Has anyone else noticed that almost all of these stories seem to be written by guys? That must explain why the average life expectancy is higher for females - many of us males don’t make it out of adolescence!
Here’s mine:
I was about 11 years old. My cousin was giving me a ride home on the handlebars of his bicycle, and we were coasting down a hill on a nice gravel road. I was swinging my feet and caught my heel in the spokes of the front wheel. Hey, instant catapult!! I slid about 10 feel on my face, ripping my forehead wide open. Took about 30 stitches to close, and to this day (I’m 41) I still have a beautiful Frankenstein-style scar on my forehead.
Redressing the balance for female childhood stupidity, I’ve been known to trouble the local casualty department. Aged 4 falling off a swing, bawling, putting my arm out for mum followed by a nice Ker-unch as the swing came back and broke my wrist. (A month later, my cousin and I, having both managed broken arms, spent a night sharing a bed and beating one another across the head with our respective plasters.)
Then there was the unfortunate incident of the bumble bee, a pink and orange Ladybird shorts set that he mistook for a flower, and being pursued by my Nan clutching a blue bag to take away the sting (wasn’t that supposed to be for wasps?). Which in turn resulted in a close encounter with a flagstone, and a new and interesting scar the shape of Africa on my right knee.
Followed by the “I wonder if my bike will go straight if I take my hands of the handleb…OOOWWW” and a nice trail of blood home from a smashed hand.
The same arm was victim again when I put on my new birthday roller skates, went across the room to take off my watch (smart) and fell, crushing my arm on the hearth (back to the stupidity). One hospital casualty visit, accompanied by one father in filthy overalls (all medical staff pressed themselves to the walls as he passed), three operations, a year in plaster, considerable expertise in reaching inaccessible itches and bathing with carrier bags, and a strange phenomenon known as “floating arm” on the day the plaster finally came off.
The park down the street from my house used to have the old school style playground–wood and metal, with sand underneath. So much more fun than the new plastic and foam play sets. There was a tire swing, which was one of my favorite things at the park when I was little. It was a real tire, suspended by three chains, so when you sat in it there was a chain opposite you. One day I got in it by myself, sat down, and got bashed in the lip with the chain when it came up according to Newton’s Laws of Motion. I had a fat lip for a few days, and I was a lot more careful on the tire swing after that.
And when my mom was little, she was on a seesaw with her brother. She got off, her brother went down, the end of the seesaw came up, and she bit a hole through her lower lip.
The summer between 5th and 6th grades I managed to break my right femur twice, in two different places, on separate occasions.
First time, I’m coming home on my bike near dinnertime, I see my brother walking home. I call out a challenge to race, figuring I have the advantage. He begins running across the yards, I’m pedalling for all I’m worth in the street. I’m going too fast for the turn into the driveway, lay on the brakes, get sideways going past the driveway, let off the brakes. This somehow vaults me up off of the bike and I land halfway on the driveway. Mom in the house doesn’t believe the tale of brother in the driveway with broken leg, and I’m still there when Dad gets home. Dad’s a vet, so he just immobilizes the legs together and swings me up into the back of the hatchback, battlefield evac style.
a month of traction later I’m in a pika cast. a month after that, they take me out of that monster with many promises to me to be careful, so we can go on vacation. At the resort, I had tested the deck of the swimming pool, and I didn’t slip. Surrounding the swimming pool deck was lots of artificial turf, no problem. Later, Cocky on the crutches, I take a short cut across this deck while booking along. Swift lesson in the difference between the static and sliding co-efficients of friction. Luckily the Pool was full of vacationing firemen. No one believes the leg is broken again, and it’s our last day there, so I get to hang out until Mom is done with the Bridge Tournament, then I’m put back in the Hatchback for the trip home.
I’m complaining enough that they go to the ER when we get back into town. This time, It’s surgical traction for me. I have scars where it looks like I’ve been shot through the shin, where the pin went through.
I Guess I wasn’t technically a Minor, so not by any stretch a child when I shattered my elbow on the pavement, falling off of the comically overloaded tupperware scooter.
I’ve been thinking of more. I might have told this one, but ah well. This is one my brother’s friend did:
We were sitting on my brother’s wood flooring, eating bananas, when my brother’s friend wonders if banana peels are really slipperly like they are in cartoons. He decides to find out. He puts the the banana peel on the floor backs up a couple paces, and sprits toward the banana peel. His heel lands on the banana peel, and he quickly finds out that they are in fact, very slippery. With both legs up in the air he lands hard on his tailbone. He either bruised it or broke it. Looked painful but was very, very funny to watch.
Ohh man. It’d have to be the time I was at a neighbor’s house and we were running across their hardwood floor in our socks and then sliding as far as we could.
I made it under the table without bonking my head, but I got a splinter imbedded in my toe so far that it took my dad about half an hour to dig it out. Childhood without health insurance is so much fun.
That’s not quite as bad as what happened to my brother at the same neighbors’ house when he decided to ride one of those snow saucers down the stairs. He’s just lucky he fell off before he hit the front door face first.
When I was 4, I was playing with a sparkler on the 4th of July. I was scared by the sparks, and moved it away from my face. Laid it directly on my leg.
I can still see a very faint scar, 19 years later…
Papa Zappa once proved that an electric warming tray couldn’t be hot because it wasn’t glowing. His attempt failed. As a college freshman, he dove into a swimming pool. The shallow end of the swimming pool. Damfool was lucky enough to only break off his two front teeth, not his neck.
One of my brothers broke his foot while rolling down a hill in an old truck inner tube. He put his foot out to slow himself down. This was several hours after he’d had a cast removed from his newly-healed broken hand.
Another brother was horsing around a house under construction. He and his buddies had somehow gotten onto the second floor of the house (it had no stairs yet). He fell headfirst through the stairway opening, into the basement. He lived but was a different kid afterward.
At age 6, I put a safety pin in an electrical outlet, with predictable results.
Dweezil moved funny when trying stand up on the bottom step of the playground equipment at his preschool. Broke his upper armbone so that from the side, the arm appeared to be Z-shaped. Rather sickening to look at. Only a kid of mine could be so clumsy as to get such a vicious break in such safe circumstances!
Ah, electricity! I had a Capsela set with a little electric moter that ran on 2 AA batteries. It wasn’t going fast enough, so I figured it would go much faster on the house’s 220V current. Stuck the two (barely insulated) leads into the outlet, the motor reved up to about 30,000 RPM for a second, then BAM! The current found a new path to ground, me.
I swear my heart stopped for a second - when I came to, the motor was all melty and smoking. I wish I could even say that was the last time I almost electrocuted myself…
All of my class is playing tag on the playground. For reference, we have a bit of a jungle-gym going on where you crawl through tubes and climb up robes and all that stuff, and part of the layout is a short slide to the ground with a handlebar/railing just about eye-level above it. A smart kid (emphasis on smart) knew to loop around it and swing underneath just in time to slide down.
But we’re playing tag, and everyone’s running around and shrieking and being chased, and my blood’s pumping and my adrenalin’s rushing and two guys are after me, and I launch myself with a defiant war-howl at the slide.
You guessed it. I don’t swing under the bar in time. I go :smack: quite literally, and after a visit to the school nurse’s office for some ice and some more tears, I get a beautiful blue-purple shiner for the next week or so.
When I was 10 years old the boy two houses up and his brother took to sneaking through the back of our property in order to steal strawberries from the farm which backed onto us. My brothers and I felt that we should be the sole beneficiaries of living next to a strawberry farm and seeing the other boys weren’t willing to pay appropriate tribute to us, we declared war on them.
So we spent long days sitting in our back yard patrolling the border, only to find they were sneaking in at night through a hole in the fence. So I decided to up the technological stakes in the war and set a booby trap. The trap was a complex arrangement of sticks designed to unleashed half a house brick which would swing from the top of a very tall tree and clobber anyone coming trough.
My brothers mocked me - such a thing would never work. “Yes it will” I maintained, and stepped on the stick which was designed to set the whole thing in motion. I then watched transfixed as stick A unbalanced stick B which caused big stick C to fall and knock out little stick D, and then stood spellbound as the half brick swung in a graceful arc down from the tall tall gum tree and smashed me squarely between the eyes. Blood shot out like a fountain as my brothers collapsed in hysterical, if ever-so-admiring, laughter
Ah, damn. I got here looking for why Scooter’s on stitches. It seems obvious that those search terms are well-represented in this thread. Well worth resurecting, I say!
While I’m here - I once played freeze tag on a wet tennis court. Totally slipped and landed squarly on my chin. I don’t think I even cried, just calmly walked over to my parents with my life blood streaming onto my white t-shirt. I must have looked horrifying.
When I was younger, much younger than I am now, I had a rather annoying trait of needing to prove my detractors wrong (a trait that hasn’t completely gone away, but… I digress). So one cool Autumn day while coming from a field trip, the teachers decided to take a rest at the park and let us play around. A boy in my kindergarten class named Jimmy told me that since I was a girl, he bet that I couldn’t climb those large, wooden red blocks all the way to the top. With much grunting and jumping, I did.
Unfortunately, something distracted me and caused me to lose my balance, perhaps the promise of cookies and juice by Ms. Pendleton, and I fell directly on my chin, smashing my upper and lower teeth together, cracking my neck, and causing small grains of gravel and other particulates to become embedded in my chin.
So I lay there crying my eyes out, as my kindergarten teacher took me, a wailing kindergartener back to the school with her.
By the time I got to school, the front of my shirt was covered in blood. So my father was called as I waited in the secretary’s office (the school was too small and cheap to have a nurse’s office, so the secretary served as a nurse). I got sent home early and for two weeks, I couldn’t eat solid foods.
At least I proved that rotten Jimmy Stevens wrong. Nyah.
When I first started reading this thread, I didn’t remember doing any kind of dumb stunts when I was growing up. As I read through the ones already posted though, suppressed memories started coming back.
When I was about eight or nine, I was at a week-long Girl Scout summer camp. I had a noseplug thing that I wore when swimming to keep water out of my noise, attached to a long rubber strap so you could wear it like a necklace. We were getting ready to head to the lake to swim, and I was sitting on the porch of our cabin waiting for the others. I started flipping the nose plug on its cord like a slingshot toward my face. It thwacked me in one eye very hard. The nurse just slapped a patch on it, and told me not to swim for the rest of the three days camp was in session. When my parents got there three days later to pick me up, they had me remove the patch, then they threw all of my stuff immediately into the car, and we drove straight to the ER. The eye was badly infected, with a risk of infecting the other eye, and the iris had detached from the sclera. I spent the next three days in the hospital with both eyes patched, to keep my injured eye as still as possible. I had to wear a patch on the injured eye for about six more weeks, and I still have double vision as a result. (I’m quite happy to have any vision in it, to tell the truth.)
A couple of years later, my sister and I were visiting our grandparents in lieu of going to Girl Scout camp. (Gee, I wonder why…) One of my uncles had a pool, and we decided we wanted to go swimming. So I ran back to the house to ask permission. I swear I saw cigarette smoke floating through the apparently closed sliding glass door just before I ran through it. My left knee and right hand broke the glass, and I have scars to prove it. (A total of 13 stitches!)
Probably the most stupid one though… I was about 13 or so, and I spent the night with a friend who lived a block or so away. When we got up the next morning, I put on my nice fluffy slipper socks (this was years before anyone thought of putting tread on them), and headed down the spiral staircase from her loft to the kitchen. The stairs had thick new carpeting on them, and my fluffly slipper sock just slid straight down the spiral stairs. One of the wrought iron supports went between my middle toe and the toe next to the pinky toe. When I pulled off the sock, the fourth toe was completely bent over the pinky toe. I called my parents to come get me, but my father refused to believe I had actually broken a toe, so my friend’s mother drove me home. Then my mother took me to the ER to have the broken toe taped back in place to heal. (Now I know why they call them “slippers”!)
I remember being about 4 or 5 and playing “birdy” by perching like a bird on our front porch railing. Squatting down with my feet on the railing and my hands just either side of them. Unfortunately I lost my balance and swung down face-first onto the concrete porch.
Another time we were playing “slam the doors” – running all over the house (me, my brother, and a neighborhood friend) and slamming doors in each others’ faces. My pinky finger got slammed shut in the hinge side of the door. Still have a scar from the stitches for that one. That was also when I was about 4. Not a hot year.
A previous post said that most of the dumb injuries seemed to have been had by boys, well I’m a girl and I had plenty of dumb injuries. Actually, there were a lot of incidents that should have ended in injury but didn’t. Too many injuries to mention them all so I will just go with the Goldfish Incident.
I was about 10. My goldfish died and he needed a proper burial. I wrapped in in paper towels and then put him in an empty single serving cereal box, (you know the ones that open to form a bowl?) they makes a perfect goldfish sized coffin. I took a spade from the garage and chose my spot. I had seen my father dig holes and I knew how it was done. You put the pade in the dirt and then you stomp on the side of the shovel so it goes into the dirt. Well, I did that and missed the shovel slightly. My foot slid down the side of the shovel with a lot of force. It was too much for my flimsy tennis shoes and it sliced right through. There was much blood.
I started screaming and crying. My cousin was visiting and watching the whole thing, I think he ran into the house to get my mom and aunt and told them I cut my foot off or something. Mom took me to the tub and rinsed my foot off, then bandaged me up. We also had no family health insurance so I didn’t get stitches even though it was pretty long and deep. After over 30 years the scar has finally faded. Luckily I didn’t get tetanus either.
Oh, and the best part was my mom’s sympathetic words, “Next time, flush it!”.
