I knocked out my two front teeth when I flipped over the handlebars of my tricycle.
When I was about nine years old I was on my bicycle cruising down a neighborhood street, kicking back riding with no hands and watching some of the “big kids” playing basketball.
Next thing I know BAM! Ouch! Blood! I’d managed to plow into a parked car right across from where they were playing. I cut my head pretty good, but the worst part was the big kids laughing their butts off as I started crying and walking my broken bike home.
I think I have mentioned this before, But I broke my own nose with my hand waking up.
I woke up to the alarm going off. I rolled over to reach across and turn it off. I didn’t immediatly notice I had dead arm(happens to me all the time) from the bicep on down. But the shoulder worked and lifted on upper arm over my head. My dead forearm swung over and down and smacked me in the nose hard, breaking it. I have also racked myself several times in the same situation, now that is a crappy way to wake up.
Growing Up Skipper was Barbie’s little sister. When you rotated her arm, she grew taller, and grew breasts. Perhaps they weren’t all that popular in the US, but I fondly remember the one I kept stealing from my sister. It was produced from 1964 to 1977.
I’m sorry, wolfman, but the image of you smacking yourself over and over again made me spit my iced tea into my monitor and laugh till tears came. I hope that you wear a heavy duty jock strap to bed now?
I pulled a muscle in my back pretty good once. Left me walking funny for more than a week, I couldn’t turn my head, needed prescription painkillers, the whole deal.
I did it reaching up to wash my hair in the shower. 
Once when I was 7, I was playing in the yard behind my grandma’s apartment building. She called me to dinner and I started to run towards the door. A squirrel passed me by and I looked back at it–while still running forward. After a few seconds, I realized that such a position was dangerous so I turned my head. Into a tree.
I think I was only out for a minute.
And then there is yesterday: I’m casually walking up the stairs in my house when my right foot doesn’t quite make it to the next step. Instead my big toe collides with the hardwood floor. Now my toenail is badly broken and I have a blood-soaked bandage around it. Oops.
I have 3, but not sure whichis the dummest, I’ll let you decide.
- The Ape Man age: 5
Remember the old A-frame metal swingsets? The ones where the chain of the swing was secrured to the crossbar with a bolt? My friend and I would stand on the support brace on the side posts, reach to hold the crossbeam with two hands, and start swing-moving sideways. Well, one day I didn’t pay close enough attention to where my hands were placed.
Bolt right through the soft underside of my wrist. What was wierd is it didn’t hurt, though at 5 and seeing all that blood, I was scared to death all the way to the ER.
Then the sadistic doctor laughs when he hears how it happened.
2. Dude, Where’s My Toenail? age: 12
On my way to take my orange belt test for Judo, I had to actually open the door to enter the building. Bad move. The door was a school style one where there was about an inch between the bottom of the door and the ground. It hurt a little, but nothing was going to stop me from getting that new color.
I sat down to take off my socks and shoes. Left foot went smoothly. Right front went…wait, what just fell out of my sock? “Huh,” says I, “that looks like a toenail.”
Yup, tore it off. The damn regrowth nail had to be cut with wirecutters for years, it was that thick.
3. Why I hate twin sized beds age: 30
Last summer I go to our hunting cabin with wife, brother-in-law and his kids. In the cabin we have sort of a communal sleeping room with 2 bunk beds. Kids took one bottom, wife took other, Craig and I on the top ones. Now, to give perspective, wife and I have a king size and it obviously is a lot closer to the floor.
I fell out of bed.
TWICE!!!
Second one I landed directly on my left kneecap. How I didn’t break it I have no idea. It was very hard to walk for 3 weeks and still like to cramp up every now and then. A great weekend for all of us. I know this because they just LOVE to bring it up.
I gave myself a black eye when I was a kid. After watching my step-dad balance and spin an aluminum baseball bat on his palm, I thought I could do it too.
I also scarred my knee for life while rollerblading, five minutes after my mom said “Wear your knee pads or you’ll scar your knees for life!”
I’m still recovering from a sprained toe from slipping down the stairs.
My Dad used to use a Tilley lamp to light his garage. This is a paraffin (Brit for “kerosene”) burner that has a pressurised tank to pump a fine spray through a nozzle, where it is warmed, vapourises, burns with a blue flame, and heats a mantle white-hot so that it will glow merrily away. The mantle and burner have a glass surround with a metal chimney on top. It’s all very fuel-efficient and smoke-free and whacks out at least as much light as a 100W bulb, maybe more.
One evening I was fetching something from the garage and I thought the lamp was burning a little dim, so I gave it a pump or two. The right way to steady the lamp while you do it is to hold it by the base - the fuel tank - with your free hand. The wrong way is to slap your hand on top of the chimney. You know, the metal bit that sits about two inches above a blue flame that’s been burning for an hour or two.
The question is not whether I was certifiable, but why the black-hot metal gave me only the biggest third-degree burn it’s possible to fit onto the palm of your hand. The supplementary question is why I didn’t spend the next half an hour with my hand up to the wrist in ice-cold water. Over the course of the next day or two all of the little blisters amalgamated into one giant blister. Interesting, in its way, but it’s extremely questionable whether the “interesting” aspect outweighs the “agonizing”, even from nearly 30 years on.
As a father, I find myself extremely disheartening that one or both of my sons will probably do something at least as painful to themselves during their formative years.
That was mostly before my time, I was born in 1976. Plus I’m a guy and an only child.
I used to have weak ankles as a child- had to go to PT and all. I sprained my ankles about once a year, rotating each ankle so one year my right ankle was hurt and the next year it was my left. One year I somehow managed to sprain my right ankle while SWIMMING. We still haven’t figured that one out.
One night, at the beginning of soccer practice, we couldn’t get onto the field due to the chain link fence being locked. There was a small space to squeeze through, but being the dumb 10 year olds we were, we decided to climb the fence. Well that fence had little spikey things at the top and my left hand went right down onto one of those spikes. I had a nice hole in my hand for a while and I still have the scar. Oh, and did I mention I’m left handed? Had to have my mom write out my homework and things for a while.
My freshman year in high school, again during soccer practice, I missed the soccer ball and hit the back of someone’s cleat with my foot. I managed to chip the bone in my big toe. You could see a huge hunk taken out in the x-ray. I was on crutches for a week.
I have so many more stupid injury stories, one of which involves sliding into 2nd base on asphalt.
Oooh, my turn, my turn!
At the age of eight I bicycled face-first into an aluminum mailbox. It was the summer of 1977 and I was trying to ride around with my eyes closed and Use the Force.
A few years later a friend andI were playing soccer. We both tries to kick the ball at the same time. Result: we kicked each other’s feet and I sprained my big toe.
Another few years later I dislocated my right thumb while playing an arcade game.
Howzzat?
Two hours ago, in the shower with my foot propped on the edge of the tub for leg shaving purposes. Foot slips off tub and I catch myself…with my HEAD. Ow.
[Yoda]Do or do not … there is no try, I’m afraid the force is not too strong in this one[/Yoda] 
Now for my stupid self inflicted wound, when I was about 11 years old I found an old .22 shell in a can in the shed. I tried to remove the lead from the end but it was “stuck” so I grabbed a hammer… with my ears ringing so loud I couldn’t hear myself crying I ran to the shed and used a pair of pliers to remove the exploded brass shell from the bone in the back of my little finger. I told my mom the neighbors dog bit me. I still have the scar.
About two weeks ago I herniated a disk in my lower back while I was sleeping. I still don’t know how I managed to do that. I just remember yelling myself awake at 3 a.m.
A couple weeks ago, I was working on my serratus anterior muscles for Pilates class and managed to strain the joint between my ribs and sternum.
Wow, I didn’t even know you could strain your rib-sternum joint.
Yeah, I was kinda surprised myself. Actually, I think it was technically a partial dislocation, but I guess straining and dislocation tend to go hand in hand.
And hanging out with a bunch of ex-ballet dancers, you hear about the oddest injuries. For example, one person accidentally broke one of her vertebrae doing a back-bend–she was so flexible that the force ended up being concentrated in too small an area, and it exceeded to load that the bone could take.
Back in November, I pulled an Ozzy*.
I was riding a four-wheel ATV on a friend’s farm and saw a neighbor pulling onto the drive. I looked up to see if he was going to the barn or to the house. When I finally returned my full attention to matters closer at hand, I was airborne over a gully and heading straight into the opposite bank. I had just enough time to think “This is really going to hurt!” The ATV strikes the bank, sending me straight forward. My thighs strike the handlebars, bending the sh*t out of them, leaving massive contusions, tearing my jeans, and inverting me relative to my previous riding position. Now I’m thinking “I was wrong; this is really going to hurt!” I strike the ground head-first, briefly losing consciousness. When I came around, I am certain I have just broken my neck and I am going to die. I laid there in the pasture for nearly 30 minutes, slowly regaining feeling in my legs (unfortunately) and waiting for my friend and the neighbor to realize that the ATV is no longer running and I am nowhere to be seen. I feel my hat next to my arm and start waving it in the air, being careful not to move too much. They finally drive across the pasture and reach me just as I tire of waiting and decide to try getting up on my own. My thighs and knees are really hurting at this point and it is difficult to stand but I manage just as the truck stops next to me - good thing because I really needed something to lean against. “Are you okay?” “No. But I’ll live; I think.” I ride up to the house to clean upo and further assess the damage. I notice some blood on my shoe as I sit on the couch. I manage to remove my shoes and socks and realize I have a deep laceration on my heel. Very deep. Mike comes in and I ask him to look at it.
Mistake #2: Never show a serious wound requiring medical attention to a former Green Beret. He’ll be excited to try out the suturing techniques he learned in training but never got to use on a live human subject.
No f**king way, I want a real doctor, like the guy who actually owns the farm I was on; unfortuinately, he was 75 miles away at a conference. We go into town to Doc’s clinic to see if one of his nurses can patch me up - preferably Christy, the one I’ve been working up the nerve to ask out on a date.
Mistake #3: Never show a serious wound to a woman you don’t know very well but really want to get to know. She now says she can’t think about me without thinking of what my heel looked like that day.
The nurses at the clinic make comments about the severity of the wound. Carrie’s first comment was “Dumbass!” There was always something about her I didn’t like and Christy tells me I really need to go to the ER since I lost consciousness and may have a compression fracture in my neck and the sutures necessary are beyond her abilities. So it’s off to the ER. The ER turned out to be a fairly pleasant experience. It was a small-town hospital and there was only one other patient so I was seen right away. I suffered through a series of Xrays and went back down to be sewn up. Funny thing was that I never felt a thing in my heel the whole time. The only pain I expereinced with it was an occasional twinge when I stretched the skin against the sutures. My neck turned out to be no more than a bad sprain. It has been incredibly difficult to deal with. I can’t get comfortable to sleep, I can’t do much work on cars, and even driving is still bothering me a bit (looking over my shoulder before changing lanes is still hard to do, over three months after the accident.
*I call it an Ozzy, but we really need to call his accident a Sewalk since mine occured some weeks before his. OTOH, he is somewhat better known than I am and I wouldn’t want this event to be what causes the world to remember me, so I’ll go ahead and let the “fooking prince of darkness” get the additional notoriety.