Inspired by the other thread, what about the times we weren’t so lucky?
For me, it was stepping on a nail while playing “Sergeant Rock” in a house under construction. I spent the rest of August playing Atari.
July 4, 1994, I was lighting single firecrackers with a cigarette, and tossing them in the air to pop. One had a really fast fuse and popped before I let go. My index finger bled a lot and didn’t heal for days, and felt like I hit it with a hammer.
August 18th, 1974, I was having fun flying a plane high enough to see across Lake Michigan. Thanks to some incomplete flight instruction from my dad, and general inattention, we augered into an oat field shortly thereafter.
I watched a LOT of TV in that hospital bed. 
I was just slamming the door tight… too bad my hand was on the glass window and not the wood. Actually, it didn’t hurt too badly at the time, which is how I immediately figured out I had severed the medial nerve, along with 5 tendons in my wrist.
I gave myself frostbite in a stupid situation.
One of the -80 degree Celcius freezers we have in the lab, used to store froze units of rare blood types went down, and I had to move all the units into a new freezer without letting them thaw.
I wore a set of protective latex as well as freezer gloves over them and still managed to freeze-burn all my fingertips. I didn’t even realize it until the next day.
Kinda sorry I started this thread…but please, continue (shudder).
I was riding my bike, through the bush, in the dry season, and decided that riding a bike was not enough of a challenge for me, and so I would try my hand at picking the big, dry reeds by the side of the road, while riding. These big dry reeds, though, are hard enough to pick with both hands, and both feet planted firmly on the ground, and picking one via bicycle resulted only in me breaking one of the reeds and tearing my finger on the resultant jagged edge. It tore through the skin and the muscle/fat, and the skin around the cut was all buckled like a collapsed highway - it totally would have needed stitches, had I been anywhere close to a hospital. As it was, I wrapped my hand in a dirty tshirt I had in my bag and continued on to my friend’s house - she had been expecting me, but was surprised when I arrived with a blood-soaked tshirt wrapped around my hand.
I still have a cool scar, but it is on the inside of my finger where I never get a chance to show it off.
love
yams!!
We had a lot of land when I was growing up and I loved nothing more than woodsmanship. For my 10th birthday I ask for an ax and got one. My mother got it from the Green Stamp store. I proudly took it off to go chopping and brought down small tree after small tree. I them moved up to the medium sized boys. I made it most of the way through an 8 inch diameter specimen when I decided to hit it the hardest I could and bring it down.
Unfortunately, the hard blow bounced off and hit me in the knee cutting through my pants and bringing on a river of blood. I couldn’t walk so I had to do the army crawl several hundred yards back to the house where I had to bang on the door furiously to get anyone to answer. The stitches and the recovery on crutches took about two months and I couldn’t walk well for about 6 months. I still can’t feel about 8 inches spanning my left knee and leg.
We were doing nothing so dangerous as moving the computer desk to another room. Unfortunately, it was to become an object lesson in removing all movable objects from any large, heavy object you plan to transport before actually doing so. Halfway through the move, having tipped the desk on an angle to navigate a corner, the keyboard drawer picked that moment to slide out and fall four feet to the floor and on to my foot. The big toe of my right foot, specifically. Corner-wise. That would be the corner of the steel runner. I spent the next five minutes in the fetal position, cradling my toe and incapable of speech because all of my available efforts were being poured into not screaming. I couldn’t want properly for three weeks – or at all for the first couple of days. The nail blackened and fell off after the first week. It never grew back quite right.
I can safely say it was the most painful experience of my life that was not a toothache. It was an order of magnitude more painful than the time I stupidly managed to shove a box cutter straight through my index finger.
When I was a child, the worst ever California drought broke with a sudden summer thunderstorm – something like 5 inches in one hour, that kind of storm. Me & my family ran barefoot through the flooded streets, sloshing through overflowing gutters, singing Christian hymns and telling stories about Noah (yes, I know…)
After the rain abated, I started walking home, looked back and saw bloody footprints extending all the way back down the sidewalk. And that’s when I noticed the two-inch shard of glass in my foot.
MAN, that hurt!!!
Riding a mountain bike on a trail I’ve done 30-40 times, but with a new fork I hadn’t dialed in yet, set too soft. Drop into a gully and bury the front end, flip over the handlebars with a whipcrack acceleration. Thank Og I “only” hit flat hard pack dirt. It would have hurt if I wasn’t concussed, with a broken helmet, and a broken collar bone. When I could stand without trying to faint, I tried to use my right arm, then it hurt.
still riding
I’ve done that. It seriously hurts like a bastard. My toenail didn’t turn black and fall off, though. I think I’ve hurt myself on keyboard drawers three or four times, actually. They’re a hidden menace.
As a wee Scout, I asked for a scout knife for my birthday, the parents reluctantly agreed, as long as I was able to get the Totin’ Chip card. I did, and I did. The following week at a fall jamboree, as I was attempting to then whittle a canoe from a block of wood to make one of these kind ofneckerchief slides I whittled a little too hard on a stubborn strip of wood, that when it finally gave way, let loose the factory sharpened knife blade on the middle finger of the opposite hand, which whittled a two inch strip of meat and skin down to the bone, which was both the most frightening and coolest thing I had seen to date. I still bear a scar there.
You wouldn’t think putting the groceries away would pose too much of a threat, but then you drop a liter bottle on the nailbed of the big toe, from waist height. Shivering shock, blackened toenail. It looks all normal now, though.
You wouldn’t think that turning around in someone’s apartment would pose much of a threat either, but that damned coffee table jumped up and bit me.
It was the end of the world for that toenail. Buh bye.
So, this one day I had my handy Hoover Dustette out and was using it, you know, to tidy up a bit. Hey, did I mention I was naked? Well, it was laundry day too, you see. Anyway… 
You know those firecrackers that spin around on the ground, glowing red-hot while throwing off sparks? I once thought it would be a coooooool idea to tie one to a length of string so that it would “spin around” in a controlled arc over my head.
It wasn’t. I still have a scar where it attached itself quite firmly into my right bicep and stuck, burning like a little piece of napalm.
Making Rice Krispie treats. Dropped the glass baking dish so it landed corner-wise on my big toe’s nail bed. The most pain I have ever been in, ever. The nail fell off eventually and I had a lovely Frankentoe for my wedding.
“Tidy up a bit”? Is that what the kids are calling it these days?
Soaking a big bottle rocket in gasoline for a week then setting it off is an exceptionally informative experiment, or so my next-door-neighbor and I thought. (We actually soaked two, in my buddy’s dad’s gallon can, but one of them dissolved off the stick - he then put it in his car because my buddy was too scared to tell his dad.) Problem was, the gas burned through the saturated stick faster than the fuse burned up to the rocket, so when we took it out into the field and put it in a bottle, by the time the powder finally ignited it had no directional apparatus. And was a ball of fire, flaming with all the gasoline.
After flailing around in an aimless direction for a few seconds, it suddenly gained a sense of purpose and flew straight up my shirt. It burned its way though my collar, set fire to my hair, and exploded, but thankfully after I’d managed to pitch it about two or three feet above my head.
I had a huge burned patch on my neck, a melted shirt, no hair on the back of my head, and my ears rang for days afterwards. To add literal insult to literal injury, my friend’s mom dressed the burns with some bizarre cream that was bright, turmeric yellow.
At the time, I was working in a store, and had to go in and serve customers the next day with a bright yellow neck, half-bald head. Saying “Eh? Pardon? What?”
The sad thing? I was 20 at the time.