I was out of town doing an installation at a museum. Packing up to drive home I had to put one of these into my car. Did I pick it up by the handle, you ask? No, I grabbed it by the blade. Granted I was on about 6 hours sleep over two days, but duh. Trip to the ER and some stiches there, 6 hour drive home, visit to the surgeon to try to repair sliced tendons. Fun times. 20 years later my left middle finger still doesn’t work properly.
First, thanks for the good wishes. Second, holy cow people have had some freak injuries! Some pretty horrifying.
The breaking-of-finger-prepping-for-party reminds me of one of my good friends who was cleaning for a party maybe 30 years or so ago, and she worried the guests using the bathroom would see their dirty tub, so she scrubbed it…and as she bent into it and scrubbed away, her arm slid and she dislocated her shoulder. The lesson is: don’t clean for parties!
I’ve got to stop reading this thread. 
Named Opus?
A few summers ago I was cutting up some applewood for smoking some chicken. I had an unassuming branch of wood, about 3 or 4 inches in diameter. I made several cuts without incident, when suddenly the blade must have caught a knot or something, and the piece of wood stuck on the blade and whipped around violently, ripping it out of my hand,
For a second I thought, whew, close call… when I saw the end of my middle finger of my left hand spurting blood. Turns out the piece of wood squashed the end of my finger like a grape and fractured the distal phalange. The end of my middle finger on my left hand is to this day is noticeably wider than that of my right hand.
Most of my own ER visits in my lifetime have been for kidney stones. One of the first stones occurred about 30 years ago, just after I had gotten married; I woke up just after midnight with intense pain, and drove myself down the street to the ER.
When I got there, I was the only patient in the ER, and after some initial tests, they sent me to radiology for some X-rays to locate where the stone was.
When I was wheeled back in from radiology, there was another patient in the ER – I couldn’t see him, as they had closed off the “bay” he was in with drapes, but I could certainly hear everything. The other patient was a young man, who had torn his foreskin during sex. As the ER doctor (a woman) was stitching him back together, he was very, very unhappy, and probably also dying of embarrassment.
And I, sitting there a few feet away, thought to myself, “hmmm, I guess a kidney stone isn’t that bad, after all.”
My first reaction was that going to the ER for an umbilical hernia seemed unusual, but on further reflection I did almost the exact same thing, except it was a quick trip to my doctor, and I had to cancel a business meeting to do it. The problem is that an emerging hernia can be painful, and if you don’t know what’s causing pain in that area, it’s a potential emergency. It might be appendicitis, for example. To make matters worse we were supposed to leave for a week at a country cottage the next day, and going off to the country with your appendix about to burst didn’t seem like a terrific idea!
The most “freaky” thing I can think of that sent me to the ER was going out for drinks with a co-worker, and I slipped and fell on a patch of ice. No great harm done except that my little finger was pointing in a direction that no little finger should ever be able to point!
My friend drove me to the ER, where I was told that the finger was dislocated but not broken, and would be snapped back into place. In preparation, I was injected with something that suddenly turned the entire ER area into a place of great shimmering beauty and joy! The doctor said he would now reset my finger but I was so enthralled I was hardly paying attention. IIRC, after my finger was reset we went out drinking after all because there was no reason not to, but I was pretty stoned for a while!
If the thing poking out through the hernia is a loop of small intestine, and is left untreated, you have <48 hours to live and you’re in deep shit by 24. If it’s just some fat or integument it’s no big deal. Fortunately I knew both those things when I discovered some of my innards poking out.
Not so easy for me or my GP to know which. The ED had surgeons & CT machines to discover which it was. I got the big easy button, not the life-threatening cut him open ASAP! option.
I didn’t mean to be critical – as I said, I had great concerns myself, mainly because I didn’t know what was causing pain in the area that might have been my appendix. But at the time, nothing was “poking out”, my GP just diagnosed it as an early emerging umbilical hernia (UH) and not posing any risk.
IANAD but I think you have it partially right but are exaggerating the risks. A UH can be quite problematic if it involves an intestine as it can lead to incarceration, strangulation, and life-threatening sepsis, but it will usually manifest first as intestinal blockage (bowel blockage), causing its own problems and symptoms. What you’re accurately describing is the point where such incarceration or strangulation actually occurs. That is a true medical emergency.
I speak as someone who’s had a fat-containing (no intestinal protrusion) UH for more than 20 years, mainly because I’m too chicken-shit to have anything done about it. To use Dave Barry’s immortal phrase, I resent having medical care inflicted on me!
When I was 9, I was swinging on the swings at school. Another boy, apparently wanting to bully me, took the swing beside it (the seat was made of about a foot and a half of thick black rubber and the ropes were metal chains) and swung it sideways toward me, hitting my head. My scalp bled but I was lucky. I didn’t need stitches.
When I was 11, a classmate chased me around my middle school’s art classroom. I hit my finger on a countertop. It got slashed. I needed exactly one stitch and it healed in a week.
Then, when I was around 28, I was going to a Christmas party in a rather far-away town, organized by a group of World War II reenactors. It was evening and I was using a Swiss Army knife to adjust something on my (rarther farb-y **) uniform. I was rushing to complete the job so as to catch the train. I ended up slitting a finger. Instead of the train station, I made a bee line to the hospital for stitches.
Two years ago, I had another incident like that with a kitchen knife.
** Battle reenactors will know what a “farb” is.
I wouldn’t think a bear would need a gun for protection.
July 4th, of course, is a popular day at the ER. Indeed, at the party I went to later on this particular fourth, a guy dove into the shalow end of the pool and came out with a nasty scalp laceration (after he got stitched up, he came back and had sex in the same pool while a bunch of us were playing Cards Against Humanity poolside. That was a party).
I did it on the wrong end of the day. I was up late on the 3rd for some reason I don’t remember, and when I was getting ready for bed at about 2am, I opened the medicine cabinet and something fell out; I tried to grab it, knocked the porcelain soap dispenser off the sink, tried to grab that, and caught it exactly as it shattered against the toilet tank. Sliced me right across the inside of the first knuckle of my left middle finger. Which being inside a knuckle would not stop bleeding, so I woke my wife up for a 2:30 am trip to the ER. No drunkenness or fireworks necessary.
Years ago my wife and I spent a weekend with my older brother. We went to his gun club for some range time. His gun jammed and while trying to clear it he shot me in the leg. It was a grazing wound and not serious.
I teased him about it for the rest of his life, often pointing out that the Marine Corps surely did a great job of teaching him to shoot.
The last time we spoke he called me and I was outside. The phone rang for a bit and when I answered I said “I am sorry I was slow to answer Jack, I had to limp to the phone”
Lemme see here…
As a child, I was wading in a shallow, swampy little pool near the high school in search of tadpoles, stepped on a piece of broken glass, which sliced through the sneaker and into my foot, and walked the few blocks home bleeding and crying. My dad was at work with our only car, but a neighbor drove us to the ER, where the wound was cleaned and stitched up – without any topical analgesic! I must have crushed the hand of the poor nurse who was holding mine.
Then there was the swingset in our back yard that I sat on and started swinging as a young teen. As it turned out, the S hook to the frame had worn so thin over the years that it snapped under my weight and I had to be taken to the ER for casting.
In the early 2000s I was walking briskly toward the barn aisle where my horse was kept, failed to notice a rake had been left on the ground in my path, tripped over it, and cracked my elbow. I knew it hurt but drove myself home, wincing whenever I had to use my right hand, then got a friend to drive me to the ER where the X-ray revealed a knob in the joint was cracked. And yes, within a few days I was tacking up and riding my horse with one and a half hands, my arm in a sling.
In early 2020, just as the perils of COVID were beginning to affect life in my area, I was walking along a street with a couple of friends. I stepped into a puddle, not knowing that it was hiding a pothole, did a faceplant, and cracked my nasal bone while dislocating my shoulder. The neighbors came out, one with a wad of tissues to sop up the blood on my face. I discovered as I lay there that I could wriggle my fingers but not otherwise use my arm to get up.
That one got the trifecta of emergency response: ambulance, fire department EMS truck, and police cruiser. Once they got me onto the gurney the other first responders went on their way while the paramedics drove the ambulance to my nearby condo so that my friends could get in to collect my purse, then off to the hospital I went. They zipped me right in, got my sweatshirt off without cutting it (at my request), cut my turtleneck off, and got me gowned up, then I sat watching masked medical folks pass by in the corridor, managing to cope with the pain (despite a morphine injection) till they came to put the shoulder back. One hit of propofol, a blankout, and then – voila! the shoulder was back home, hurting way less, and I was getting my slinged-up arm strapped to my body.
My most recent ER visit was far more minor but still for a silly reason. I was sliding the drapes closed in the bedroom, using a long wooden drapery wand, which suddenly snapped in half and stabbed the inner joint of my thumb. Blood, blood, blood! I hurried to the bathroom, washed the hand, blotted it and applied pressure with paper towels while struggling one-and-a-half-handed to uncap the antibiotic ointment and dig out some bandaids. The ointment kept getting washed away with the bleeding, and by the time the fourth layer of bandaids finally stopped the flow I decided maybe it was ER time, so I drove there, lucked into being seen fairly soon since it was a quiet Sunday evening, and wound up getting it cleaned again and then sealed with wound glue.
When I was 6 and my big bro and some cousins were playing baseball. I nagged my brother til he put me in as catcher.
Well, the back swing my cousin made caught me right in the forehead. Lots of funzies, blood and a speed to the ER. Stitches, cracked noggin.
My Daddy was fond of saying “Just think…I resisted the urge of cracking her on the head and now this!”
I sliced my finger open cleaning the dryer lint trap.
How was that ER, Mr. Fish?
You know damn well I didn’t go to no ER! I guess I shouldn’t have posted.
How’s your weather? 
First adult trip to the ER was for a back muscle spasm. Woke up late on a Friday night and didn’t know what it was. Luckily the hospital was blocks away from my apartment, so I could basically crawl there by myself.
The next time I got to see the ER up close and personal was also on a Friday- Black Friday to be exact. I had just rescued a neighborhood stray cat and we were still getting used to each other, I shouldn’t have hovered when he was trying to eat. He bit my left hand right in the thumb web and palm. I got some antibiotics and antibacterial soap for aftercare but no Tylenol. 
that’s okay, it’s much cheaper at the drugstore. I wore a cotton glove on that hand for a couple of weeks too.
When I was 7 years old, I somehow bonked my head on the little metal protrusion in my bedroom doorframe where the doorknob latches. I didn’t even feel it at the time and strolled into the kitchen to take a sip from the cup of juice my mother had set out for me on the table, and she started screaming because I apparently had blood just absolutely gushing down my face of which I was completely unaware. Dad got called to rush home from work and drive me to the ER where I got a grand total of two stitches to seal up the cut.