I’m feeling macabre today, so share stories of the bizarre ways you or the people you know have injured yourselves or others. In particular, I’m looking for stories that are actually serious, but which did/must have sounded pretty ridiculous at the ER.
A friend of mine once managed, god knows how, to stick a sword up another guys nose. He (the other guy) was fine, as the sword was blunt - but he had to have stitches in his sinuses.
Another fellow I know decided rather spontaniously that the glassed, framed picture of Jesus on the wall was offensive - so he headbutted it.
Two stitches in the top of a six year old’s head. His sister whacked him with a(huge, heavy, teflon-coated metal) rolling pin. NOT out of anger. She was doing an interpretive dance and using the pin as a prop and didn’t look behind her before flailing away with it. The weirdest part was she insisted she come along and she cried her eyes out pretty much the whole time out of guilt. He was a little dazed, but generally fine.
I was cooking dinner one night and decided to use a knife that I rarely use. I wasn’t too sure about how sharp it was so I decided to run my index finger along it to see.
When I told the ER doc what happened, he shook his head as if to say “When are people going to realize that KITCHENS KILL?”
I had a friend who’s toddler decided to try to climb up on the kitchen counter. He made it part way, then slipped. The little guy happened to be naked at the time, and managed to snag his scrotum on the cabinet pull. His father turned to see him hanging, bleeding, from the cabinet by his scrotum. Fortunately, he just tore the skin and his essentials weren’t seriously damaged, but I think his father was traumatized for life.
When I was 12, I got my ears pierced. A couple months later, while wrestling with my brother, one of the backs to my earrings got stuck *inside *my earlobe. My mother dug it out while I screamed in agonizing pain. A few years ago, while working at an urgent care center, I learned that this is a fairly common occurrence, and you need to see a surgeon to have it removed. Thanks, ma!
My friend in college came into my dorm room to chat. He looked around for a place to sit, and of course dorm rooms don’t have much, so he decided to sit on the edge of an old empty fish aquarium that was sitting on the floor, waiting to be thrown out. An old GLASS aquarium.
Of course the thing broke and he got a lot of large pieces of glass up the wazoo.
I read that article about a week before I did shrooms for the first time. Wound up having terrible hallucinations about police men raping me with gerbils. The policemen were not, in fact, hallucinated
There was a kid at an elementary school I went to that had a burn mark on his face. It covered half his face and was in the familiar, curved triangle shape that forms an iron’s soleplate, and had unscarred dots where the holes of the iron spared his skin.
The rumor was that his sister didn’t realize the iron was still on.
Also two coworkers horsing around in the back of the house at a hotel. One held the plate. The other punched the plate. The one who held got fired. The other one who sliced his wrist and/or broke his hand(don’t remember exactly) wasn’t. Something about worker’s comp because technically he was injured on the job. I never got the full story on that.
I got whacked in the head with a corkscrew when I was a kid (it was an accident) but that didn’t require a trip to the ER although even a small scalp wound bleeds like an entire horror movie…
Unusual things that I have had to go to the ER and/or urgent care for included:
Double malfunction skydiving accident, total on the main followed by a partial on the reserve. Turned out to be nothing but sprains and bruises but several nurses kept poking their heads into my room, I assume they thought there were going to see a squashed person.
While showing visitors around campus I was bitten by a squirrel. Everyone except for me and (I presume) the squirrel thought this was hilarious, including the admitting nurse.
As a child I was fooling around with hot peppers and managed to rub the oil right into my eyes. Mom rushed me to the doctor’s office, I was given some kind of painkiller which is supposed to knock a kid out, instead it made me totally hyper.
In grad school I used to keep a bulletin board full of those oddball news stories where someone got impaled by a javelin at a track meet or whatever, complete with photos and/or x-rays. I assume that the ER desk doesn’t ask “So what seems to be the problem” when they usher in a guy with a spear stuck in his head.
I recall a news story a while ago about how a couple who were Star Wars fans decided to do some mock lightsaber fighting. So they took a pair of long fluorescent tubes, cut off one end of each, and filled them with kerosene. Then lit them on fire and dueled with the flaming, kerosene filled ***glass tubes ***- which naturally shattered, resulting in flaming kerosene flying everywhere and serious burns.
There is an interesting ass stuffer in the Darwin Awards. The original article link is on that page, but it’s in Romanian. Any Doper that can translate Romanian gets bonus points for a translation. Darwin Awards Next-generation laxative
Once when I was a kid I was ‘helping’ my grandmother put her refrigerator magnets back on the refrigerator She had taken them all off and placed them on a glass end table so she could clean it. Since I was a kid, I decided to be silly, taking them one at a time, and to do it quickly, so I ran. I tripped on the way back to the end table and demolished it with my face. My parents thought I was dead. After they pulled me out of the wreckage, they discovered I had only one cut, where a long thin piece of glass was embedded in the flesh right between my eyes. I had to go to the emergency room to get it removed. I was told later that the piece of glass was almost 2 inches long, but hadn’t done any real damage.
Heh. My brother punched me in the mouth and I had to go get it looked at and the tooth realigned. ER nurse “So she was hit in the mouth? With what?” “Her brother’s fist.” I thought her giggling a tad unprofessional.
In a hospital where I used to work, there was a bulleting board in the doctor’s lounge where ‘interesting’ case notes would be posted. I remember once the x-ray of where there had been a live bullet in a pile of burning leaves.
He was drunk and ate a whole jar of cherries with the pits - he ate the pits too. He tried to stick a hammer up his butt to break up the pits. The first hammer didn’t work, so he stuck a second one with a partial handle up. He tied a rope to the end of the hammer but the rope slipped off. They also found part of a handle off of a beer stein in there.
So he was stuck with two hammers and part of a beer mug up his butt.
