Cleaning my teeth Monday night, I managed some how to sever the bit under your tongue that connects it to the bottom of your mouth. Profuse bleeding ensued. I have not been able to speak for most of the week and am now today even speaking very hesitatntly and with a lisp.
I’m a grown up. I do Big Important Things every day of the week, but apparently cannot coordinate my motor skills to do anything as basic as cleaning my teeth without injury.
When I was in college, I accidentally smashed my left thumb in the hinge of my car’s glove compartment. That wasn’t so bad, stupid-wise. But later that day, when I was demonstrating to my dad how I’d injured my left thumb, I did the same thing to my right thumb. It’s a good thing I hadn’t planned to do any hitchhiking that week.
Naked in the hot tub with a boy. Got out to go to someplace more “horizontal.” I got out first, missed the step and landed on all fours on the pavement. Cut out chunks of my knees and palms, and lost all of the skin on the top of my left foot.
I couldn’t wear shoes for two weeks. And now I hate said boy and I still have a scar 3 years later.
I’ve been working with sharp tools since '81 or so… so last summer, I sat down on a rainy day to sharpen about 30 pairs of loppers. 15 or so down, and I have no idea why I let one close on my finger. Ooops. Having your boss take you to the ER because you were stupid with the tools you are sharpening for KIDS to use is embarassing.
I’ve done the same toothbrush injury. Compounded it the next morning when I managed to forget what I’d done and sat down with toast (!) and OJ (!!!) for breakfast. That lasted one mouthful.
Also in college, had a stressful incident involving a girl. I was angry and walked out of my dorm room, over to the men’s room and punched the solid wood door with the metal push plate really hard, enough to break my hand.
Hm. There was also that time at a store where I picked up the serrated steak knife and ran my fingers over it saying “I wonder if this is sharp?” (answer was “Yes”).
Come to think of it virtually all my memorable injuries have been stupid self-imposed things. Can laugh about them now of course.
[ol]Ordered Thai curry to go and sat down in the park to eat it. I put the styrofoam container of the curry on my lap to pull out the rice, and before I knew it, I had a 2nd degree burn on my thigh.[/ol]
[ul]Machete
Okay, so I was standing on my friends doorstep. And then I fell, and kinda twisted my ankle and sliced up my foot. (flip flops)
Standing. Not walking, nor running down stairs. Just standing. And then I just fell.
I failed at standing. To this day I have no idea how it happened, but that has to be my stupidest injury evar. (sic)
I managed to cut my middle finger on my left hand while opening a plastic package. :smack:
I did it with a butter knife. It was a special uber-sharp-edged butter knife that I bought from my ex-boyfriend (never buy knives from your ex), but still.
I cut it so badly that I thought I might bleed to death from the cut. I remember hoping at the time that my atheist friends were right about there not being an afterlife, since I wasn’t looking forward to spending all eternity explaining how I managed to kill myself with a butter knife. I still have a scar now, more than ten years later.
She would not be happy if she knew I was posting this, but Pollywog Princess outdid herself last weekend. I should admit right up front that she gets her grace from her mom. :o
She was pushing her bike across the back yard to go ride with a friend. Somehow she fell, going over the handle bars, pinning a foot underneath. Luckily, she only bruised her knee. I must say, the local hospitals brand new ER department is very nice. Quick and efficient. We were in and out in less than an hour and a half.
A couple of weeks ago my ten year old son broke a tooth crashing his bike into a parked car. He said he was riding his bike, heard another car approaching behind him, turned to look, and wham. He broke off a very large piece of a front tooth.
Naturally, this happened on a Friday night, so we had to call the dentist at home. He came in to his office and did a nice job on the boy, with my husband playing doctor’s assistant and me pacing up and down the hall with the dentist’s crying baby.
I was using one of those apple slicer gadgets that you center over the top of the apple and push down to cut the apple into neat little sections. Except it didn’t slice all the way through the skin at the bottom, so I flipped it over and used my thumb to push the apple the rest of the way through. Those things are very sharp.
Back in February I was walking to my car. I was walking down a fairly new sidewalk. Completely flat, no cracks, very wide. It was a sunny day, no water or anything on the sidewalk. There was no one else around, or any obstacles whatsoever.
Somehow I managed to put my foot down sideways. As in, the sole of my foot was almost perpendicular to the ground. And I didn’t notice this until I put the full weight of my body on that foot as I was walking along. The moment my weight hit, my foot tried to take it, and the pain made me suddenly aware of just what I had done, and I fell down to the pavement immediately. Oddly enough, I didn’t hurt anything in the fall; not so much as a single scratch on my arms or hands. But my foot (not my ankle, mind you, the foot itself) hurt so much and ratcheted up the pain as the afternoon went on that I left work early and stayed home the whole next day. Took about two weeks or so to heal.
All that from just walking down the sidewalk. It’s so stupid, it’s funny.
I was walking through my oddly shaped kitchen in the house I was renting at the time. In the middle of the kitchen, there is a post and a kind of archway that goes from that post to the wall. I was going to go through that archway, when I saw a bicycle pump laying on the floor underneath the archway.
I could have stepped over it. I could have picked it up and put it away. Instead I decided to jump over it. Here’s the problem. I’m about 6’5". I can dunk which means that I can jump at least 2’ in the air (not that impressive of a vertical leap, but bear with me). The archway (which I measured after the fact) is a shade under 6’7".
I didn’t just jump, for some reason I put my all into it and jumped as high as I could. I don’t know what the upward force is for a person to jump 24" in the air, but not much of that force is dissapated in the first 2".
I woke up on the ground. The bicycle pump was under my left arm and badly mangled. I noticed a pool of blood forming on the floor. I was quite dazed. I felt my head and found a rather large cut and lots of blood. I had managed to inverted pile drive myself into the bottom of the archway.
I really should have gone to the doctor, but as I was in college and didn’t have health insurance, and I got the bleeding to stop right away, I didn’t go.
I do have a nice scar on the top of my head now, but it is not the type of injury you brag to your friends about.
Yesterday I repeated an injury which, while not scar inducing still hurts like a sum’beech. I use a wheelchair, and I was barefoot in the house. While trying to turn and go in another direction I ran my toes over with one of the front wheels. It’s a particularly exquisite pain, although it doesn’t last for long.
There was also the time (before the wheelchair) when I was unloading a king size waterbed and transporting the parts down a set of 14 concrete steps. I had one of the long side slats under one arm, took one step down and hit ice. I went down, all the way to the bottom of the steps, to the hilarity of my husband and kids. I had a huge black bruise on one hip and shoulder which lasted for weeks, and the only thing that kept me from smashing my head in was the fact that with the slat under my arm my head didn’t touch the steps.
I have three, which I will relate in chronological order.
Working on a craft project of some description with bare feet in my room, I left my Swiss Army knife open on the floor - and naturally stepped on it. Ye gods, the blood. You’d think a herd of pigs had been slaughtered in the near vicinity, all from one cut in the sole of my foot.
I was standing at the top of a flight of stairs, waving goodbye to a friend, and took one step backwards, doing an interesting somersault-slither manouvre on the way down. Didn’t injure myself too badly, but was quite shaken. Ever fallen down a flight of steps backwards? It’s most disorienting.
Tried to ride a bicycle with my hands swapped, fell, momentum carried me into the drain by the side of the road where I caught a stone slab with my chest, and then rapped my chin against it, hard. Tore a muscle in my chest, which is far more painful than it sounds, because *breathing *hurts.