Well hell yeah. You wouldn’t let them get away with that, would you?
Similar: I dropped a screen door on my toe, with the same outcome and treatment by the local podiatrist.
I saw him 2 years later, when the same toe’s nail had come back and was wickedly ingrown,
You ate the screen door?
One hot summer during my childhood, I got the bright idea to fill my Grandpa’s large wheelbarrow with water with the intention of using it as a personal swimming pool. It was a very deep wheelbarrow and took a loooong time to fill with a hose. Just as the water was nearing the top the barrow suddenly tipped forward and dumped its load. Unfortunately, my right big toe was where the lip of the barrow landed. Luckily I was standing on wet grass, so my foot sunk in to the ground dissipating the blow a bit. I did loose my toenail though.
You know the old expression about being able to sh*t through a screen and not hitting a wire? :dubious:
Wasn’t me, but a couple of weekends ago, some of my rescue squad buddies went to a call where a guy with a nailgun put a nail through his femur, just above his knee. He was framing a house, and was stranded on the second floor because of the injury.
Let’s see…
There is the broken toe, caused by rushing out to my car one morning to roll up the windows as it had started to rain. In my haste to get back in side, I kicked will full force a rock on the side of the driveway. The entire foot was black & blue for weeks. The toe still hurts once in a while.
There is the entire flight of stairs that I missed in my college dorm one drunken Friday afternoon. I was in a rush to get back to my friends after changing clothes for the evening, and sailed over the last half of the set of stairs, landing at the bottom in a broken heap. Nothing lasting for damage, but I was bruised and sore for quite a few days. I figured at the time that the best treatment was more alcohol, which did actually dull the pain (until the next AM).
I learned not to catch a knife that is falling off the counter by catching it… once. (not in the 60s, and it hurt for far more than 20 minutes). Nice cut to the palm of my hand. Thankfully nothing important was cut. (Fishmonger’s knives are VERY sharp.)
I’m sure there are more, but those are the worst that I can think of right off the top of my head.
Just the other day I was washing my face, as I have done twice a day for going on 50 years, but never with this result: as I was raising my wet, soapy hands to my face something distracted me and I must have turned my head a bit, because the next thing I did was jam my thumbnail up into the underside of the tip of my nose hard enough to gouge it. I stood there laughing incredulously with blood dripping off my nose as the soap began to sting, wondering if it was a sign of impending senile dementia, that I would forget to watch out for my own nose… :smack:
Funny how after lurking for years and years, an admission of my own stupidity fially prompts me to post again…
My wife and I fish, and I’ve had one good treble hook in my hand while fishing… quick decision time: Do you get the hook out of your finger or the 5# fish off the other end first? Believe me, the answer is not so obvious when faced with the question! (finally got the hook out and kept on fishing… that was fun… FTR - you take the flopping fish off first!)
But the “dumb injury” is not that… those things happen.
I started tying some of our own flies - this requires a vise that holds the hook firmly and in a steady position so that you can put pressure on it (to hold the materials in place with the thread)… The vise I had been using was not so stable, and I was getting tired of it… so the wife takes me to buy a new one…
Never reach behind/thru a vise to get something… its a sure recipe to get “hook in hand disease”. Not 20 minutes after getting set up, I have a nice 1/0 hook in the hand, past the barb…and again, the question becomes, do you take the hook out of the vise or your hand first?
(went to the dr for this one, figured a tetnus update was in order, told the nurse when she went to give me the shot that i was afraid of “sharp pointy things”… she about hit the floor rolling in laughter).
Cutting up a chicken for barbecuing, I had separated the thigh bone from the pelvis, but there was a small strip of skin and sinew keeping the parts attached to one another. Rather than simply set the bird down on the cutting board and draw the butcher knife through, I dangled the whole chicken by the ankle and swung the blade toward the target.
I’ve got what the doctors call an essential tremor, by the way, and what I hold in my left hand doesn’t always remain steady. Thus it was that I took a dime-sized slice of skin out of the first knuckle on my right index finger. I packed it in ice and went to the ER, but the doctor told me that since there were no blood vessels to speak of, trying to reapply it to the injury site would just be a waste of time.
When I went for a job interview the following day the interviewer asked me about the huge bandage on my hand. I had to confess that it came from having lost a knife fight to a dead chicken.
Friday morning I was putting on my face and I felt a little pop in my shoulder, it was a little sore but not bad. By the end of the day I was in big pain and my R shoulder was a lot lower than my L. Saturday I wore a sling and it felt better, but again by Saturday night it was really sore. Just as I was telling my boy that I wanted to go to the ER I moved my neck and felt my shoulder pop back into place.
The thing is I was at Horse Fair all weekend for work. I had spent 2 days walking all around the grounds with a dislocated shoulder, that I got while putting on makeup. If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me if I had been bucked off I could have bought those boots I saw!
So far I definitely have to go with “flaming crotch snow hump” as the funniest injury and best potential band name!
I’m not sure it’s fair to pick on kid injuries since kids are supposed to be stupid… having said that, I remember when I was 11 and tearing along on my bike when it suddenly occurred to me to see what would happen if I reached back with my foot and stuck it in between the spokes. Short answer: a flight over the handlebars followed by a trip to the stitchatorium! But I was OK and able to be back in my gifted classes the next day…
It was also at about that time that I was tearing across our gravel parking strip, slipped, and broke my parent’s van headlight with my head. Well, these things happen…then a week later, I was doing the same thing and caught my arm on the jagged shard of headlight (OK, granted my folks could have been a bit more proactive about getting that fixed…). More stitches!!
How did kids ever live to reproductive age before the advent of modern medicine, anyway?!
This past Saturday, I was playing Marco-Polo on some playground equipment- there’s a big connected piece with multiple slides, bridges, a net, and other stuff, but everything has a “child’s height” wooden bar over the top.
The third time I was “it,” I started getting fairly confident of where stuff was with my eyes closed, so I could dart around for 5’ steps. This caused fewer problems than would be expected. I knew where one set of slides was well enough that ducked under the bar and grabbed a friend, no problem.
I opened my eyes, turned my body around, said “you’re it,” took a step forward and turned my head just in time to get clotheslined by the bar I’d ducked under two seconds ago. My legs went another half step, I fell flat on my back, and, being on slides, I slid headfirst into the ground.
They all waited for me to get up before they started laughing.
I was shaving my head as i am wont to do when i clipped the very top of my ear. Now ive been doing this for a while, But whack,Just this once, there was blood everywhere, I felt so stupid standing there looking like the cover of some George Romero film.
I seem to have reached the age of 39 remarkably injury free, apart from the broken leg sustained at an amble. That wasn’t so much stupid as unfortunate considering I was at the top of Yosemite Falls at the time.
My husband, on the other hand, is reknowned amongst our friends and families for his ability to injure himself. Far too many to recount them all here, but the best one happened when he went downstairs in the middle of the night for the toilet after a night on the piss, tripped over the dog (who was innocently sleeping, as he always did, at the foot of those stairs), and face planted the wall opposite. Bruised his nose and blackened both eyes. And the next day was photo ID-taking day at his work.
And then there was the time he was doing some rewiring for a friend. He tried pulling a wire through the wall with needle-nosed pliers, the pliers slipped, and he smashed himself in the face with his pliers-wielding fist. Broken nose, more black eyes.
Ooh, and one more. He went into hospital for a hernia operation. After the op the nurse told him to ring her if he needed to go to the toilet. Because he’s stubborn like that, he decided he didn’t need help so went on his own. While perched on the throne he decided to take a look under the bandage, the sight of which caused him to pass out. He came to and crawled back into bed. The nurse came in, saw his bloody head, and said ‘You went to the toilet alone, didn’t you?’. So he went in for a hernia op and came out with stitches in his head.
Boy can I ever identify with some of these injuries! My dear patient wife claims with confidence, and good reason, that I’m on first name terms with most of the accident and emergency wards in town…
One of my best efforts came during a spot of home renovating during the height of Summer. Our house of the time was a hundred year old colonial villa with 12 foot high ceilings throughout. Painting the ceilings in that place was a real chore, all board and batten so a roller wouldn’t do. Every lick of paint had to be brushed on.
Now Auckland has a humid climate at the best of times and those old colonial villas have precious little ventilation high up at ceiling level, so the conditions at the top of my stepladder were really hot and sticky.
Midway through the first ceiling I was starting to fade from the heat and humidity so stripped to cool down, before setting off to complete the room. The paint was going on like a dream, and I must pause for a moment to advocate painting in the raw as a near-spiritual experience.
Near-spiritual that is, until it came time to move my stepladder. I stood beside the ladder, admiring my handiwork, and carelessly lifted the ladder off the floor by the stile on one side (for the ladder-impaired, the ladder stiles are the vertical frames that hold the treads).
Of course stepladders are hinged at the top and the other side was free to slam shut on the first side - which it duly did.
Now boys being what we are, we have an extra bit of tackle down below, and with the near-spiritual experience of painting the ceiling in the raw, my extra bit was celebrating the event with a half-cocked salute to manhood, so to speak. That is until that stepladder slammed shut neatly catching my manly virtues between the two stiles.
All thoughts of celebration were knocked out of that little sucker, let me tell you!
Some time back, we had a patient in hospital who had a massive gash in the front of his leg. He’d been chopping firewood, and because it had rained and his usual spot was muddy, he’d moved back up the yard a bit, and wound up under the Hills Hoist (a rotary clothesline with wire line). He’d managed to catch the axe on the line and loop it over the top and drop down onto his thigh. Stupid, but not earth-shattering.
After several weeks, he goes home. A few days later, he’s back with pretty much an identical wound. Evidently, his neighbour asked him what had happened, so he showed him.
One time, many years back, I was at my parents home after being away for some time. I’d been taking kickboxing lessons and was in that ‘yeah, I’m badass’ phase that most people get after their first couple of lessons but before they’ve actually been hit by anything.
I noticed a pull-string hanging from a ceiling lamp and thought to myself, “I bet I can kick that,” and proceeded to swing my right leg up as hard as I could.
Since my own home had tatami reed floors, it never occurred to me to check my feet. If I had, I would have noticed that I was now standing on a waxed hardwood floor. In socks, no less.
Remember the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons? When Fred or Barney would get a rug pulled out from under them, or Yogi would slip on the ice? Both legs would shoot out forward, and they’d kind of hang in the air for a split second, horizontal, before crashing flat on their backs.
That’s exactly what happened to me. The momentum of my right leg overcame the friction of my left foot against the ground and spun my entire body into the air. In that short, unexpected span of time, I hung there, suspended in space, and experienced a single moment of absolute clarity:
“Huh?”
WHAM!
I lay there for a few moments, completely stunned. Luckily, I landed full flat on my back just like Fred and Yogi, which spread the impact around. Even luckier, there were no witnesses. I was very sore for several days, but there were no lasting effects, save for gaining the sense not to try that again.
Ok. I hike, I bike, I roller-blade, and I dance. I am a fairly active young lady. I take stairs 2 at a time. I jump off the bottom four or five steps.
And yet two weekends ago I was walking across the parking lot when I apparently tripped over a painted line. Down I went. I don’t remember too much of it, but I hit my knees, then my wrists/hands. But that didn’t stop me. I kept going and hit my *face *on the pavement. :smack:, literally.
I was completely stunned. I got up with two skinned knees. I sprained my wrist, badly, and it still hurts two weeks later. (I did go to the doctor; he says it’s ligament damage and will take a while to heal). I had a huge bloody scrape across my chin which took an attractive 4-5 days to heal.
The right wrist & hand were hurt fairly badly and the doc was afraid I might have cracked one of the bones. Luckily I seem to have tough bones and was fine, but it still hurts to switch the gear shift or twist the tops off bottles.
I’m 31, btw.
I was about nine years old. It was summer vacation and as such was at home with my brothers while my mom and dad were at work. They had just bought a new set of knives, with one in particular, a 10 inch carving knife that looked especially inviting. I had just seen “The Three Musketeers” on tv and decided to pick up that knife. There was a cardboard box on the floor. I proceeded to stab it over and over with the aforementioned knife, undoubtedly pretending to kill whatever character Porthos, or Athos, or D’Artagnan was inovled with at the time. My grip slipped, and I promptly sliced my index finger to the bone, cutting a vital nerve.
We were at my MIL’s for some family dinner sort of thing and I needed to go to the bathroom. I usually put this off until I can go home because my MIL has set up the bathroom for her aged and ailing mother which means there is a thick plastic ‘riser’ sort of thing on the seat and a chrome system of handles on the toilet to help with getting up and sitting. The problem was that the chrome bars were always soooo cold that I hated the feeling on my thighs so I always had to sit funny to avoid touching them.
Ok, so I am poised precariously to take care of my business. The toilet paper is a tiny bit further away than usual so I reach out for it. I got overbalanced from this weird position and start to fall. The only thing I can grab for is the toilet paper holder on the wall - oddly, it’s not so securely attached as one might hope and it rips out of the wall. I continue my fall forward and hit my face on the door. The noise alerts everyone and I have to explain how I got the TP hanger out of the wall and bashed my nose.
I hate big family gatherings.