I fell out of a tree when I was a child, landing hard on my back, but thankfully I wasn’t hurt too badly.
We had a standing office fan on the landing of our two-story apartment, and one night in the darkness, I was walking barefoot down the stairs and caught the little toe of my right foot on it, badly. The toenail eventually came off. I still have a little white line scar.
The worst injury was probably a large “goose egg” on my head when I crashed head-first into another running child on the playground at school.
I never had any super serious injuries as a kid. I’ve never had a broken bone in my life. The joke between my younger sister and me is that I always ended up injuring her or talking her into doing things that resulted in her injury while I came out unscathed. Like the time we were messing around with a cinder block, and I dropped it… on her foot. Or the time I made a “bed” by placing an inflatable pool floaty air mattress thing between the couch and a table, and convinced her to lay on it. Of course it couldn’t support her weight and she fell and hit her head and had to get stitches.
The one time the situation above was reversed and she injured me was when our family was on vacation in Maine. I was around 7, so she would have been around 4 years old. We were on some rocky shoreline, possibly Acadia National Park. She was trying to climb on some big rock. I placed my hand on that rock, and she fell and smacked her head on my hand. It was actually incredibly lucky that she landed on my hand; if my hand hadn’t been there she would have hit her head on the rock and been seriously injured. But it still was not fun to have my hand smashed between a rock and her head.
When I was 12, I was hit by a car while riding a bicycle. I wasn’t doing anything crazy, just riding along. The car just drifted over the line onto the shoulder where I was riding.
Broke my leg in three places (thigh bone, both bones of the lower leg).
It was never quite the same.
Let’s see if I can remember all the ER and doctor’s office visits.
A football injury in high school with a broken arm. The funny thing if you knew me as a kid was that I was a bookworm with no athletic ability. It was in 9th grade gym class. We were all divided up into teams of about five or six kids, with one really good person who would be the quarterback for the team, and one total klutz (me!) to hike the ball and block the klutz on the other team.
At the end of the “season” another team and us were undefeated. Our quarterback (who became the high school QB as a senior) devised a play to send our receivers wide right and left, and have me run out a few steps, “buttonhook” (apparently means just turn around) and he would softly toss the ball to me. I then ran down and scored.
One of the players on the other team caught me by the arm after I scored, spun me around him and let me fly. I broke my fall with my arm, breaking it in the process and was in a cast for six weeks. The good thing was that it got me out of gym for the next year.
When I was 17, I had a waterskiing accident where I came into shore too closely at full speed. A broken bone in my hand which required two surgeries. We were six hours away from the hospital and I started fainting from pain and fatigue by the time the doctor saw me.
My dad threw me down the stairs once but I only sprained my wrist. He told the ER that I “slipped.”
Another time, he slapped me hard enough that I fell backward and hit my head on the sharp corner of the wood chair and needed stitches. Another “accident.”
Last injury was when I was washing dishes and cut myself, requiring another bunch of stitches. It’s just the right place where a person would try to slit my wrist and I’ve had people notice it.
I was about 12. I was riding my brother’s sting ray bike around the driveway. Went flying between my mom’s station wagon and my dad’s VW Beetle. One of my friends was sitting in the VDub and opened the door at a very bad moment. I flew over the VW door and hit the garage wall, next to the door, about 4ft. off the ground. I think my head was down, legs up. I was pretty messed up but didn’t say anything to my parents. It was probably a year before I no longer had pain from the several locations on my body that got injured in that episode.