Scar Stories

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

How did you manage to acquire acid and drink it as a 4 year old?

My scar is fun. I was running in the dark towards a halloween bonfire. I saw a reflection off of a bench, and intended to run around the back of it. However, it was a picnic table, and I smacked into the other side at full tilt (I’m on the track team as a sprinter!) with my shins.

I land flat on the bench of the picnic table, and sit up and promptly start rocking back and forth telling myself it doesn’t really hurt that bad, I’m just a chicken (I’m stubborn about things like that. I was 15 at the time, I think. Maybe 16?) I finally decide I’m ok and walk back over to the fire. I sit down and realize that the fire kinda stings my shins, and take a look.

They had swelled up to the size of a pop can sitting in front of my shin, with the accompanying side-to-side size necessary. Needless to say, the person next to me freaks out and sends someone running for ice. I insist I’m ok, it doesn’t hurt (it really didn’t, after the first 20 seconds. I’m good like that. I have nerve damage and tendonitis in my ankles, pain doesn’t bug me). However, we also realize that part of the shin is actually bleeding.

In short, my shins stayed swollen for almost a month due to my refusal to ice the swelling. It finally went down and I gained a beautiful purple-blue bruise until about January (this was on the weekend before Halloween, remember). I, to this day, have a matching gouge out of each shin, because I scraped fat out when I hit, and I cleaned it out with hydrogen peroxide, killing the stuff that tried to replace it. Funny, the part I used hydrogen peroxide for healed “prettier”, although slower, than the part I used bacitracin for.

So there’s the story of that one. I also have the random ones all over, I was a klutzy kid too. And, of course, the childhood right-of-passage known as Chicken pox. (18 spots, including in hair.)

~C~

42

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Not one hour ago, after scoring two goals and one assist, I was highsticked in the face: *I cracked and lost the halves of two of my front teeth. * Pictures soon to follow. . .

I feel like a stud. I grabbed a towel, skated over to the bench, and played two more shifts to end the game. Now I look like a stud, and have a kickass reputation. :cool:

Mods, can you change this smilie: :smiley: somehow, to show a gap in his teeth?
Tripler
Chicks dig a tough guy. :mad:

43

Let’s see, from toes to head … scar between two toes on my right foot from a drill my dad left on the floor, bigger scar from when I nearly cut my big toe off with a beautiful new bolline knife, three-inch scar on the right knee for painful knee surgery, small purplish scar on top of same knee from Gods know what, long appendectomy scar, bizarre-looking scar above that from the first time I got the chicken pox, strange white birthmark dead center on my chest, small mark on the inside of my right wrist from a bent metal flange, longer sidewise burn mark from picking up an iron the wrong way (the only burn scar I have despite working with boiling liquids all day), two colorless scars in my upper lip from when my brother knocked my front tooth out when I was two, small scar below right eye from Gods know what when I was a few months old.

All, with the exception of a scar on my left hip from the second time I got chicken pox, on the right side. This is why all my tattoos are on the left. :slight_smile:

44

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Okay, I got some pictures for you. Just a warning or three, first:

  1. I just got back from playing a full hour of hockey. I ain’t pretty . My hair’s a little mussed, I have a day’s worth of beard growth, and I didn’t wear mascara today.
  2. There is a minor amount of blood involved. The pictures are not for the squeamish.
  3. Okay so they’re really chipped, so what? I can’t tell you the instant fear I had, is that I lost four full teeth, two top and bottom.

My first reaction was that I was bleeding all over the ice. It may seem silly, but that was the first thing that popped into my head: making a public spectacle that couldn’t be easily repaired. Thank GOD they’re only chipped. While the nerve in the one tooth is exposed (I’ll have to be careful, or it’ll really friggin’ hurt), I should be okay so long as I am careful in what I eat or drink. The dentists should be able to patch me up.

Mouthgard? The one I got wouldn’t have helped. It ‘rides’ on my upper teeth. I got whacked from the chin, up (note the cut on my upper lip). My helmet saved me from further destruction. . . Especially when I went down on the ice in pain. Keep in mind, I cleaned myself up, and finished the game.:smiley:

I have other scars, but they aren’t as interesting or as recent. Ask me about my ‘thunderbolt’ pinky fingerprint. . .

Tripler
Chicks dig a tough hockey guy.:cool:

45

I’ve got all sorts of small scars all over my hands from my high school drill team days. Those M14’s can really tear you up.

My best scar is on my left shoulder. I fell post hitting a small rock when rollerblading. I really should have gotten stitches, but I didn’t. The scar is about the size of a 0.50$ peice

I’ve managed to avoid getting a single scar from playing hockey. I guess it pays off to be a goalkeeper

46

bad one on my knee from roller blading and bailing on the diamond plate pedestrian walkway in the Broadway Tunnel in San Francisco during Friday Night Skate. Didn’t know it until I peeled off my leggings after skating for 2 more hours. I could see WAY down deep inside my knee…pretty disgusting. Had to get external and internal stitches on that one…hurt really bad the next day. Limped for a month.

47

Lessee here…

Scars on two of the knuckles on my right hand–a beer glass broke as I was washing it out after a party a couple of years ago. Blood everywhere, but it went straight down the drain.

Small scars all across my shoulders and upper back–skateboard accident on Dead Man’s Hill (yes, we really called it that) when I was about 13 or so. Hit a rough patch of street, flew off, landed on my right shoulder, then the top of my head, then my left shoulder.

Scar on the inside of my right knee–burned myself on the tailpipe of a friend’s motorcycle when I was about 14. I wanted to get off, and the damn thing just wouldn’t stop all the way (it was kind of old, and not in the best shape), so I fell off the side, contacting the tailpipe on the way down. Had to walk a mile and a half home afterwards, too.

Scar at the inside end of my left eyebrow–I don’t actually remember this one happening, since I was only 2 or so, but my mom tells me I was running down the hall with my favorite toy, a metal fire truck. Fairly large, not a Hot Wheels type of thing. Tripped, fell down, and a corner of it embedded itself less than an inch from my left eye. No stitches; my baby book says I had to have the eyebrow “taped up”.

And finally–right before leaving base camp on my first-ever Boy Scout backpacking trip (the Grand Tetons), I was whittling with this 5 1/2 inch hunting knife my dad had given me, and being 11 years old, whittled back toward my left hand to get rid of a particularly stubborn knot in the wood. The knife (of course) slipped and sliced my left thumb to the bone. My dad (the doctor, by the way) said, “You won’t need stitches”, and just bandaged my thumb up. Then we went backpacking for a week. I now have a half-inch boomerang-shaped scar just above the knuckle. Isn’t it odd that doctor’s children so often go without first-aid-type medical care?

48

I have the ultra-common chicken pox scar on the forehead, kind of between the eyes but closer to the beginning of the left eyebrow (is there a deeper reason as to why so many people have this one, other than it’s a convenient place to scratch?); I also have another one an inch or so above my ass.
I too have stepped on broken glass; this was at a canoe race in a possibly majorly polluted harbor. I thought I’d stepped on a rock, but when I came out of the water my foot was bleeding like a mother. With every beat of my heart bright red blood pumped out onto the sand, and my parents took me to the hospital to have it cleaned out and bandaged up. The cleaning part was an adrenaline rush. The doc put a topical anesthetic on the cuts (about three deep ones), then took what appeared to be a household nail brush and SCRUB them out. I couldn’t feel a thing, except the pressure(especially when he took the tweezers and poked around in there for more debris) but I was hyped up like you wouldn’t believe, talking a mile a minute about nothing at all. I found out later that people at the race thought I had been bitten by a shark, as one swam into our boat as we were paddling out. :eek: The best part was that I had to go to practice every day with my foot coated in some antibacterial cream, wrapped in gauze, put in a plastic garbage bag, and then put in a plastic hospital boot thing sealed at the top with duct tape. I have three light, thin crescent shaped scars on the bottom of my foot.
I also have a scar on my arm from the removal of a weird mole; it was my first time for stitches, and they said it wouldn’t leave a scar.:frowning: I sometimes tell people someone stabbed me with a key in a barfight.

49

Small scar, about an inch long, on my upper lip.

Got hit in the face with an axe.

Okay, so I hit myself in the face with an axe. I was putting together a hand-cranked carousel at the Chicago renaissance festival, and needed to get one of the legs of the thing lifted up an inch or two so I could get the last bolt into it, and decided that one of the handy throwing axes nearby would provide the proper leverage. Never counting on the possibility that it might slip.

I got the thing bolted, then went back to the booth. No pain at all, just blood dripping down my face. I couldn’t see how bad it was, because I had a full beard and moustache at the time, so I shaved it all off, and decided that even though it would probably need stitches, I didn’t care all that much. Cleaned it out, and went back to work, beardless.

Several more, but that’s the most interesting.

50

Starting at the feet :

Left ankle, an inch long crooked scar from when I was thrown from a horse. Me and a friend were riding in the wood, jumping fallen trees. She went over fine, my horse stopped dead before the jump. I went over his head and didn’t think to land by rolling. I landed hard with my full weight on my left leg and compound fractured my ankle. Nothing like seeing your bone sticking out of your skin to send you into shock.

Left knee, a faint scar from breaking a bottle of olive oil on the floor, falling and landing on a shard of said bottle.

Navel, a scar from having a laproscomy for female problems.

Left forearm by the elbow, half inch scar from a fight I had with my older sister. She gouged me with her engagement ring.

And the scar I’m actually proud of, under my jawline on the right side. Size of an Exacto knife blade. Back in my stupid youth, I dated a man with a bad drug habit. The night we broke up, he was extremely high and decided I had to stay with him. When I tried to leave, he pinned me up against the wall, stuck a knife under my jawline-creating the scar-and told me he’d kill me before he’d let me leave. I managed to fight my way out of his apartment, a feat considering I had never fought before and he had a foot and about 75 lbs on me. I learned that day I was a survivor. The scar reminds me to never give up no matter how bad the odds seem and that I can defend myself.

BTW, Tripler, that’s why I wear a mouthguard. :slight_smile:

51

It was offered to me in the guise of an innocent jug of water by some older kids. It being a hot day, and me being a stupid kid, I accepted their gracious offer and took a mighty swig.

Where they got the stuff, I have no idea. Nor do I know what ultimately became of them.

52

What little bastards:mad: I’m so sorry this happened to you, but glad that you are ok.

53

well, my most interesting scars are little quarter inch ones, on each of my knees. I got them while making love with my boyfriend in the front seat of his car. i was on top, and my knees were constantly rubbing on the side of the seat. needless to say, i didnt notice till after.
My other scar is 3 inches long on my left shoulder from a biopsy. My boyfriend has a barely noticible scar at the base of his penis from a bicycle accident, and yes, everything works properly;)

54

I have a memorable one from one of those elementary school field trips to the local skating rink/ice arena. My finger got in the way of someone else’s skate blade and it hurt like all hell, of course. Luckily, the hospital was very close by, and I knew my mom worked there, so of course I was screaming for her. I still have the scar years later… and people wonder why I never skate anymore! I think that incident scarred me for life… no pun intended!

55

Oh, so many good stories… We’ll start at the top and work our way down. And these are only the major ones.

Around my right eye:
Well, one of my second grade classmates thought it would be fun to throw me as hard as he could into a brick wall. As it happens, this shattered my kid-safe (no scratch, no break) glasses. I passed out.

In my right eye:
Ever lost a contact? Ever lost one in your eye? Ever had it not work its way out for a couple of months? Did the (now) dried-up piece of plastic get stuck to your eyelid and scratch your eye every time you blinked? Well, that’s what happened to me. While we were driving through Kansas. Do you know how hard it is to find an optometrist near I-70 in the middle of Kansas? I sure do! (As it turns out, I cried the contact out about an hour before we found one. But I got some nifty eyedrops and some very dark sunglasses.)

The back of my neck:
Somehow recently I managed to cut the back of my neck in a perfectly straight line. I didn’t notice this for quite a while. It’s scarring as we speak.

My left shoulder:
A big ol’ chicken pox scar, which is old enough now to apparently be called a “beauty mark,” at least according to my old doctor.

My left arm:
A very jagged line from when I was a young and very annoying little sister. My brother happened to have a broken license plate close at hand, and meant to pretend to threaten me with it. What he actually did was cut me with it.

My wrists:
Ah, the folly of depressed youth. At least I went the wrong way, and not all that deeply.

My right hand:
A neat little bubble from when a lit stick of incense fell on my hand and I didn’t notice.

My right knee:
An inch long and quarter inch thick scar. I was jumping over a circular floor fan and somehow managed to catch my knee on a screw on the top. This was Labor Day, and we were already late to a picnic, so my father decided we “didn’t have time” for me to get stitches. Nevermind that the cut was originally between 4" and 6" long, and bleeding everywhere. Gauze cures all.
A very rough-edged scar, roughly the size of military dog tags. I was shaving with a nice new razor, and cut myself. Then I jumped, but I neglected to let up on the pressure.
Then there’s the piece of bubblegum sized one just under the kneecap. I was riding my brother’s bike (a racing bike, very unlike my mountain bike) down a steep hill on a gravel bikepath. I didn’t make it, and embedded a rock in my knee. I rode my bike the rest of the way home (somewhere between half a mile and a mile), and my mother pulled it out with tweezers and slapped on some gauze while I screamed bloody murder.

My left knee:
When I was 3, I made an outstanding discovery. My kneecap was exactly the right size to fit snugly inside the tailpipe of a VW Bug. It was even cooler to realize that the smoke coming from said tailpipe behaved differently when my knee was there. I didn’t cry until every adult around me was panicky. I don’t remember it ever hurting. But I still have half that scar, a thick dark half-circle around the top of my kneecap.

My right foot:
We had a pond when I was a teenager. I was running around it, when I discovered that there was a board leading into the pond. I walked a little bit down the board when I realized that it was covered in various pond slime. I slipped. That’s when I found the hole in the board. With my foot. Namely, I found the very jagged edge of the hole.

56

I think I have more scar stories than I have body parts. Being a lifelong klutz, I tend to accumulate scars as visible indicators of my klutz-hood. :slight_smile:

The majors:

  • Age 14, Fell off a bike doing what seemed like a million miles an hour. Hit something (still not sure what) with the front wheel, ended up flying up over the handlebars, and skidding about five or six feet on gravel with the bike on top of me. Rubbed two-inch diameter patches raw on both knees and the back of my left hand (don’t ask me how I landed on the BACK of my hand instead of coming down palm first). The scar on my wrist is still barely visible.

  • Age 15, making garlic bread and slicing a still-partially-frozen loaf of French bread. The blade of the knife snaps out of the wooden handle and carves an S-shaped scar on the back of my right hand.

  • Age 8 or 9, playing hockey in the school parking lot. Kid named Ricky walks up to me and slams me in the center of the forehead with his stick. I fall down and start crying (it HURT). My mom was teaching at the school at the time, so I went wandering in search of her. The blow to the head confused me, so I went into about a half-dozen rooms before I finally found her. Years later, she told me just how close she came to fainting when I walked in her classroom door – little kid, head split open, face a mask of blood, piteously moaning, “Mom? Help!” staggering into her classroom.

However, my favorite is the one on the left side of my ribcage. When I was a wee little Zanshin, I fell out of a tree – and onto a bamboo stake sticking up out of the ground. My mom was in the house and when she heard the SNAP of the stake breaking, she bolted outside and saw me laying on the ground with a two-foot length of bamboo sticking out of my chest.

Took me to the doc, where he removed the bamboo; it had only penetrated far enough to break two of my ribs. He taped up my ribs and I was on my way. Good thing that stake broke, otherwise I’d probably still be hanging there. <shudder> The ribs on that side are still kinda misshapen and you can see the bottom of the rib cage protrudes out a bit.

57

Hrrm I don’t have that many scars (and yes I know I’m about 2 weeks late on posting here but damnit I want to share). I heal very fast and don’t scar easilly so I don’t have man.

  1. Left eyebrow. Was being silly at summer camp and ran full tilt into the corner of building. Bled a bit, got taped together eyebrow is a little thin there.

  2. Above left eyebrow. If you don’t stop picking at it, it won’t heal (and will scar). I did a LOT of picking at this one… try several months.

  3. Lower lip. Stair broke and I went boom, face first on the stairs below. Splinter in lip and cracked it open.

  4. Left arm. several small ones from too much fun w/ female friends.

  5. Right hand. I was 2 or so… My dad was building our house in CO… I was on my little plastic tricycle zooming around and hit some lumber… went flying. Impaled my hand on some celling joices… those V shaped pieces of metal. I cut into the top of my hand in a V between my center two of my 4 fingers… I learned later that I cut deeply enough to groove the bones and if I had been going faster I may have managed to cut of both fingers!
    Amusing story about after I did this… my mom can’t stand blood… my dad doesn’t deal with stress well so my mom couldn’t help and my dad was goign nutz… he wrapped a towel around my hand (I don’t know what the hell i cut but I remember having the flesh on top of the V raised up so I could see inside) called the doctor… He lived on the way to the hospital, and just finished dinner. So we drove there first. He was kinda shocked, shoved my hand in the sink (soapy, greasy water) and scrubbed the FUCK out of my hand with a brillo pad. Looking back he may not have been a good doctor. Then I went to the hospital and went nuts until the drugs kicked in. All better except for this nasty looking scar.

  6. Right Foot, big toe.

This puppy is nasty. I have shortened tendons in my right foot for all of the toes… so they curl up. I had the worst one, the big toe fixed. It was bad enough the bone was deformed. Huge mistake… I should have given up diving instead of having it fixed…

They moved and lengthened the tendon, shaved down and fused the bone and left me with a scar in the front of my toe and one running from nail to the top of my foot that’s absolutly huge. Whoever closed IDIOT.

If I’m (or my family) is paying for an operation don’t let butter finger’s close …

58

I’m not at all squeamish, but this post almost made me faint… [sub]whoozy…[/sub]

I have a bazillion scars on my left hand. I’m right handed and worked many, many late, late, late nights in the studio. Power tools and sleep depravation don’t mix.

I am known for stapling myself to stage sets. Stapled my thumb to the set of the Red Green Show when it was touring a few years ago. But the best stapling accident was with a pneumatic staple gun. I had to bend some door skin around a curved rib shape sut out of plywood. For some reason, I was using 1 1/2" staples at firing them in at about 120 p.s.i. Missed the rib, and door skin is to thin to stop a speedy staple.

Strangely, it really didn’t hurt much. I felt the pressure of something against my thumb and when I saw the result, I thought: “Oo, neat. Oh… this is gonna hurt when I pull it out.” Stranger still, it didn’t hurt to pull out the staple and it didn’t bleed either.

So now I have two itty-bitty dots on my thumb. You can hardly notice them though – there disguised by all the other scars from saws, blades, drill bits etc. (I’ve currently trying to trademark my owie-owie-owie dance.)

59

I was walking through some ankle deep grass at Carswell Air Force Base during a Boy Scout thing. I stepped on a Coke bottle, it rolled and I fell with my right shin landing on the bottle. The bottle broke, cutting a very jagged “U” shape on the shin. I got a ride in an ambulance to the base dispensary, where I was given an injection of novacaine right into the edge of the wound. Our sissy scout master, who made the trip with me, passed out cold from seeing the shot being administered–the guys on duty got a real kick out of that one. I ended up with ten stitches, as I recall, and a great story to tell about the scout master. Got a pretty good scar, too.

60

On the outside of my left leg, just below the knee: slightly raised area about the size of a quarter. When I was in grade school I got a summer job delivering newspapers. Since I didn’t have a bike I did it on foot, carrying the papers in a huge canvas bag slung over one shoulder. Since I was (as they say now) rather vertically challenged at the time, the bag just barely cleared the ground. It being summer I wore shorts most of the time, and I never noticed that during the course of the summer the bag was slowly rubbing away the skin on my leg.

At the base of my left thumb: half-inch long line. I worked as a lab assistant in the chem lab at college. One day I was cleaning up a backlog of long-unused glass-stoppered bottles. I was having trouble getting one of them open (after sitting a while they tend to vacuum-weld closed); I’m twisting the stopper as hard as I can when the neck of the bottle snaps and the broken piece slashes across my hand. Since the paper label on the bottle said “concentrated sulfuric acid” I dove for the nearest water tap and started rinsing. I probably should have gone to the doctor and gotten it stitched up, but that would have cost money.

Both of these have faded and shrunk with the passing years. I also used to have some small scars on the back of my right hand from reaching in to take something out of my electric oven, having forgotten that I had turned on the broiler instead of the oven. (It was a new apartment and the first time I’d had an electric oven.) Those healing coils get hot!:eek: