I did something uncharacteristically dumb last week, now I’m paying for it.
We stopped off at my Sister-in-law’s halfway to Norfolk, where we were to spend the new year’s holiday; there was about half an inch of snow everywhere, maybe a bit more. We don’t often get a good fall of snow down on the south coast, so I we went out for a walk in it before lunch, to give the kids a chance to enjoy it.
So there we are in the park and the kids happen to have walked under a tree; the tree is a youngish one and the branches are nicely covered with snow. A lightbulb appears above my head and I run madly at the tree trunk, shouldering it with a view to knocking the snow down on everyone. The trunk doesn’t budge a millimetre, so I just sort of splat into it sideways; my forearm is trapped horizontally between me and the tree and it pushes really hard into my ribcage. I can’t breathe for a minute.
On top of all this, not a single flake of snow is dislodged upon anyone.
Long story short; it got better for a day or two, then it got worse; I think I’ve cracked a rib; hurts when I move; hurts when I breath; laughing is nasty, sneezing is agony. I phoned the doc, the triage nurse says that as long as I’m not having respiratory problems or coughing up anything interesting (which I’m not), then I just need to tough it out.
Ouch - my sympathies!! I have had the “pleasure” of bruised/cracked ribs thrice in the past and it isn’t fun. The most recent time ended up causing a plural effusion which hasn’t been fun - aged 35 and unable to walk up stairs and talk at the same time :eek:
I pulled a boner the other night. Since I have bad knees, I jog in the house. I have a space of about 30 feet or so. Can’t get any speed, but I can’t get any speed with my knees anyway. It’s more fun than jogging in place, and I don’t have a treadmill. A friend wanted to see my route, so I decided to demonstrate.
Unfortunately, I was wearing my cool skull’n’bones Vans instead of my running shoes. As I trotted into the big empty bedroom I caught my toe on the carpet and crashed into the closet doors. The mirrored closet doors. Smash!
There’s a silver lining, though. I’ve always found a six-and-a-half-foot by six- foot mirrored ‘wall’ a little creepy. Have done, ever since I was bitten by that bat. So now I have incentive to get something better. (I’m thinking folding louvered doors.)
Hey, none of that here Buster!
When I was in college, walking home from a night out, I thought it would be fun to run fast and slide on a long patch of icy sidewalk. All went well until I hit a dry spot in the ice, my foot caught while the rest of me went forward.
Pat Robertson would say it was God’s vengeance on you for wanting to dump snow on your little darlings. You might want to send Pat 20 bucks just in case.
A couple months ago, I was walking down the sidewalk with a bag of Wendys food, while everythings was a little icy.
Since it was cold I was walking pretty fast when I heard a voice behind me. I half turned without slowing down. Caught my ankle and twisted it. My other foot was unable to react to the sudden change of balance as it had no traction,and I slipped arms a-flailin’. I sort of landed hard on/ran into the corner of one of the three foot tall electrical box under my airpit. Somehow I managed to land so that my arm was positioned awkwardly behind the box, and I turned the entire weight of my body into the counterwieght for a very effective Wendy’s bag throwing trebuchet.
I fell to the ground with a twisted ankle, pulled groin, cracked ribs, and hyper-extended arm. And the worst part was that my food was in a wide dispersal pattern centered about 150 feet away.
All because some nice guy wanted to warn me that the sidewalk was icy.
Up in the appalachians some years ago, we got a thick layer of ice over snow. So when I have to head down a steep slope, I didn’t stick to the stairs. I just did my normal thing and took a straight line towards my destination. Diagonally across and down the slope.
For less than one step.
It was so obviously too slippery to walk on that I felt like a complete dumbass. To make things worse, It happened in front of the big windows on the student union so there was probably a big crowd to see it. At least I was unhurt.
Now that right there is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time, having bruised ribs occasionally myself and knowing exactly how that works…
You’ve brought back a memory that I would have preferred remain forgotten.
While travelling, I stopped at a roadside place for a break. The place had a really cool playground with an amazing tall twisty slide. I decided that I was not too old to take a ride on the slide. I climbed the ladder and started down the slippery slope. Immediately I realized a very important fact: slides are made for children, not adults. Between the end of the slide and the ground is a gap of maybe a foot. A little kid with short legs can easily hit the ground running. I, as a long-legged adult, had about two seconds to decide whether I was going to land hard on my butt or hit the ground with my feet and try to run through the fall. I elected to land on my feet. My feet touched down and remained firmly grounded as the rest of my 5’8” body plunged onward and landed face-down in the gravel.
As I slowly, painfully, gracelessly rose from the gravel, I saw a playground full of children staring at me with stunned expressions. I hobbled back to my car in shame.
The other day I sat down to eat a bowl of cereal in front of the TV in the living room off a cheap wooden TV tray. Halfway through the cereal, I heard my cell phone ringing in the next room. I got up to get it, but somehow between stepping out from under the TV tray and trying not to step on the dog, I managed to hook my foot on one leg of the TV tray. Which, amazingly enough, did not fall down.
Unlike me. :smack: I went down on my right hip like I was poleaxed. I’ve spent most of the week hobbling from a nasty deep bone bruise.
In the meantime, while the TV tray remained motionless, the cereal bowl rose a couple of feet in the air, did a perfect 180, and landed face-down in exactly the spot it had started from on the tray. The cereal mostly landed on the tray. The milk, of course, went all over the (wooden) floor.
Only to be lapped up eagerly by my dog. My golden retriever with the severe lactose intolerance. The one who, upon eating one single bite of a dairy product, spends the rest of the day farting, producing the kind of eye-watering miasma that makes strong men run from the room. Needless to say, he was exiled to the hallway for the remainder of the day.
Final score:
TV tray 1 - my hip 0 - farting dog - too many to count!
So, for background, I used to be in the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M. One of the rules there is that freshmen can’t touch their upperclassmen (ie: bumping into them, smacking them upside the head, etc.) unless told to by another upperclassman (ie: when one of our seniors told us to grab a junior and dunk him head first in a toilet. I don’t care how big you are, if thirty 18 year olds decide you’re gonna get dunked in the toilet, and they know they won’t get in trouble for it, you’re gonna get dunked in the toilet )
Anyhow, one day I’m running down the hallway, and I trip over something (probably my left foot), and proceed to fall just like Mangetout’s tree didn’t. Directly in my path is one of the Sophomore cadets, who, acting out of instinct, is holding out his arms so I don’t end up breaking the floor tiles with my face. (Incidentally, the rest of the story isn’t truly funny until I act out each step of it for my audience.) Anyhow, I decide that I don’t want to be caught by one of my upperclassmen, let alone get in trouble for touching one, so I twist in mid-air to avoid him. I slam my right shoulder into the frame of an open door, land hard on my left knee, and then fall over sideways.
Onto the Sophomore cadet’s feet, clad in his freshly-polished shoes. :smack:
I somehow jump back up to my feet, knee and shoulder hurting like hell, and as he’s sucking in a deep breath to yell at me for touching him, and I’m sucking in my breath to declare that it’s not my priviledge to touch him (gotta love these fun rules), one of the juniors figures I may have hurt myself, so she reaches accross the hallway (you have NO idea how crowded this hallway usually was :rolleyes: ), grabbed me by the back of my collar, and physically yanked me away from the sophomore (having an effect that I’m sure wasn’t entirely unlike watching a comedian get yanked off stage by a shepherd’s hook) and sent me back to my room to put some ice on my knee.
Okay, here’s my tale of klutziness and shame. Earlier today, I was loading old newspapers into paper bags to bring them to the recycling room. My sneaker toe somehow got locked under one of the bags and I tripped and fell face down on the carpet. My right shoulder hit the door jamb and now my knees hurt and my right shoulder feels like it’s popping out of the socket if I twist my arm in certain ways. Otherwise I don’t hurt much so I’m glad tomorrow’s Sunday so I can rest up and get into work on Monday.
)