Don’t make me show my scars…oh…you’re not making me…okay…
Well can I show them anyway?
Here’s one that wasn’t really an injury either. But a) it seemed funny to me, even at the time, and b)I just want someone to believe me.
9th grade chemistry. We were doing this experiment with pure sodium and water. The deal was you take a piece of sodium, a very small piece of sodium, as it tends to react violently with H2O, and drop it in a beaker of water. The sodium hisses and skittles around, and you attempt to catch the vapors in a test tube. Once this is done, you stick a glowing splint (a popsicle stick lit on fire and then extinguished) into the tube and it makes a cool “POP”. Yay.
Anyway, my lab partner, a particularly delinquent type fellow, decides that little skittling sliver of sodium is just no fun. He tosses a chunk the size of pencil eraser in the beaker. What fun, we all thought. Then POW! The whole freaking apparatus explodes. Fortunately we were wearing our required, dorky, safety glasses. Unfortunately, said glasses did not cover my nostrils.
After chuckling hysterically at the destruction we caused, and wiping ourselves dry, I noticed an irritation in my nose. As I wiped my proboscis, this shooting pain, coursed thgough my face. That’s right, a piece of the exploded beaker shot right into my nostril. I told the teacher this, and he looked up into my nose with a little flash light. Having a particularly snotty cold at the time (me, not the teacher), he couldn’t see anything. I might also point out that the cold caused me to sniffle, also bringing about the above mentioned nasal agony.
My father had to come get me at school to bring me to the hospital, to have this glass shard extracted from my nose. The doctor looked up my nose, but couldn’t see anything either, but I know it was in there, it hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. The doctor goes out of the room to look for some nostril probing device or something, and god-damn it if the shard doesn’t just fall right out of my nose and bounce underneath a cabinet.
I told the doctor, and he said, “So it isn’t in your nose anymore?”
I said, “I guess not.”
He said, “Ok. Tell you what, I’ll give you a tetnus (sp?) shot just in case there actually was anything up your nose.”
To this day, I’m pretty sure that everyone, my teacher, my father and the doctor included, was convinced that I made the whole thing up to get out of chemistry that day.
But I swear on a stack of Straight Dope books, that I had a glass shard up my nose. Damn it.
Well, I’m not clumsy. Really. Well, okay, it’s just that none of my injuries have been particularly funny.
My mother, OTOH…heh heh heh
Sitting across from a friend of hers, peeling potatoes, and ran the peeler over her thumb. Blood everywhere, she looks up at the friend, holds up her thumb, and says, “Oh, look. I have cut myself.”
While teaching her Camp Fire Troop how to make strawberry jam [homer]mom’s fresh strawberry jam[/homer] (sorry) she poured some over her hand. We joke to this day that those CF girls went home with the lesson: when you burn yourself, say, “Shit” and put the burned part in cold water.
…and it left a nice little tattoo.
My uncle has one of those. A coworker threw a pen at him, which lodged in his upper arm and left a permanent blue dot. He claims it is a tattoo of an airplane waaaay off in the distance.