Post your not immediately apparent injuries (probably TMI)

March of my senior year in high school, I hurt my wrist during diving practice. Took a couple of days off, taped it up good and kept on practicing through the summer. That fall at college, I had to go through the extremely thorough freshman physical. They asked if anything hurt and I told them my wrist had been kinda bothering me for 5 months. They x-rayed it and it was broken.

Because I hadn’t had it fixed right away they said I’d need surgery to put a screw into the bone to hold it together. But the season was about to start so I told them I’d just have it done in April.

So 13 months after my initial injury I had a piece of my pelvis grafted into my wrist and a screw placed. I was in a cast for 5 months during the Georgia summer. If I had gone to the MD the day I hurt it, I could have been in a cast for 2 weeks.

Moral of the story… go to the doctor if you hurt yourself.

Playing basketball out on the street one day me and another guy went for a loose ball, got our feet tangled and we ended up falling to the asphaulu, landing on my left thumb.

It hurt but I could tsill move it, so I thought I must have strained or sprained it.

3 weeks later it still hurt so I went to our orthopedist and got some X-rays. Turns out I broke the thumb.

The funny thing was talking to the orthopedist about the incident and when I said it had happened on Sunday, he said, “Oh, two days ago.”

I said, “No, 3 weeks ago.”

To say he wasn’t pleased would be an understatement.:stuck_out_tongue: :smiley:

I was thrown by a horse once and didn’t realize I was injured until I got back to the barn and started to take the bridle off of my horse (who was waiting for me there after gleefully galloping all the way back riderless). When I raised my right arm, it wouldn’t work. Couldn’t raise it past my shoulder.

I was a kid at the time and I don’t remember exactly what was wrong with it but I remember having a sling for my arm for a couple of weeks.

I also have a crooked pinky finger on my left hand that was pulled out of joint like plnnr’s finger. It got caught in the lead line of the same horse as he bolted and ran from something probably as horrifying as a plastic bag blowing in the wind.

My mother had a similar injury falling off a horse as a child. She broke her collar bone and didn’t even realize it until she got home and her mom noticed that her shoulder was slumped in a weird way.

This is’nt about me, but someone my dad knows. After a car acident the guy went with his girlfriend to the hospital. She had some injuries but he felt fine, but got checked out anyway while he was in the hospital. After the tests while he was in the waiting room the doctor walks up to him and says. “Don’t panic, but you’ve broken your neck. Please don’t move”.

How wierd is that?!

Both are fine now.

my husband never got a chance to develop the handyman instincts–his uncle got that role in his family, rather than his dad, so he was apparently never exposed to extensive tool use. :: sigh:: i, on the other hand, grew up in the combined son/daughter mode, since i was an only child. i learned to wield a hammer and screwdriver as well as the next person. so when we got a new home after being married about a year, if mechanical things needed doing, i was the do-er. one of the things we agreed we needed was a dead-bolt on the front door. after buying one (and the necessary special drill bit), i attempted to begin installation. the wimpy drill that my husband owned (and why he actually had one i’ve never gotten around to asking) didn’t have enough power to do the job. i borrowed a better one from our neighbor across the street, and set to work.

if you’ve never done it, putting in a dead-bolt is a multi-step process. first you drill a regular hole straight through the door, to serve as the centering point for the install location. then you’re supposed to drill a large circular hole (using the special bit) through one side of the door, until you get about half-way through. then you go to the other side of the door and finish the hole.

well, after getting the pilot hole done, i tackled the first half from inside the house. in the process, i discover that we don’t have a metal door as it initially appeared–we have a wood-core door with metal covers on both sides. so, ok fine as far as additional insulating properties, and probably strength for the door… but when you transit from metal to wood while drilling, the bit tends to “grab” when it makes the switch. i discovered this when the bit tried to stutter across the metal surface on the inside of the door. less than pleased with the mild marring of the surface, i made sure when i started working on the other side that i wouldn’t allow it to happen again. remembering how the drill tried to rotate, i was using my left hand to power it, hoping to provide additional bracing against the time of transition/skipping across the surface. got through the metal layer, hit the wood … and the damn thing kicked like the proverbial mule. major pain from my left hand. i wore a ring on my index finger; as soon as i could stop swearing, i eased it off, figuring that i’d sprained that finger pretty badly and it was bound to swell up. after a couple minutes, the pain got back down to tolerable levels. i figured i might as well finish the job, before the swelling got too bad for me to hold the drill. funny thing though-- i couldn’t seem to get any strength on the trigger of the drill from my index finger.

REALLY pissed off now, i figured if i sprained it that badly, i better take it to the emergency clinic to get looked at. didn’t want to neglect it if i’d injured a tendon or anything like that. so i drove myself over there, sat around until they x-rayed it. when the doctor came back in, i said (only half-jokingly): “You better not tell me it’s broken.” his reply? “Ok, I won’t say it’s broken. It’s broken in three pieces.”

crap.

i declined having pins put in to hold it together. unfortunately, the bones compacted a bit as it healed, so the length shortened and now the end tendon is a bit slack. i opted for the screws next time i did a multi-break on that same hand. (i have weird bones; they don’t just break, they do interesting spiral breaks. every time lately.)

I banged the back of my hand against a wooden post when I was about 20 yo. I thought it was just bruised and the xrays showed nothing wrong. Kept it wrapped and took Tylenol (not that it hurt that much). There was a small wound but it didn’t heal in over a week. 10 days later, I massaged my hand and something poked out the hole. I pulled out a 3 inch splinter I hadn’t even suspected was there. I healed up quickly after that.

Not me but my mom–

We had our boat out of the water in dry dock, which generally means that the deck is quite a ways off the ground. Anyway, she was standing on the edge to clean part of the windshield and lost her balance.

Luckily she managed to grab onto a railing and right herself a bit as she fell, so she didn’t end up on her head. She landed on both her heels, hard. She thought she’d bruised them, and continued to help out with the work.

When they didn’t feel any better after two weeks or so, she went and got them X-rayed. Turned out she’d shattered both her heel bones. The only advice they give you when this happens, apparently: try to stay off your feet as much as possible. Yeah, because that’s easy for a working mother of three.

That would be might tough to do, since your metacarpal bones are in your hands.

Your foot has metatarsal bones.