I have a good story that could only happen in my province -
One of my Dad’s best friends first job out of school was as a meteorology person up in Churchill.
Driving home drunk one night, he came upon a polar bear in middle of the road.
He figured no problem, he would just nudge the bear out of the way with the car.
He survived. The car did not.
When I was three, I was playing “doggy” on the stairs- we had one of those older mobile homes where all the steps and edges are SHARP. Ran the corner of the stairs right through my cheek. I was so terrified of the doctor that I didn’t cry or make a sound. He was impressed and gave me a ton of lollipops- which of course I couldn’t eat until my stitches came out (that was torture! )
The ultimate stupid injury I had was when I was 10 or so. My best friend and her cousin and I were playing cowboys & Indians and I let them talk me into be hanged :eek: with a jump rope on our swing set. They promised to hold me up but for some reason didn’t do such a good job and I had pretty bad rope burns. I didn’t tell my mom right away, but she made me confess when she saw the burns. I’m not sure which hurt worse, the rope burns or the major spanking I got for trying to get myself killed.
When I was like 8 or 9 years old. My parents were hosting some kind of Elders & Deacons meeting for our church. My brother and I and another kid of one of the parents there went upstairs to my room to play and keep out of the way.
It was nighttime out so we decided to play Night Crawler. You turn out the lights a crawl around on the floor playing tag. The room needs to be pitch black so you can’t see a thing. Hmmm … kids playing in the dark?
So as we started, I turned out the lights. Then I quickly squatted down to get on the floor. Dumb me forgot I was standing right next to the dresser. Wham, my two front teeth meat the corner of the very hard dresser. I let out a blood curtailing scream. Someone finds the lights and as I stand up I take my hand away from my mouth, no blood (one of the few times). Showing my brother my new smile I ask “Did I chip them? … It kind of feels like I did!” His eyes become saucers and he looks down. I look down and see quite literally fragments
of my teeth all over the floor! I had sheered them off a the gum line. We gather them up and go downstairs to end the meeting. So now I have two fake font teeth!
While in nursery school I was being chased by a boy and while running, turned to look behind me.
I ran directly into a long wooden table, painful enough, except my thumb ran along it’s edge. A HUGE sliver under my tumbnail.
Very painful and excrutiating to remove.
And I, unlike some in this thread, was not stupid enough to stick my hand in a door, oh no! I felt that if they saw my face they wouldn’t slam the door on it. I was wrond and had two bruises on either side of my head for days.
{Goofy}Goosh, Micky!{/Goofy}
I remember stapling my thumb at age 3 and at age 4. Once with the stapler, once by somehow removing the stable that was holding a brown bag shut. Why? No idea.
“No self brakes” Age 5 trying to fly a kite in the non-windy month of November by running and dragging the kite (a brown bag tied to a string) behind me. Running, looking over shoulder, whip head around to slam face first into tree. No blood, just PA IN P A IN PAIN P A I N P A I N as I drag myself, blawling, back into the apartment building screaming for MOMMIE. Then I must have passed out.
Ages 8-11 were marred by stubbed toes, skinned knees, and splinters in toes.
Could not cross the street without tripping. And the bitch fights with my sister-can we say hair loss, fingernail scratch scars, and bruised ego/feelings?
Then age 9 (I think) trying to punch holes into jar lid (for hunting lighting bugs, I think) with jackknife or a steakknife, unclear memory which, and the blade slipped and dug into my left hand web between the thumb & forefinger. Bloood. All over the place. Stiches needed. I screamed as if all the demons of hell were doing the stich up job, even with the Novacaine. The scar is still visible if you know to look.
Not a terrible injury, but very very stupid…
I was about 5 years old and our family had gone over to visit an elderly neighbor. Sweet old elderly neighbor indicates a cactus plant on her porch and warns my brother and me not to touch it. The very* instant * she turned away, I touched the cactus. Nothing happened. Smugly, I caught my brother’s eye, and just to impress him, squeezed the dickens out of that cactus. Several spines impaled my fingers, and because I was afraid to tell anyone I’d touched the plant, I suffered the pain until bedtime, when my mother noticed my red, swollen hand.
Ouch. I couldn’t even finish reading this thread - my nerves were going haywire (sympathy pains I guess). It’s amazing most of us make it to adulthood!
I never got hurt seriously as a kid. Broke a finger playing tetherball (I still hate the kid that I was playing against, that was 11 years ago hah). Couple of bike crashes. Once, I thought I could jump a curb (probably a 7" vertical one) and wrecked in front of someone’s house. Palms, both elbows, knees, all bloody. Had to call Grandma to come get me because all my joints were bleeding and it hurt too bad to walk a mile home.
Hit a neighbor’s mailbox once. Riding my bike, looked down at my shoe, noticed it was untied, then SMACK. Luckily it was a plastic one but I busted the shit out of it. The mailblox flew off and the beam it was sitting on half fell off. I ran to their door asking them to help me because my glasses flew off when I crashed and I couldn’t find them (I have pretty bad eyesight).
A friend hit me square in the nose with a Barbie once. I was pretty little, four or five, and blood freaked me out. I don’t recall this, but my dad says he had to come and take me home because I was freaking out about all the blood, which of course made my nose bleed worse, etc.
But other than that, no injury stands out. Compared to what happened to everyone on this thread and other people I know, I am lucky!
Not an injury but a major embarassment. I was 8 years old attending my oldest cousin’s wedding. At the reception and dinner, the kitchen was located on the second floor and there was a balcony overlooking the main floor. I was not tall enough to reach it so I got on top of a large cooking pot 18" in diameter and 2 feet tall. The pot was about 3/4 full of warm baked beans. Well, as i adjusted my position, the lid tilted and I fell feet first into the large pot. I was OK but with everyone laughing around me, I just remember crying. It ruined my tuxedo for the night. I had to spend the rest wearing shorts.
I’ve never been graceful, but when I was a little kid, there was a piece of playground equipment I swear was out for my blood. It was a curved piece of monkey bars called the Rainbow. I had to have my forehead sewn up at least twice, not because I fell off it(I wasn’t that stupid), but because I’d run into it. Yep, just ran smack into it. Twice.
-Lil
Ooh, or there was the time my friend and I were playing around with this rope hammock, designed for one person, that was hung up on our porch. One of us would get inside and the other would twist it up and let go, spinning the hammock around and around. So I’m inside, and Sarah’s winding it up when the whole thing comes crashing down. I get the breath knocked out of me, and Sarah decides I’m dying. Once I caught my breath, we realized what we’d done. The swing was hanging by a hook that had been screwed into the ceiling so as we turned it around, we were unscrewing the hook. Yep, didn’t tell the parents about that one.
-Lil
Once, when I was about 5, I tried to swing on a rope by holding onto it with my teeth (it worked in the cartoons dammit!).
Lost a few of my baby teeth on that one.
An OK story, but not quite worth telling twice. 
No good stories from my childhood (other than the old flying-off-the-jump-and-seeing-the-bicycle-wheel-come-off ploy) but my son was always good for trips to the emergency room.
Best one was he and a friend playing on a jungle gym/slide at a park a few blocks away. The (metal) slide had a bar at the top about two feet above the start. I guess the idea was to sling under the bar and go faster. His idea was to do a flip over the bar. The idea wasn’t too bad except that he was just barely tall enough to hit the top of the slide. That is, he was exactly tall enough to catch the top of his head on the thin metal edge at the top of the slide.
I’d heard that, back in the olden days, there were people who had been scalped but not killed. This was pretty close. Peeled back a large flap of scalp.
A neighbor witnessed this and told him to go home for help. By the time he got there he was covered in blood. It took the doctor about five minutes just to find where the bleeding began. But he stitched it up and, other than a funny haircut for a while and a hidden scar, it all ended okay.
He also broke his arm playing football in the seventh grade and was so frustrated at not being able to do things with a cast on that he punched (with his good hand) a kitchen stool. You guessed it – boxer’s fracture. He was famous for a while for having casts on both arms.
When I was about 8, I let my best friend from across the street come over so we could play in the back yard. First mistake - my mother was asleep and I was not supposed to have anyone over or leave the house. Then we decided that swinging in the swings on the swingset was BORING! So we were going to swing from sheets that we tied to the swingset. Now, I knew that my mother would kill me if I used her good sheets for that - so we got out the old ones. With the predictable results that mine split out from under me, dumping me about 4 feet to the ground, flat on my back. I wound up with a broken collar bone, but no lecture. Not one of my brighter moments.
My brother, on the other hand, broke his arm in 3 places jumping out of a swing. I don’t remember how high up he was, but I remember being impressed.
This, “When the ER doctor asked me when I’d last had a tetanus shot, I answered, ‘yesterday,’” posted by JerH, was frigging hilarious.
At 7 I slammed the ring finger of one hand in a door, resulting in a black fingernail that provided hours of entertainment picking at fossilized blood when the nail part actually fell off, and ripped the ring finger of the other hand off in a chain-link fence soon after. A couple of weeks before that, I fell down playing tag, ripping a chunk out of my knee that was deep enough to show bone.
I bruised the hell out of the bottom of my foot at 13 from vaulting off the roof of a building. I couldn’t walk on it for a week. I may have even cracked the bone; I never got it x-rayed. I pulled a groin muscle at around 13 or 14 from imitating a karate instructional video my dad got me. The punching bag was swinging, I missed slightly, the bag swung back, trapping me with my leg at full extension. Extricating myself was not fun.
In the spectacularly stupid category, I sliced through an orange I was holding in my hand. Yes, in my hand. What about the fingers holding the orange, you ask? Why didn’t I ask myself that question before slicing into the orange? I only managed slice off the tip of my middle finger, miraculously missing the others. I was 12, I should have known better.
Just before starting high school I spectacularly wrecked my bike. I raced at full speed toward a square curb that I remembered was partially filled in with dirt, making a decent, if tiny, ramp. Unfortunately, it had rained recently. The front wheel went up, but the back wheel also hit the curb, bouncing the back end of the bike higher than the front. I got some decent height, but my flight attitude needed some adjusting. I hit front wheel first, bent the forks in toward the frame, which promptly stopped the rotation of the front tire. The whole bike, with me tenuously attached, turned linear velocity into angular, until I hit the ground and slid.
Did I mention that I was wearing only shorts, a tank top, and sandals? I think I lost about half the skin on one side of my body. I’ve still got a few patches of scars. What was worse is that this was next to a major road. Some asshole in a car saw what happened and laughed at me. I had to drag my non-functional bike back home. I even managed to bend the frame a little. We couldn’t afford another bike, so I was bikeless after that.
My more serious wounds were later, as an adult. I put my hand through a window while trying to break into my locked room from the outside at age 20 or so, slicing the hell out of my arm. I sometimes use that scar as a joke story, “I was in a knife fight one time. . .” because considering where I grew up it’s believable. I broke both my wrists and my nose, as well as splitting open my chin by taking a really bad fall so that a kid wouldn’t get injured. The ending wasn’t exactly accidental since I chose to take a chance on getting hurt instead of the kid, but the situation was stupid and avoidable. I made it 26 years without a broken bone, despite doing all sorts of dangerous stuff as a kid, but made up for it all at once.
If we can do third-person stories…
My sister (14 months younger than me) had many trips to the emergency room as we were growing up. Most of them happened in a single year, to the same ER, when we were four and five years old, to the point that my mother was honestly afraid that she would be arrested for child abuse if she showed up there again. These trips included:
[ul]Getting her hand shut in a closed door. (Not just pinched, the door was actually closed enough that it had to be unlocked to free her hand.) Pinched finger.[/ul]
[ul]Getting her hand shut in a car door. Again, just a badly bruised finger.[/ul]
[ul]Getting her thumb and forefinger burned from sticking a bobby pin into an electrical outlet. (Both she and I were terrified of electrical outlets for many months after that incident.)[/ul]
[ul]Getting a gash in her forehead from a can of Silly Foam. (She and I were taking a bath together. We played in the tub a lot, and when our mother came in to get us out of the tub, she slipped in the water that had spilled from the tub to the floor. Her hand hit the can of Silly Foam–imagine a can of whipped cream with soap in it instead–and it flew across the tub and slammed into my sister’s forehead, requiring 5 or 6 stitches. She still has a scar more than 30 years later.)[/ul]
[ul]Falling off the top bed of a bunk bed and getting knocked unconscious. (To be honest, I actually remember falling off the bed myself, but our mother insists that it was my sister.)[/ul]
[ul]Tripping while dancing to a kid’s 45 on the turntable, hitting her head on the fireplace hearth, and being knocked unconscious. (I ran upstairs and told my mother that she was dead!)[/ul]
[ul]Eating an unfamiliar fruit on a plant in the backyard, at the prompting of her big sister and next door neighbor. (It was a perfectly safe wild blackberry plant!)[/ul]
[ul]Slipping down a hill on her way to school, and landing on a broken glass bottle, cutting her hand in the process.[/ul]
[ul]Falling at an uncle’s house, with her hand landing in a BBQ pit filled with lava rock, cutting her hand in the process. (This was the same uncle’s house where I ran through the sliding glass door a couple of summers earlier, BTW.)
[/ul]
Our youngest brother actually broke his foot by jumping from a 10-foot high ledge into a wading pool with about 1 inch of water in it. He was dared to do it by his older brother and a friend, but ended up in a cast. The worst part is that it happened the very day we were moving from TX to NC, and our parents had sent us to a friend’s house to play and swim while the movers were loading our stuff into the moving van. (Note: This was a year after my own eye injury which happened only a few days before we moved from NC to TX. I have a strong feeling that my parents thought they were doomed at that point.)
God, please, please, I hope it was the nail of the ring finger that was ripped off- and not the finger itself!!!
I broke my leg at summer camp sitting on a bench. Metal bench. Collapsable metal bench.
Eating lunch- it collapsed and pinned my ankle and broke it. They kept telling me to walk on it, it will feel better. Ha. :rolleyes:
My sister and I were trying to cut a coin slit in an empty light bulb box so that we could use it as a bank. Under supervision in the kitchen with my mum, using her good sewing scissors.
Problem: We were just scraping the points of the blades against the box, instead of stabbing half of the scissors all the way through. (Hey, I was in kindergarten so I wasn’t exactly the top of the intellectual food chain) My sister was handling the scissors, and I figured I’d help out by putting my fingers on the blades. This helped. Until the blades sliced through the bumps on the corrugated cardboard and slammed shut, taking part of the end of my thumb with it.
I remember Mom freaking and calling my dad, clutching my hand in a bloody towel, with both of us sitting on the floor while I howled. Suffice it to say, the doctor slapped the missing bit o’ flesh on my thumb and put me in a cast, good ol’ Spanish-American War style. :eek: I had to go around with my arm straight up to keep the blood from pooling in my hand for weeks.
20 years later, I still have a perfectly round, raised scar on my thumb, which is going to ID me right off should I ever knock over a bank.
My Dad was in the Army and he had access to some parachutes which were all packed and everything, but the Army didn’t want them anymore, so anyone could have them. My Mom asked him to bring one home so she could use the material they were made of. He brought it home and left it in the garage. My 8 YO brother thought it would be fun to try it and I (6 years old) was the perfect guinea pig. We went up on the roof (2-story house, climbed out of his bedroom window) with me wearing the parachute, hand clutching the pull-cord, approached the edge of the roof, I looked down and began having second thoughts, started to back up, he decided to “help” me by pushing me off. I did pull the cord, but it opened a second AFTER I landed in the front yard. Crying. My Mom was both disgusted and pissed with both of us. Understandably.
Reading this thread makes me think some crafty entrepreneur should create a series of videos for children demonstrating the catastrophic consequences of doing all these dumb things kids do, sort of like the gory driver’s ed videos. I’d like my kids to be terrified of electrical outlets, hot things, jumping off high things, etc. but I’d like to avoid them finding out through experience. Video-induced trauma really seems like the way to go. 