“You’ve broken your back”
“Oh”
(I had gone to hospital thinking I had broken my foot. My back is ok now and I am not paralysed or anything, just in case you were wondering)
My brother (after tripping over one of those wooden fence things at running tracks, and then looking at someone’s horrified expression):
" What’s wrong?"
<points at bone sticking out of arm>
“oh”
Dopers post your injuries you did not know you had when you had them.
I got hit by a car and did a pretty nifty haul turn to avoid getting killed. I flew about 15’ and landed on the curb on my right leg. The driver kept going and never slowed down.
So I walk home 3 blocks thinking my leg is royally messed up as it is hurting like hell.
Parents take me to the ER and the doc says " You carried your bike home 3 blocks on your shoulder with a broken wrist"!
The worst not immediately apparent injury was 24 hours later. I had just got back from a camping trip and got poison sumac on my arm under the cast…I still have a scar from the coat hanger I used to scratch:)
When I worked at Petsmart , I had leaned down to fix a pit bull’s collar. The poor dog got scared( I being a stranger and all) and it head butted me. So, I just said “ooowww” fixed it’s collar, then straightened up. My co-worker asked if the dog had gotten me. I said that it hadn’t really. Then I touched my face expecting to find a tender spot , or at most a bruise and came away with a palmfull of blood. Turns out the dog had biiten all the way through the lower part of my right cheek.
I got 13 or so stitches and am a-okay now.
And yes, i am aware I use WAY to many commas and parenthesies. Sorry, it’s an illness.
I tore all the ligaments in my ankle. I thought I had a light sprain.
My husband broke his back, but didn’t know for 5 days, either.
When I broke two bones in my foot, I thought it was a sprain - after all, you don’t hear popping sounds from your actual bones, right?
I did a load of laundry for a neighbor the morning before I got another friend to drive me to the doctor (it was my right foot). The whole time I maintained it was just a sprain of some kind, but it was out of pride - “Yeah, I was running upstairs and I tripped and came down on my foot wrong” sounded less than impressive. Some sympathetic buddies suggested I made up a story about water-skiing. 
Well, two that come to mind right away.
That first I soon became aware of. I hit a lightpost at ~55 m.p.h. in my GT-6. I hit the steering wheel, but felt OK. The cops on the scene passed me as OK (it wasn’t my fault - another driver gave me the choice of being rammed into to bayou by him or choosing an alternate braking device).
That night I started puking blood. I went to ER in the morning and spent 30 days in the hospital getting my intestines untwisted.
The other I never noticed. My doctor took some X-rays in about 1987. In looking at them, he commented that he didn’t remember my three broken ribs, and ordered my previous X-rays from a few years earlier pulled. He showed me (it was quite obvious) where the 1982 X-rays did not show the three healing lumps on three ribs that were quite apparent on the (then) new X-rays.
So, somewhere between 1982 and 1987 I suffered three broken ribs and got over it without knowing it. The three breaks were aligned, giving the impression that they were the result of one incident. The best I ever came up with was either: a.) shock from a parachute harness or b.) the only bar fight I was ever in transpired during that period, and I felt like shit for days after that.
Not life threatening, but I got kicked in the face in a swimming pool and broke my nose. Needless to say, there was alot of blood and in water it looked like ALOT of blood. Since I was wet, I didn’t realize it was bleeding, I just thought my face hurt…until the lifeguard nearly passed out when he looked at me. Then I understood.
On a related note…Dontcha love that moment between hurting yourself and feeling the pain when you are thinking “man, when that starts hurting…”
When my brother kicked me in the wrist once. “Ow. Ow. Ow.” “You okay, Gad?” “I’ll be fine.” Bruised muscle.
I had a dark, nasty and painful bruise/black and blue mark a little smaller than a tennis ball on the inside of my left forearm that lasted several weeks. The only thing I could think of that had hit me in that spot was that I had recently bumped into someone’s knapsack while walking through Penn Station, and never thought twice about it because it didn’t hurt when it happened.
I broke my big toe and walked around on it for a few weeks without realising.
I was getting a ride on the back of a friend’s jet-ski when he decided it would be fun to see whether he could throw me off the back. After much bouncing through the surf and spinning around in circles, he succeeded.
Slightly before I was thrown off, my foot was trapped in a seat strap. As I traced a graceful arc in the air before landing – the water felt like concrete because of the speed my body was flying at – the bone in my big toe snapped from the sudden pressure.
It felt a bit sore, but it was only several weeks later when I got back to my home state that I found out what had happened.
On further reflection, my story sounds something like lovelee’s, if he or she claimed it was waterskiing!
Not me, but my SO. I’ve posted about this elsewhere on the boards, but it definitely applies here.
He fell off his bike after hitting the brakes too hard going 35kmph towards an unexpected red light. At the time, it was clear that hed scratched up his face and knees pretty badly, and needed stitches in his chin. Both his elbows hurt, and he thought at least one was sprained.
We went to the ER, and found out that one elbow was indeed sprained, but also that the right one had a small fracture at the top of the radius. It got put in a cast, and we went home, with him taking pain relievers for the next couple of days.
That wasn’t the unexpected injury.
A week after the accident, he goes to see a fracture specialist, who takes new x-rays and says that the fracture is minor enough that they can take the cast off, and start physio to get his elbow moving properly again. They take off the cast, and the doctor starts rotating my SOs forearm, with the result that he practically screams in agony.
Turns out his wrist was SEVERELY dislocated, but no one knew because it didn’t hurt him at the ER!!
A week after THAT, he sees another doctor, a joint specialist, who tells him that the only way to get his wrist back to “normal” is through surgery. So they operate, about 3 weeks after the initial injury. THAT was rediculously painful, with my SO taking 60mg of codeine and 2 Advils every 4 hours to fight the pain and inflammation for the first couple of days.
He had the cast on for 6 weeks (so total of 9 weeks since the fall). When they took it off, he couldn’t move his arm at all. He’s been doing physio for the past 2 months, and his wrist still cant move in all directions, and he cant yet extend his elbow completely.
It’s been an interesting 4 months, that’s for sure!
In a sledding accident, I broke my nose, flapped my scalp, split my lip, loosened several teeth, and suffered a bunch of abrasions. Apparently I was also briefly knocked out. At the time, I didn’t think anything in particular was wroong, although the other teens I was with were reacting with some horror. I didn’t realize anything was awry until I went in the house and looked in the mirror.
Same for me. Actually I was told to stop complaining because it was only a sprain. 3 years later they found out one ligament was torn and I finally had surgery.
Got hit by a car when riding my bike to school one May morning when I was 16. I woke up on the grass with a mangled front tire and a dull ache in my side. Walked the rest of the way to school, took my final exams, and walked home.
Didn’t realize I had internal injuries until sometime that afternoon when I went to take a leak and pissed blood!
Had a nice ambulance ride and spent a few weeks in the hospital. And never caught the sunovabitch who hit me, either.
The index finger on my right hand doesn’t bend in the middle joint and is very crooked (stick your hand out in front of you like you’re a traffic cop stopping traffic - your fingers should point to 12:00. My index finger on my right hand points to 12:00 for the first joint, but points to 2:00 from that joint to the tip).
I went up to block a kill in volleyball and the ball hit my finger tip and drove the bones together in the joint. I thought I had really jammed my finger and didn’t do anything about it for a about a week. The swelling finally subsided and I went to the ortho. He said, “Has your finger always been so crooked? Surgery is the only way to correct it.” I skipped the surgery and can now point around corners.
I was out with my husband at a restaurant one night. He had been complaining earlier that day that his eye was hurting. I looked at him and from across the table I could see something in his eye. When we couldn’t get it out he went to the eye Dr. and be found a metal shaving in his eye that was now rusted from being in there so long. Had to pull it out and then get the rusty area out with a tiny grinder type instrument. For a few days I could plainly see a hole in his eye where the rust had been. Lovely!
He had gotten the shaving from an incident at work the previous day.
When I went to the doc for a fractured elbow sustained that day he noticed some swelling in my thumb. I told him I had jammed the thumb playing basketball about a week before and it was no big deal. He insisted on x-rays and found the bone was broken - lengthwise.
I jumped to the bottom of some stairs once and thought I’d really sprained my ankle, which had buckled once I hit the floor. I put ice on my ankle, then went to bed.
Next morning, my foot was black and blue and green and yellow! Turns out I’d broken – spiral break – a teeny bone (5th metacarpal) in the outside edge of my foot.
My back was broken in a car accident. Didn’t know about it for 18 months, because the ER didn’t do films. Finally the car insurance people got tired of paying for me to have therapy for my sore back, so they made me have an “independant” MD exam. He ordered the films, found the fracture which had not healed, and I had major surgery. It was yucky.
Earlier this year I broke my jaw and didn’t get it checked for 4 days. I guess I did know I had the injury just not the severity.
I’ve also had broken ribs that I didn’t know were broken. Found out a couple of years later when I was x-ray’d for another injury.