zombie post-
please delete
That really, really is awesome.
I’m trying hard to think of one for me, but no. If it is going to hurt it happens to me. I am the guy that within five minutes of being on a skateboard for the first time broke his ankle in such a way that required two operations.
GOOD POINT.
I fell through a garage roof in a light pair of bermuda shorts. I smashed down on a discarded whisky bottle which missed my nuts by, well, the length of my taint. Yes, that’s right, the bottle went up my anus, ripping stuff on the way and leaving me with a colostomy bag for six months and a broken (other from the previous story) broken ankle.
THat’s why I forgot about this story. I did have horrific internal injuries and a broken ankle BUT I DID NOT LOSE MY NUTS.
Every cloud has a silver lining.
Did I mention that his happened two days before end of second year university exams? I was in hospital during the exam period, had to do all of them in the resit time, nine exams in five days whilst still battered. Needless to say I did badly and had to resit portions of the year and fell behind all my friends.
THis had an additional silver lining. I had few friends in my final year as everyone I started with had graduated. It could have gone two ways - drink or studying. I chose studying and got a fine 2(i) in Pure Mathematics out of it.
Oh I also found out I was type one diabetic at the end of the first year (blood sugar of 42.6 - that’s 766.8 on the scale that the Americans use. Yeah, I was in a bad way.
I had a difficult time at University. And very little of it was the actual work.
Many many years ago, I was coming home from work late (round 2:30am) on my my motorcycle. Cruising down the street somewhere around 40-45 mph when a car pulled right out in front of me. I remember never even having a chance to hit the brakes. My bike made contact with the car in the tiny space between the tire and drivers door. I flew over the hood of the car and down the road what felt like a hundred miles (was more likely closer to 20-30 feet) and slid to a stop in the oncoming lanes. This is the conversation I heard as I laid there -
Woman 1: Oh my god, don’t move, I’m calling an ambulance
Woman 2: I think he is dead.
I jumped up to my feet and was amazed that I was totally unhurt. I did have a very small patch of road rash (bout the size of a silver dollar) on one of my elbows, but other then that…not a scratch.
What a night…
Well, I didn’t walk away unscathed… but I was far less badly injured than I might have been when I tripped walking down some stairs at a fancy resort hotel in Phoenix. There were lots of large rocks on either side which could have dashed out my brains if I’d fallen differently. I had bruising on my spine where I slammed it on the concrete stair.
Instead, I broke one elbow, and did some sort of permanent damage to the muscle / flab on one thigh (5 years later and it’s still tender and lumpy, though no functional impairment).
I still get the shakes over that one.
Then there was the time I was hit by a car at age 4, when I wandered out of church looking for my brother who had disappeared (he was at Communion but at age 4 I didn’t understand what that meant). I crossed the street to see if he was in the car. On my way back, apparently I was thumped by a car. I don’t really remember the thump, just that the next thing I knew I was on the sidewalk and my dad and some other people were there.
Turns out, Dad never told Mom about that (she had attended a different service) and she was… peeved when I mentioned this many years later.
I know this is a zombie, but as elfkin still posts I’ll respond to this. A lot of chemicals burn quickly but not very hot. I did some fire performance and we routinely put white gas in our hands and set them on fire. Whereas gasoline (for example) burns pretty hot, a tiny bit of a chemical with a low burning temperature like you had isn’t going to do any damage, no matter what it looks like.
I was standing in my office in Kabul in the morning, drinking a cup of coffee and looking at the snow capped mountains. A bomb went off and shattered a lot of windows in my building, but the one I was looking out only rattled. If I had been standing at another window, my face could have been shredded.
Just remembered one. I went to a skate park with a friend. I was pretty bad on rollerblades, but I decided to try going up a ramp to a table. When I got to the top of the ramp, my wheel caught somehow in the thin gap between it and the table, and I fell from the top of the 5ish foot ramp to the pavement below. I was wearing a helmet, and landed somehow with my cheekbone and side of my helmet hitting first at about the same time. By all rights, I would’ve expected falling 10 feet directly onto a cheekbone to fracture or break something, but other than a pretty bad ache that I don’t remember lasting for very long, I was fine.
After homecoming my senior year of high school, we all took turns riding on the back of my friend Kristina’s car as she was doing donuts in an empty church parking lot (amazingly, no alcohol was involved in this, just massive stupidity). During my turn, I decided I didn’t want to do it anymore, and jumped off. The back. Of a moving car. Needless to say, as my legs hit the ground, the rest of me that was still on the car kept moving. I crashed down HARD on my hip. Had a bruise about the size of my head, walked with a limp for several days, but nothing was permanently injured. Heck, my mom didn’t even notice for a couple of weeks, when she saw the nasty healing bruise as I stepped out of the shower. I never did tell her what happened. All she knows is “I fell.”
I was cutting the grass not too long after a rainstorm, so the grass was pretty wet and clumpy when cutting. Partway through my run, the lawnmower sounded like the grass wasn’t going into the bag, and was stuck in the passageway between the blades and the bag. No problem, I think, I’ll just reach in there and clear it out. Hey wait, if I let go of my other hand holding onto the engine kill bar, I’ll have to restart the engine again, and that takes an extra 10 seconds! So of course I reach into the mower, with the blades still whirring to clear the clogged grass.
No surprise, the blade smashes into my fingers. Luckily, I was wearing work gloves at the time, so I only feel this acute but blunt pain in my fingers, as if someone had smashed them with a sledgehammer (I’ve felt that one before too). Only once this happens do I realize what a supremely terrible idea this whole process was. Amazingly, I suffered no ill effects other than some numb fingers for about half an hour, but never suffered any bruising, detached fingernails, or missing appendages.
Same thing happened to me when I was a teenager. For some stupid reason I reached back in the door on the hinges side to shoot the lock when my friend got out, he didn’t see me do it and slammed the door. It latched with my bicep still in the door. I calmly asked that they open the door again so I could remove my arm. Ached a bit the rest of the day but didn’t really hurt that much, small bruise, nothing like you would think from having it slammed in a car door!
Not me, but I witnessed it. My brother and step-dad decided to sled down Payday run after the ski resort closed. This is a blue square run so it’s smooth, but at about a 45º angle. They hiked really high up and jumped on the sled. And off they went! It was reminiscent of this scene from Christmas Vacation.
It was awesome up until the point they hit the giant orange SLOW sign. It looked somewhat like a tennis net, with two 2" posts jammed into the ground and the sign strung between them. They hit the net and snapped those 2" posts like twigs, fabric sign wrapped around them as they raced down the hill. Me and mom just watched as they just sped on by, blind and they eventually coasted to a stop on the bunny slope. By rights they should have tumbled down that hill end over end with the sign wrapped around them and post remnants pummeling them in anger.
My brother still has the sign somewhere 
I was contracted to take down an 100’ antenna tower for scrap metal that was surrounded by HUGE oak trees. I had to cut the tower down in sections as it was so rusty and corroded that I couldn’t unbolt the sections. It had three sets of guywires with three wires per set. One set at the top, one lower down about 25 feet and the bottom set at the halfway point, 50 feet.
The first 3’ piece that I threw down after cutting it loose got caught in a tree limb. I tried knocking it loose with next piece but it got caught too. :mad::mad::mad: I decide to wait until I got lower on the tower and look the situation over. I got down to the halfway point, fifty feet off the ground and I saw that it would be impossible to use a ladder to get the caught pieces down; they were just too high in the air. I was stumped. I couldn’t just leave them there; when they eventually fell, they could easily kill any one they hit.
The halfway point was where the bottom most set of guylines were attached, remember? Now, cutting the guywires on the way DOWN is standard procedure but you NEVER NEVER NEVER cut the last set while anyone is on the tower. But what did I do? That’s right, I reached out and sawed the first wire in two. I still don’t know why I did that.
Immediately the tower fell with me still attached to it with the safety harness. We fell over to my left and came to rest against the limbs where the two pieces were stuck, not even an arms lengths away. I didn’t even drop the saw!
I grabbed the two stuck pieces and threw them to the ground and then climbed down the leaning tower like a ladder. I was surprised that, not only was I alive and unhurt, I didn’t even start breathing heavy; not frightened at all. I cut the guywires at the ground level and pulled the rest of the tower out of the trees with my truck.
Today, my wife refuses to even look at any tower by the road when we drive by.
I have a little fun by guesstimating the height of every tower that we see. :eek:
I don’t remember if I have shared this story here before, but of all the things that have happened to me over the years, this is my best story.
Prologue:
I was living in a small Native fishing village on Kodiak Island, Alaska with my then husband and our four kids. One evening as I was riding the 4-wheeler home I saw a (white, like me) woman in the middle of Humpy Creek with a five gallon bucket, picking salmon out of the creek and putting them in the bucket. I asked her what she thought she was doing, and she replied that the lodge she was working for had taken to bringing salmon up to the dump to lure the bears (Kodiak brown bears, flippen huge beasts) away from the garbage so their clients could get some photos of the bears seemingly eating fish in the wild, not the garbage. I went slightly medieval on her, and reported her to the VPSO (Village Public Safety Officer who reported her to Fish and Wildlife.
The reason this was such a bad idea is this; once the cannery mess hall scraps stopped being dumped and the fish run was over, if a bear has become accustomed to getting food directly from a person, then the bear, upon seeing a person, expects a hand out. The lodge she worked at closed early in the Fall and they left at the end of August.
So one late September morning my husband decided to go deer hunting and went to the beach to gas up the skiff and get it warmed up. I made him a lunch, and I went out on the deck to watch for my husband and to just enjoy the quiet of the beautiful Autumn morning. I heard some noise from the house next to me, looked over and saw a sow with her two cubs digging in the neighbors garbage can. I stayed on the step, quietly watching her. Then one of my dogs (yeah, the dogs I had to warn me when a bear was close to the house) caught the scent and began baying at her. She swung her head around, saw me, and charged. She cleared the thirty yards from the neighbor’s house before I had the chance to get inside.
I got in the house and ran to the bedroom to get the firecrackers we used to scare the bears away from the house. As it was a pleasant morning my bedroom window was wide open. There was a small platform under the window as a fire escape. I leaned over to try and see where she was, and all I could see were her two cubs in the middle of my yard. I thought “Damn, she is on the deck!” so I put my hand on the wall and began to lean out of the window to check out where she was. At the same time the bear had put her paw on the outside of the wall pretty much where I had my hand on the wall and leaned in to see, presumably to see where I was, and did I have breakfast for her and the cubs.
So there I was, nose to nose with a 9 1/2 foot mother bear with her cubs directly behind her. This is the most dangerous situation with the bears, and I froze. As did she. I could see myself reflected in her eyes, her breath was blowing over my face, and I could see out of the corner of my eye that her other paw was resting on the fire escape platform, with huge, long and sharp claws. We both stared at each other, neither one making a move. My mind was flashing on all the mauling stories I had read and been told of, and I was thinking that she was either going to bite my face off, or maybe decapitate me with one swipe of her paw. I could not breathe or move, frozen in the moment.
Then I caught a big breath and started screaming at her to get the fuck away from my house. Her eyebrows shot up and she had the most comical, human-like expression of surprise, then she and her cubs took off as if they had a butt load of shotgun spray in their backsides.
I don’t know why she didn’t harm me. She and I had many encounters before and after this one, as her territory included the land my house was on. My garden was in the back of the property and she was often sleeping in the tall bear grass, and as I approached her bedding place she would erupt with her cubs and run the other way, while I would walk quickly back to the house, shaky but otherwise fine. We had had other encounters, and the worst thing I ever did was to lean out of the windows and scream at her while banging my skillets together. My theory was that she recognized me and knew that I would not harm her or her cubs, she was just looking for breakfast.
My then husband, when he returned from the beach and heard what had happened laughed and said “Sow vrs sow, I feel sorry for the bear!”
Awesome story moorland!
Once when I was 8 or so I broke a 1-inch thick sheet of ice from a water fountain with my forehead. It didn’t even hurt. My only theory is that the ice had just recently frozen and wasn’t so hard. That and all those hours of watching TMNT really payed off!