Thanksgiving, 2007 (yes, we celebrate Thanksgiving - we like the food). My wife’s chef’s knife, which had just come back from sharpening, fell off the counter point first and stabbed through the top of her shoe, her skin, the tendon connecting her big toe, and the sole of her shoe. There was quite a lot of blood.
The fact that my wife used to cook professionally made it even more embarrassing for her.
December 26, 1986 I was in an ER being treated for assorted cuts and a sprained ankle sustained when my aunt’s 10 foot Christmas tree, covered in glass bulbs and all sorts of scratchy/sharp-edged ornaments fell on me. I still hold a note of irritation with said aunt that her first concern, despite the fact that I was lying on the floor under the tree crying in pain and bleeding was that her antique bubble lights were damaged. :rolleyes: The doctor who patched me up said that it was her fourth holiday decoration related injury in as many days. Apparently the holidays are dangerous.
I’m traumatized for life just reading that!
I’m not sure I can go on with the rest of the thread!
I knew that “Christian the Lion” video was a load of BS!
:eek:
And you’re going to leave it at that!?
C’mon, details!
:eek: I’m traumatized just reading that.
I managed to impale myself in the armpit. I was walking along the top of a fence made from bunches of long branches, slipped and got caught by a branch in my armpit. The branch was longer than I was tall, so I couldn’t touch the ground and the more I struggled the further it impaled me. Eventually my brother noticed my [del]girlish screams[/del] stoic forebearance and lifted me off. 7 stiches but no sexy scar I can show off to the ladies without repulsing them. 
I was opening a can of cat food . . . the kind with the little ring that you pull . . . the can slipped, and the lid sliced right through that fleshy skin between the thumb and the rest of the hand. I needed 7 stitches and a tetanus shot.
Of course they had to ask me questions like “Do you often have thoughts about harming yourself?”
“Oh yeah, every time I feed the cats.”
Reading this thread I am reminded of two stories.
The first is from my mother, way back when her and dad were dating - it seems that dad used to own a “guard cat” (yes that’s right, me daddy had a cat that that he used to be VERY rough with, he was the only one that could touch it). It seems that mum decided to play one day by running round a round garden with the cat chasing - went fine until the cat decided to take a shortcut through the middle and tackled her ankles - it seems that mum had perfectly circular scratch marks from that one.
Secondly, a friend of mine at the end of a marathon session, had his boyfriend lay on top and grind - it seems not enough lubrication and tearing of the foreskin resulted. A trip to the ER ensued - and the cause of the accident had to be recorded - this column read “rough sex”. Luckily he was a loooong way from home or this would probably have outed him to his parents.
I just started a residency in Emergency Medicine so I’m going to collect a lot of these kinds ofstories. One I saw a couple of weeks ago: woman came in with a BBQ fork stuck in her arm. Apparently there was BBQing and there was rough-housing and the two should not be mixed. The X-rays were very dramatic
I sprained my ankle getting out of a recliner. It was a little embarassing explaining to the doctor.
The worst injuries i’ve inflicted upon myself involved a Draw Knife (Stitches in the knee) and a loaf of bread (shoulda gotten stitches in the finger…)
I lost a fingernail and got a mild concussion when an anchor fell on my head.
Both of these, while seemingly minor and not worthy of an ER trip, are complicated by my wife’s lupus with related immunity and blood clotting issues.
One time, long ago, she dropped a large block of ice that had a sharp edge and nearly amputated a toe.
Much more recently, she did cut the end of her finger (the very fleshy tip, about as big around as a pencil eraser) off with a rotary cutter. After 10 minutes of bleeding and no clot forming, we took the trip. The doctor gave us a big WTF? look, until we said the magic word: coumadin.
For me, I ran a Philips Head driver bit through the end of my finger. They sent me home untreated because there was nothing to stitch.
My father has a history with ER visits. With him it’s not really the injury but the circumstances.
While installing a new garbage disposal he slit his wrist laterally with a utility knife last used in cutting out old drain lines from the septic system. He walked up to my mom holding a kitchen towel to his arm saying “Honey I think I need to go to the hospital”. My mom was getting ready for work as an ER nurse. Her words were “You’d better not… Oh shit get in the car…”
Several years later he fell back wards against the hay-bailing spear on the tractor. For those of you who don’t know this is a 6-8 foot long metal spike about 4 inches wide that comes to a rounded but formidable point. It’s used to pick up those large round bails of hay you see in fields. He’d just dripped of a round bail and was pulling off the bailing wire when he tripped and fell back-wards. The spear hit is left arm but didn’t break through his Carhart’s. He says it hurt but thought it was just a bruise until he felt a trickle down his hand and took off his coat to find a 10 inch long skin and muscle tear in his left upper arm in the shape of a J. Dozens of stitches and a J shaped scar followed.
And my personal favorite; drove him self to the ER after fracturing his right ankle.
He was walking out to the truck and slipped on the ice. The nearest neighbor to the farm is over a mile away and he was alone that morning as every one else was at the hospital visiting my grandmother who was in the final stages of congestive heart failure. So with no help available he crawled across the snow and ice in to the garage. The phone was out because of an ice storm and this was pre cell phone. He took an 8 foot long 2x2 and broke it over his knee to use as a cane. He then hobbled back out to the truck, got in and drove out to the gate. Got out and opened the gate. Got back in drove through. Got out closed the gate. Drove to my grandparents’ house. The whole reason he was walking out to the truck was to pick up Grandpa and take him to the hospital. Now is when his singled mindedness becomes a bad thing. Rather than sit down and call for the squad Dad then proceeds to drive to the hospital 40 minutes away using his left foot and the 2x4. His logic; I got there just as fast as the squad would have.
Between Turkey Day and Christmas, I transported a 10 y.o. kid to the hospital that shot off his 2nd toe with a shotgun while deer hunting. The hunters around here will rest the muzzle on the toe of their boot to keep from getting junk in the barrel; he forgot to take his finger off the trigger. He was fortunate to be using slugs that day.
My favorite ER tale is the woman coming in with chest pain; I had to set up a 12-lead EKG on her, and she was very proud to show off her surgically reduced breasts to me. If I wasn’t so intent on doing my job, I might have enjoyed it, but under the circumstances I was sorta squicked out.
Well, not quite. In my case, the piece of glass was almost all inside. That was why I had to go to the hospital. I still have a little bit of a scar from it.
So, I was in Africa on safari, and the hotel was offering transport to various tourist traps, including something called a “lion walk”. According to the pamphlet, this involved close encounters with lion cubs, to benefit the conservation society that was raising them.
Turns out that when they said “cub”, they meant “between six and eighteen months old”. To give you an idea of how big an eighteen month old lion can get, well, I found some pictures of the same lion at what I think was thirteen months. At the time he bit me, Lungile was something like seventeen and a half months.
So, I ended up staying in Africa longer than I planned, until my skin grafts were done. But on the other hand, I got some great pictures, including Lungile’s sister, Lina.
I’m almost healed now, although my best pair of pants is beyond saving.
great thread in another message board
There are some amazing threads on the student doctor forums … this one is amazingly amusing!
[and occasionally gross!]
My late father-in-law needed to be able to see up to the top part of a storage room and he decided to have one of the guys give him a lift on the forklift. He hoped on the lift and braced his left hand right in the spot where the two horizontal bars, one of the frame of the lift arm and the other on the front of the forlift, pass each other. The spot labeled “Caution - Extreme Danger - Keep Away”. He claims he told the guy not to lift him all the way up, thus keeping the bars from passing each other and scissoring off anything in between them. He went into the ER with his middle finger of his left hand in a cup of ice, and his left hand swathed in paper towels. The only reason he didn’t lose his ring finger too was because of his wedding band, which was ruined. They weren’t able to re-attach his middle finger, so he went through the rest of his life without one.
A chem teacher once gave us a very stern warning about not misusing equipment in the lab. Punctuated by holding up his right hand and showing that he had about half an index finger. I talked with him later in the semester and he admitted it was an injury from the family farm. It seemed they had a chain driven hay baler whose motor could keep it running, but didn’t have enough torque to start it moving once it had aged. Family practice was to grab the chain and give it a good yank. He didn’t get his hand out in time and lost part of his finger to it when it got caught between the chain and drive sprocket. While it may sound intriguing to city folk, the fact that the local docs had patched up his father in exactly the same manner, and later his younger brother, it probably wasn’t new at their ER. He said he now doesn’t have to worry about losing a finger to the chain drive because he can get out of the way easier now that the finger is an inch and a half shorter and he still starts the baler this way.
Enjoy,
Steven
After pooping fur for a week I started to wonder 
