I remember lying there a second afterward with a tremendous pain in my head and neck, and seeing blood on the hand that I’d raised up to my forehead, and my brother running toward me, and suddenly I popped up and ran toward the house screaming. I guess I knew I was hurt BAD; I’m still surprised that I was able to get up and run, but adrenaline is amazing stuff.

It turned out that I had a big, deep cut on my forehead at the point of impact, and also that my head had twisted around when I hit, so far that I had broken my nose as well. I’m lucky that was all that happened, I guess.

Anyway, I had some stitches in my forehead, and to this day you can feel a big dent in my skull at that place, and I will never ever forget the moment when I had just caught the frisbee and I was just turning my head and out of the uppermost limit of my vision I saw something big coming, impossibly fast, and it was the woodpile.

10

Coincidence? (scroll down about 9)

11

The one I remember best was when I was in college. I was biking down the street when someone in a parked car whipped her car door open in front of me. I caught the door’s edge right along the right side of my body, with the top of the door frame smacking me in the chest and top of the shoulder, and my right handlebar hitting the door lower. My right hand was jarred off the grip by the force of the impact, and my right arm swung through where the car’s window should be. As that was happening, I distinctly remember thinking, “Either the window is rolled down or things are really going to hurt shortly.” Fortunately for me, the window was down, and I only ended up being bruised and shaken up. I think I scared the driver more than the accident scared me, though. :smiley:

12

Early January i had knee surgery (ACL reconstruction due to hockey injury), so i was on crutches. Of course, this was only about 2 months after we moved into a 2 story house. About 4 weeks after the surgery i decided it was time to venture up the stairs for the first time. After a while, i was headed back down the stairs (on my crutches) and my good food slipped out from under me and all my weight started down the stairs. For that split second i teetered on the second to the top stair and thought two things:

  1. Dont fall on your right (surgically repaired) knee!
  2. Damn, this is going to hurt like a bitch!

Result: Broken left elbow. Made walking on crutches interesting.

13

I can top most of these. I was working as an exhibit tech at the Omniplex, a hands-on science museum in Oklahoma City. This particular museum has a Foucalt’s Pendulum with a beautifully inlaid wooden disc under it and about 180 1"X4" dowel rods to demonstrate the science.

Well, the pendulum is run by electromagnets (or it wouldn’t continue to swing) and hangs through a skylight. Since the apparatus is rather large, the removed skylight is covered by a little shack on the roof, about 7’ tall, and 4’X4’ square.

One night we had one of those famous Oklahoma windstorms. We come to work to find the disc covered with rain and mud. All of the tech staff go up to the roof to put the shack back over the skylight. Three of us, including me, go inside to push from there. Five others stay outside to push. The three are pushing as hard as we can to no effect. The five, meanwhile, are looking at a bird’s nest with eggs that has blown up on the roof. Someone says, “We’d better help.” All five come and push.

Sudden movement. Stof goes through the skylight. Did I mention that this is a 3-story building and there are no floors between the skylight and the ground? 35 feet–someone measured while I was in the hospital.

I don’t remember going through and I don’t remember landing. I do, however, have the memory of a split-second of seeing ceiling and the thought, “Oh shit, this is gonna be painful.”

I lucked out. First, I’m 6’2", and the skylight was 3’X3’, so I landed directly on my ass. Second, the janatorial staff had removed the dowel rods (or else I’d still be walking funny, 11 years later). Third, the inlaid disc buckled and absorbed a lot of the shock. The docs told me that if it’d been the industrial carpet over concrete, my spine would have shattered all the way up. Instead, I hit, broke my pelvis and sacrum, bounced about 2 feet into the air (according to an eyewitness), and landed on my left side, breaking my hand, shattering 2 inches out of my upper arm, cracking 4 ribs, and bruising a lung.

Two weeks in the hospital (on morphine–damn that’s good stuff), 3 weeks at home in a wheelchair, 6 more weeks as a 22 year old with a cane, and 11 years later, my back still hurts.

Strangely, I don’t have any fear of heights, though the sensation of falling (like leaning a chair too far back) makes me almost pee my pants.

Stof

14

Took a Dodge Dakota from nearly new to scrap metal by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A Ford F150 blew a stop sign and plowed into my driver-side door.

He was doing maybe 40, I was doing 55 mph. It tore the bed off the truck, crimped the cab and rolled me 450 degrees.

I pulled the seatbelt off, crawled up and out of the driver’s window, retrieved my glasses from 20 feet back up the road and walked away with bright blue bruises from shoulder to hip and hip to hip.

Before he hit, I remember distinctly cringing and saying “Oh Crap!”

I consider myself the poster child for seatbelts.

15

stofsky: Not only are you lucky you can walk, you’re lucky to be alive. Stories like that give me the heebee-jeebees. :wink:

16

The last time I had a moment in which I anticipated pain was over a summer break during college. I was just barely awake, and heading downstairs so I could shower before work when it happened: I missed a step near the middle of the staircase. I was awake enough to think “Crap! Grampy broke his ankle falling down these stairs, this is going to suck!” I fared better than he did- just cut and bruised a section of my lower back the size of my hand- but it was the last time I burst into tears after hurting myself; mostly from being scared. I think I prefer the hurts that happen so fast there’s no time to think about what it’s going to feel like.

17

Biking on a rocky trail at about 14 years old I took a steep hill and hit a rock at the bottom, shot up into the air – my first definite recollection of an ‘oh shit’ moment.

Snowboarding last year I took this weirdly shaped jump at an odd angle and bailed immediately. As soon as I left the ground I knew I was in no shape to land it, and it seemed like I had a lot of time to figure out how to crash with the least amount of pain. I guess I didn’t utilize that time effectively, because I broke my wrist and bruised a rib.

Snowboarding last month I was cutting across a very steep slope and took a jump (still travelling laterally across the mountain) when my board slipped out from under me. I began parallel to the slope, facing downwards, with my board on the uphill side and my head downhill, my board traveled away from the mountain and I ended up doing a faceplant in the powder while my board (and feet) went backwards over my head and crashed into the mountain below me. This was interesting because the ‘this is going to hurt’ thought came after the impact. At first it seemed like any other wipeout, but as my board was going backwards over my head, I could hear my lower vertebrae cracking. After it was all over and I was lying there, that’s when I was going ohhhh no, this could be bad. Luckily, it wasn’t, although now more than two weeks later, my neck and lower back are still sore and stiff.

Last one – this has always seemed weird to me because I didn’t have any ‘this is going to hurt’ moment. After climbing Mount Shasta (14,162 ft.) last summer, we were glissading (sliding on our butts) down the steep, snowy part at the top to get back to the trail. Long story short, I came over a rise and saw the forward members of my group stopped by some rocks watching my other friend tumble down the slope about 50 yards below. I was going too fast to stop and had to roll out of the groove to avoid my stopped friends, lost my ice axe, and went out of control myself. I can’t remember thinking anything at all. I think I was siezed by that kind of panic that hits you when things are just moving too fast even for thoughts of danger or pain. Ended up losing half my equipment along with strips of skin along 3 fingers on my left hand (down to the bone), and on the backs and sides of both my calves. Luckily, chicks dig scars. Or so I hear.

18

When I was around 13 or so, my dad was teaching me how to ride a dirtbike (kowasaki 100cc). With him watching I made my first solo trip down a dirt path through the back field… I was puttering along in 2nd gear when I came across a spot in the trail where there was a fairly deep rut and a new path running along beside the rut. I tried for the new path, but the front tire slipped into the rut and that was it. whoosh! The bike went out from under me. I had time for a “ohmugod” and that was it… I think I passed out for a minute and when I came to I noticed that there was a good sized gaping hole where my right shin used to be. It turns out that the rubber on one of the feet pegs was loose and it bit me on the way down.

Being a good little scout I took off my shirt and applied pressure, and kept the ants out. Yup, ants. With my good luck I landed on an ant hill and I had little black ants running around my bloody leg. It was meals-on-wheels time for the ants…

I started to yell for my dad and after around 5 minutes he found me, threw me into the back of his pickup and made a quick little trip to the local ER. I wouldn’t let him look at my leg, he’s squimish and I knew that seeing my inside parts on the outside would freak him out. I just said “Dad. it’s bad and I need a doctor”. I think I started to cry then :slight_smile:

I haven’t rode a motorbike since…

19

I was riding a bicycle (lot of bike-related incidents!) down this big hill. I was at a tremendous speed for a bicycle; maybe 35-40 mph on a Kmart mountain bike. There was curb beside the road but no sidewalk, just dirt. The bike got really unstable and the front wheel hit the curb, throwing me probably 10 feet or more. Before I hit the curb I saw it coming, but was to scared/slow to react in time. I was fortunate to be wearing a durable field jacket, and I hit the dirt and rolled quite some distance. When I stopped rolling, I was lying on the ground waiting for some unknown pain to kick in- it didn’t I was completely unscathed. I got up, brushed the dirt off my jacket, and went to my bike, which also was completely spared from any damage :slight_smile:

20

Rollerblading, going down a really steep hill, on a old road (no sidewalks). Old means that much of the tar has worn away and the rough, semi-sharp pebbles underneath are exposed. Going down the hill really fast. Dog runs in front. Going too fast to stop or swerve.
Dog freezes right in my path. I remember a particularly venomous Chinese curse flashing through my neurons, right before I go flying over the dog, knocking us both over. Skinned legs and arms, hurt like hell, especially after Mom put iodine on them.

Last time I ever went down that hill without continual braking…