When you tell this story to people in person do they laugh? Wince? Both?
Isn’t it wild when that happens in real life? I was rock climbing in Kentucky a few years ago and somehow just popped off the rock face. I swear I hovered in the air for a second (Wile E would have used that time to raise a little “Help!” sign) and didn’t plummet until a few heartbeats had passed.
Sometimes they laugh, but they always wince. Then come the usual questions, mostly “So how did you get around?” My answer is invariably “Very slowly.”
Oh yeah. And it’s amazing how many thoughts you can have in that moment. The biggest one is “Well, I’m fucked now.”
I had a total idiot incident like that where it surprised me that I didn’t have that “oh shit” pause.
It was winter two years ago, right before Christmas, when we’d had a big cycle of freeze/thaw periods that left a lot of ice patches under snow. I had to get up early on a Saturday to drive my husband to work so I could use the car for errands, and just threw on a beat-up pair of loafers to walk outside in. Loafers without any real traction. He backed the car out of the garage, like usual, and I went to close the garage door, like usual. Walking right under the corner of the garage. Where lots of water had dripped off, and formed ice under the snow. I turned away from the garage door and walked back under this corner.
Next thing I knew, I was sitting on the ground in pain; my rear end, back of my head, and right wrist hurt. Especially the wrist. I curled up in pain, trying to cradle my wrist, and realized that I had apparently slipped on the ice, fell on my rear and had reflexively put out my hand to try to break the fall, and now something very very bad had happened. When the adrenaline kicked in a short time later, I tried to convince my husband that I would be OK if I stayed home, he needed to go to work, as he was already on the cell phone calling work to tell them that he needed to take me to the hospital. Not being an idiot, he ignored me and took me in. (The head pain? Turns out I smacked the back of my head on the garage siding when I went down.) My wrist was broken.
To answer Textual Intercourse’s next question – I’m wincing.
When I was a teenager I came up with a brilliant idea to make my lipstick last for a long time: nail polish!
Without really thinking about it much, I quickly picked out a nice colour and painted my lips. They looked fabulous for about 15 seconds then this horrible burning sensation started. In a panic I leaned over the sink and rubbed water all over my lips to try to get it off but all that did was smear it around a bit.
What takes off nail polish? Nail polish remover! I soaked cotton balls and rubbed and rubbed my lips. It was way harder to get off my lips than when it’s on finger nails. In the end I looked like I had clown paint on for a few days. My lips and surrounding skin were bright red, some parts were bleeding a bit, and sooo sore.
Me too. I’ve just been reminded of an experience I had some 10 years ago. So I bought this new 3 wood driver right. And I’m practicing my swing…in my room. My room has a ceiling. So that I can see things, my ceiling has a light fixture attached to it which in turn has a 2 and a 1/2 foot wide glass bowl on it.
I begin a swing which will send the imaginary golf bowl 300 perfect yards down the fairway. I’ll be in prime position for an eagle after this one. Instead of an eagle, I hit the big glass bowl attached to my light fixture with the back of my new club. It split the bowl in two. I watched one of the pieces fall right on my index finger (which was wrapped around the club.) It left this massive gash through which I could see a whole lotta bone. Lots of bleeding ensued.
Thus ended my illustrious golf career.
I’ve been cooking and using kitchen tools since I was 8 years old. I keep my knives razor sharp and am always very careful when using them. As a result, I’ve had far fewer cuts than many other cooks I know.
Still…
Once morning I was cutting slices of cheese off a block. For whatever reason, I didn’t grab a chef’s knife but picked up the santoku I’d just been using for something else. I put the cheese on the cutting board, grabbed the knife in my right hand, put my left hand on top of the blade and began pressing downward. Of course, since the top edge of the santoku curves downward, and the cheese was nice and hard, my left hand slipped off the blade and sliced the hell out of my index finger when it crossed the point.
Cut (so to speak) to me picking the knife back up after cleaning and bandaging the cut, switching hands and doing the exact same damn thing to the right hand index finger. :smack:
Never have I ever felt stupider, particularly in a kitchen.
Worse yet, my rear end was fine. A little sore for a few days, sure, but fine. So was my head, actually - superficial glancing blow, boinged off the aluminum siding. It’s probably good that we had aluminum siding rather than brick or wood, else maybe that would have a different result.
My body overreacted and in that split second went “omg we’re falling!! Try to break the fall!” - and put out my dominant hand (the other hand didn’t do this) to try to stop the fall/protect my butt. :smack: Good job, there.
My husband’s reflexes are awesome. He’s tucked into a shoulder roll to protect his head when he went over the handlebars of his bicycle and happened to not be wearing his helmet that day. (Fractured a bit of his arm but better that than the head.) He’s also whipped the car safely onto a gravel shoulder and immediately back onto the road when confronted with a car coming head-on at a high rate of speed going the wrong way in our lane, fast enough that we didn’t even believe it had happened at first.
But me? Oh, I wore slippery shoes in a spot that should have ice on it, and when the inevitable happens, my body says “duh, we’re falling, let’s put a ton of force on the dominant hand.” Gah.
That’s probably a very natural reaction. I once had the nickname of Lefty after the second day of owning a skateboard. Better my wrist than my noggin.
Boy, this is going to seem awfully tame after the harrowing tales so far.
I was in the housewares section of our department store and they had a new product displayed prominently: a special peeler for asparagus spears or carrots. You put the whole thing in one end and pull or push it through, and it comes out peeled. I picked it up, idly curious, and stuck … my finger … in. The non-cutting end. Which would have been fine if my finger, like a carrot, had been unattached at the other end; I could have just put it all the way through, no harm. However, since the entire rest of my body wasn’t going to fit …
sigh
I managed to maneuver my finger out slowly and carefully enough that I only lightly peeled the one side, so, um, go me?
moron
All the snow reminded me of this - last year, after a snow, I headed out to start the car and slipped. Somehow, trying to twist around to grab the mailbox seemed like a good idea.
It wasn’t.
Had I just let the fall happen, I might have ended up with a bruised ass and bruised ego, but I wound up with a sprained ankle and a very sore wrist.
I’m a bit of a klutz.
SWMBO wakes me up to tell me that the wall furnace has gone out during the night, would I please re-light it.
So I grab the long butane lighter we keep for such occasions. Pull the trigger several times, and get no fire.
Thinking it may be out of butane, I decide to listen and see if I can hear gas coming out. The way to start the butane flow is to pull the trigger. Did I mention I just got out of bed. Yes, my hair looked like I just got out of bed. Bed-head hair, it turns out, lights on fire quite easily, and burns quickly. No burned skin, but plenty of stinky singed hair.
Thank goodness I wasn’t trying to shoot the furnace with a pistol.
Username/thread title win. Perhaps that should have been a clue (“On our next episode of Is_It_Safe, we test that old adage about never sticking a fork in an electrical socket…”)
Username/thread/post title 2nd place.
Yeah, that happened to me one time (the beat before falling, not the rock face thing, although come to think of it…)
ahem. Sorry, back to the real hijack. So there was this body flume at a water park where you could get some air on certain dips? I figured out a way to approach it at a much greater speed than probably thought possible by the parks engineers. So I’m going so fast when I hit the dip in the slide that I get launched into the air.
Long enough for it to sort of go like this.
[…launch…]
[…]
[self: “hey, I’ve been up here for quite some”]THUDDDDD! Knocked the wind out of me but it was so worth it.
When I was six I thought it would be fun to take my cat into the bathtub with me. That wasn’t such a hot idea.
The dumbest injury, though, had to be the “Black Eye from the Chair.” It was probably one of the hottest nights during the summer, and I had a fan sitting on a chair in the middle of the room. I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and stepped on something. I reached down to pick it up, forgetting about the chair there…and smacked my face right on the corner of the chair.
I ended with one HELL of a shiner. The worst part though was explaining explaining to everyone at work the next day what happened. Most of the customers though probably thought I was a victim of domestic abuse.
:smack:
I nearly had to tell people that I walked into a door, and it was the truth. That’s a classic “my husband beats me but I’m not going to admit it” line. I was getting into the passenger side door of our car, and looked over my shoulder for some reason. Meanwhile I was still moving towards the car, and turned my head back during that process. Whap! Smacked myself next to my eye with the pointy upper corner of the car door. Fortunately I didn’t even bruise, else that would have been awful to deal with.
I didn’t even have a boyfriend at the time, which was probably a good thing – can you imagine what the poor guy would have had to deal with?