injuries from childhood

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Boy, so many come to mind. Here’s one I remember fondly.

We used to live in an apartment complex that had a huge hill that was perfect for sled riding during the winter. Once during the summer, my two best friends -brothers Dirk and Jeff, were taking turns riding their bike down the hill.

They prodded me into giving it a try. Now this bike was a little bit too big for me and what was worse was that it had hand brakes, and only the front brake at that. I had never really gotten used to using a hand brake since my bike had the kind that, when you wanted to stop, you simply pushed the pedal (with your foot obviously) backwards.

Nonetheless, I was ready to give it a try. The brothers reminded me to tap the brake rather than to squeeze it and so I trudged off to the top of the hill.

As soon as I took off I realized why we never rode bicycles down this hill. I was at terminal velocity in moments and quickly found the urge to slow down. I “tapped” on the hand brake, which of course stopped the front wheel cold, and I went completely end-over-end at least for two full revolutions.

I’m lying there in a heap beside the bicycle and of course I’m bawling away. The two brothers rushed over and after ascertaining that I was still alive -barely, they just started cracking up. This was the type of uncontrolled, hysterical laughter that causes one to throw himself on the ground. After a bit, between sobs, I couldn’t help laughing myself though I was still very much in pain. It was the only time I can remember crying and laughing at the same time and the last time I took a bike down the big hill beside the apartments.

Fin.

2

I broke my leg when I was 3, my mom tripped on the last step while carrying me

3

My brother suggested that I lick the ice off the inside of the freezer. I did. I stuck. The top layer of my tongue is about ten years younger than the rest of me.

4

When I was two I climed up my high chair and fell backwards, earning myself stiches on my eyebrow.

When I was eight, I was riding my little brother’s bike down the sidewalk. I was having a hard time steering it. It kept drifting to the right. It drifted so far that the low wall that was next to me sliced into my shin and thus earning myself 5 stiches on my shin.

5

We had a heavy screen door made of metal which would slam shut. One day when I was four I didn’t get through it fast enough, and it took off a chunk of my heel. I couldn’t walk for weeks.

And one time when I was little older my brother and I were playing “slam the doors”, where we would chase each other around the house and slam doors in each others’ faces (real fun, honest…). That game promptly ended when my pinky finger got slammed shut in the hinge-side of a door.

But that’s nothing compared to my brother, who managed to wedge an axe through his bare foot when he was 10. (He was trying to chop up a tree trunk, took a heavy swing, and missed.)

6

About 6, I was running through my babysitter’s house, being chased by her son. He finally caught up with me and pulled on the tail of my shirt, sending me chin-first into the corner of a table. I still have the cute little scar.

7

I must have been the most accident prone kid in the world when I was younger

Here are some of my tricks
[ul]
[li]When I was about two, I trapped my right index finger in the backdoor of the house, slicing some of the skin off[/li][li]When I was about 5, I was climing a frame thingy with a rope in the middle, I reached for the rope and missed. I landed head first onto the stones on the floor. 5 Stitches*[/li][li]I was riding my bike down a dirt track pulling skids at the end (the one nearest the main road, how dumb was that) and one time I did not stop. I hit the side of a passing van. Luckly no damage except severe bruising and some cuts (the van was going slow cause it was pulling up to a give way junction)[/li][li]Shopping in town, rents cross the street, I am still admiring the toys, they call, I turn and start to run across the road (it was a turn off from the main road) run into the side of a moving car which runs over my foot. More bruising of foot and knee and no swimming on holiday :frowning: (I think the car driver was worse off than me cause he nearly had a heart attack :eek: )[/li][li]Playing at the top of the stairs as my mum hoovers. I catch my foot on the cord and fall down said stairs. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but only a few bumps.[/li][/ul]
There are also about a million other minor accidents, cuts and such. Like the time I was cutting some leaves (mint, IIRC) using my knee as a chopping block :wally Much blood. Then I was cutting a cord on a box, cutting towards myself. Lucky excape, it hit my forehead (not much to damage there then :rolleyes: ) Hit in the back of the head while sledging, luckily it was only a plastic sledge and the other person had fallen off, so it was not too hard a hit.

I was such a klutz I am surprised I did not break anything until I was nearly 20!

*<rant>Why, oh why, oh why do people who design play areas think it is a good idea to put concrete and stones underneath objects which children are going to climb on. Talk about and accident waiting to happen. :rolleyes: </rant>

Erm, I’m not that bad anymore. Really I’m not.

Rick :slight_smile:

8

Aren’t bikes instruments of evil? I was up on the handlebars while my older sister rode us around the neighborhood. There was a huge pothole in front of Dr. Dela Cruz’s house and she would steer around it saying we were going in, we were going to crash. She got a little too close, I panic and wrench the handle bars hard to the left. We went in and crashed in a tangle of black concrete chips, litte girls and blood. Visible scars on my left knee 30 years later and she still claims I for no reason suddenly decided to jump off and caused her to fall.

9

Age 1 1/2: I was toddling around by the hearth of the fireplace, which was made of cement and stone and had extremely sharp corners, and naturally, I fell. My forhead found the corner and, wham! 3 Stiches. I still have a dent in the middle of my forehead.

Age 2 or 3: I was sitting in a reclining chair (the kind with the lever on the side) at my grandparents’ house with the chair fully reclined. I suppose I was leaning over the side playing with the lever, and I managed to push it down, causing the footrest thing to go back into the chair, and the back to pop back into the upright position. Problem was, my foot was in between the chair and the footrest, so when it all popped back into postition, I was pushed over the front of the chair - right into this little oak table. I went face-first, so I smashed my eyebrow open…right from one end to the other. 12 stiches inside, 8 outside. My left eyebrow is still funny-looking today, and it has a huge red scar under it (luckily it’s covered up!)

Age 11: My little sister got fed up with me one afternoon coming home with the pool and threw her bike down…right on my foot. The foam on the handlebars had peeled back with age and there was a jagged metal edge sticking out…which dug right into my toe…3 stiches.

There are others of course, but those are the most interesting…

10

On my knee I have a little gray spot, a tattoo of sorts, where a neighborhood kid stabbed a burning sparkler into my leg thirty-five years ago. No reason. He was just an asshole. Damned stupid, too. He did it in plain view of the whole neighborhood’s Fourth of July block party.

11

I crashed face-first into a hillside trying to do the Tarzan Swinging Through The Jungle trick. It never occured to me the movie Tarzan was really swinging on sturdy hemp ropes…or that the spindly wild vines that grew in trees in southern Ohio weren’t actually very strong.

Yep, grabbed a nicely dead, brittle vine, backed up the hill and launched myself into space–doing the warbling, Tarzan-yodel the whole time, of course. The vine snapped while I was in midair. Instead of landing neatly on the other side of the ravine I smacked slam into the opposite hillside and slid face-first right back down the whole way.

I tore the hell out of my leg and one of my horror-stricken pals had to run for help. I still remember my dad hiked back into the woods where we were and he carried me the 2 or 3 miles back home. Then it was another visit to the Emergency Room. (I was a frequent visitor at the Emergency Room.)
Veb

12

I was a tomboy; so at 43 I still carry the scars of many childhood misadventures!

The biggest one is on my side. We were living in Turkey; I was seven. While showing off my balancing skills on a 10’ stone wall, I fell on to a spiked iron fence and was impaled. My mother had to pluck me off, call a taxi to the hospital, and ride with me bleeding & hyperventilating in the back seat. I was lucky, the spike went in 6" but missed everything important. When I got back from the hospital, my father had hammered every spike on the fence over.

I have so many scars on my knees I can’t identify them. And I have a big one at the base of my left thumb from trying to prove I was tough by cutting my hand open with a kitchen knife without crying.I think I was six.

I’m still collecting scars, too. :slight_smile: I’m still kind of a jock.

13

I stepped on a little 1 hand dollie that my sister was dragging behind her trike. And punched a round chunk out of my left eyebrow , Thanks to the handle…
I also tried jumping this log on my bike.When i realized just as i hit it i was gonna really get hurt.And ended up breaking my shoulder and cracking a couple ribs.

14

age 7 - fell on the playground at school, chipping my two front teeth and tearing the hell out of my chin and lips.

age 8 - break my hand while playing “swinging statues” after church.

age 9 - neighborhood asshole kid ran me down (on his bike) while my sister and I were walking on the road. Bruises all over my chest, back and arms, and sore for weeks.

age 10 - get whacked upside the head with a golf club swung by my sister. No stitches, but a 2" gash and loads of blood.

age 14 - trip over neighbor kid’s bike while playing hide-and-seek with him ( was babysitting him and his sister)

age 15 - break all the toes on one foot when a horse steps on my foot when I’m attempting to bring it into the barn during a thunderstorm. No more tennis shoes at the barn after this fiasco.

–tygre

15

Many, many skinned knees (the worst ones had gravel and then you got to wail while your dad picked it all out. I hated that.)

Sliced the bottom half of my toe off jumping off a cement pathway onto a beach. (submerged broken bottle?) More pulling small rocks out of injured flesh.

Stabbing a probe through my wrist (A probe, like you used in bio, big long pin on a stick) I’m easily startled and I owned a micorscope and a dissector kit.

All in all I survived nicely.

16

When I was 8, I had an incident very similar to minlokwat’s. My buddy & I pushed our bikes to the top of a hill used by motocrossers. I lost the coin toss and had to go first. About 3/4 of the way down I hit a rock or a hole or something that sent me sailing over the handlebars. Landed full force on my right shoulder dislocating it and breaking my arm about 3 inches below the shoulder. My buddy walked his bike down the hill and went and got my brother who drove me to the doctors. I’ve also had bike crash related stiches in my right knee.

A not so childhood (I was 24) injury was blowing out my anterior cruciate ligament playing volleyball.

17

I was the stupid kid who in kindergarten was dared to lick an outdoor metal railing in the middle of winter…and DID.

I’m still mad at my brother because when he was about a year old we were leaving to go to a restaurant and he managed to fall on something and cut his forehead down to the bone; it was only about a half-inch long but very icky. I was hungry, you understand, but no…he had to go get stitches, and we had to wait about two hours because he really wasn’t hurt that bad.

18

I’ve been sitting here, trying to catalog all the injuries I dealt myself as a child (or which were inflicted upon me by outside forces)–without much luck. There were just too many. I was so ludicrously accident-prone that our family doc offered us a bulk rate on stitches (that was the first time I went in for stitches two days in a row).

Based on scars I’ve recently seen on myself:

5 years old: A nasty scar from a measuring tape on my right thumb. I remember seeing bone at the bottom of that one.

5 years old: A scar from a piece of glass that went right through the sole of my shoe and gashed my right foot (the day after the measuring tape incident).

8 years old: A scar on my forehead–I tripped and smashed forehead first into the corner of a brick window-ledge. Good think I’m hardheaded.

9 years old: Stumbled in my Dad’s TV shop after turning out the lights and fell across the neck of a large CRT (for those unfamiliar with the back of the monitor, think of a round glass tube about an inch in diameter and 5 inches long, with a moderately sharp end.) That left a scar on my stomach, and nearly provided an informal appendectomy.

10 years old: The scar on the top of my head explains to my satisfaction the reason why it’s bad luck to walk under a ladder.

11 years old: I have a dark spot in the center of my right palm–it’s a bit of pencil lead acquired when I prevented a guy from sticking me in the throat with a sharp pencil.

12 years old: Finally began learning to ride that evil device, the bicycle. I made the fundamental mistake of wearing short pants, and skidded about 12 feet on a hard-packed, sandy gravel road…on a bare leg. The scar’s barely visible; I guess there’s an advantage to removing all the skin around the injury…

14 years old: Another forehead scar–two, actually, but one overlaps the windowledge scar. I was standing behind my cousin (who was target-shooting with a .38). I have no idea how he managed to hit me in the middle of my forehead with part of a slug. Fortunately, it came in at an angle, followed the curve of my skull, and was deflected out again by my right brow ridge. Lots of blood, and a NDE for my cousin…

…and that’s the last scarring injury I remember. Apparently, my bones are tough. I’ve never broken one (despite accidents that should have); I guess that’s Nature’s way of balancing total klutziness.

19

Another klutz checking in…

Age 14 months or so, burned both hands falling on one of those floor heater vents at Grandma’s house.

Age 3, the chair I was standing on collapsed, put my hand down to catch myself and burned/sliced open my palm on sis’ “Easy Bake Oven”…needed stitches, still have the scar from this one.

Age 3-6 stopped using my hands to catch myself when I fell, ended up with a gray front tooth, had a root canal for it, but it didn’t help. Thank goodness it was a baby tooth.

Age 7 climbed a neighbor’s tree…fell out of said tree, hitting my head on a decorative slab of concrete and lost consciousness. That was a fun trip to the emergency room.

Other assorted stuff up to age 7, like playing “Duck Duck Goose” with my best friend…she pushed me on the blacktop, I ended up with a fat lip. Same friend, we’re running in circles like fools, ran right into each other, she lost her loose tooth, I again ended up with a fat lip. Played “tag” with school mates, boy I was chasing spun around and scratched my face (Still have a slight scar on my right cheek from this one) Watching kids flying kites, one kite goes out of control, kid attached to the string, runs to keep it in the air…whoosh, big rope burn on my neck from not moving.

Hmm it didn’t end there…
Age 14, holding my dogs head while someone else unhooks his foot from the fence, dog turned his head quickly and sliced open my right index finger. Dog was fine, I needed stitches.

Age 14 to 25, repeatedly sliced open my fingers trying to slice a bagel…It’s only as of late that TG’s letting me use knives.

I know there’s more but these are the most memorable.

20

8 - Cat scratch right cornea.

12 - Anchor dropped on head, crushed fingernail and concussion.

7 - Hit from behind by rock will throwing at water rats, eight stitches.

6 - Fell off of a trailer - have no idea why I was up there, concussion, six stitches.

4 - Ran headlong into open drawer corner in kitchen. Cannot stand an open drawer or cabinet door to this day.

5 - Sliced open right palm on oyster, ten stitches.

I’m sure there are tons more.

Later on in life I broke my jaw at 18, found out when I was 31.

When I joined the Marines and got my first high and tight haircut, my mother saw all the scars on the back of my head, and was afraid people would think I was an abused child.