Stupidest way you have injured yourself

In My Humble Opinion
101

My big heavy upright vacuum cleaner wasn’t sucking up bird seeds on the rug fast enough to suit me, so I turned it upside down, still running, to see if the beater bar was revolving. It was. It sucked up my 3ft long braid that was dangling into its maw and smacked me in the head. Hard.

I don’t know which was more humiliating, taking apart a 30lb vacuum and extracting my burning, stinking hair from of the motor while the thing was still attached to my head, or explaining why I had fried hair and giant gash above my eye to everyone who asked.

102

The ‘Fuzzbuster’. :wink:

Been there done that, with the lawnmower. :frowning:
Felt it all the way up to my shoulder! :eek:

“OW! Fuuuuck!” is somewhat of an understatement, IMHO. :stuck_out_tongue:

103

This story is better in person, but I’ll try to describe it.

So at my old job, we had burlesque shows once a month. I was a cook in the back and had to keep on doing my job while there were girls in feathers and pasties running around through my work area.

This particular night, I was making a soup. It was the tomato soup, which only I and one of the managers could make correctly, so I had to get it done. From the back, I grabbed three large cans of ground tomato. They’re big industrial-size cans, so I had to hold one in each arm and stack the third on top. As I was walking out to the kitchen, one of the burlesque girls held the bar door open for me.

“Thanks, but I’m going that way-” I gestured with a nod of my head toward the kitchen, slamming my face on the edge of the can of tomatoes.

Ended up with a black eye and a big cut down my face.

104

Oh my god, that is golden. :smiley:

My son did the same when he was a toddler. I put a pot down and said to him, “Don’t touch that pot, it’s hot.” He looked me in the eye, said, “This pot?” and stuck his finger right to it.

Of course, it’s hereditary… any time a waiter sets something down in front of me and says, “Look out, that’s really hot!” I’m a-going to touch it. On purpose! :smack:

105

One office in which I worked had a (real) mangled, shredded necktie pinned to the wall above the shredder, with a sign that said “Don’t be this guy.”

Since you mentioned a head gash…one time I was carrying an enormous stack of copier paper, stacked vertically, across a room. The stack started to tilt toward me, and I intentionally head-butted it to restore it to the vertical – getting a nice horizontal papercut across my forehead. I walked around for a day or two looking like I’d been lobotomized.

106

Difficult to decide.

I hit my own self in the nose while trying to catch a ball, not sure how. I bled like a stuck pig and still have a scar where I split open that middle nose part, whatever it’s called.

Or, there was the time my ex-girlfriend called me while I was with my new girlfriend. Ex had locked herself out of her apartment. I can’t remember what craziness caused me to go over there with my new GF - there may have been crying. I tried to climb in a window, no doubt showing off. Both women watched as I slipped and put my foot through the window of the lower apartment. Both of them were kind enough to wait, together, in the emergency room while they stitched me up.

107

This thread gets better and better.

Did both girls take you home shiftless? Did both put you to bed?

108

I’ve got a brand new one to share with you all. So new it happened just this afternoon. This is no tale of love, as shiftless wove, but a tale of pain and vengeance. And stupidly injuring myself.

The back yard was getting kind of shaggy, so I started mowing. I started from the back like I always do. When I get close to the house I feel a sharp pain in the back of my right leg, so I assume it’s a mosquito or something and swat at it. Then the back of both my legs lights up in pain. It seems I ran over a hornets nest. If you ask me the bastards were asking for it, building a nest underneath the long-ish grass, but I digress.

I did what anyone would do when attacked by a swarm of angry hornets: I ran around like a goddamn maniac, flailing my arms! This is where the stupid comes in: I managed to smack myself in the nose hard enough to give myself a nosebleed. The bee stings are fine now, but my nose still hurts. And if you’re curious, the bees are all dead. I went out after dark with two cans of hornet spray and sprayed the shit out of the entrances to their nest.

So I guess the message is: If you hurt me I’ll freak out and hit myself in the face, then later I’ll come back and slaughter you, your family, and everyone you’ve ever known.

109

That doesn’t count. I’ve done the same thing coughing. More than once. something about bending over while doing it.

A have a few of them with a theme. When I was a kid I buried a scythe in a block of wood for fun and then proceeded to pull it out Three Stooges style. Yes, it came loose, right in the forehead.

Similar event when trying to pull out a dent with a dent puller. It let go and I got a 6 inch scar on my other arm.

110

This thread’s making me feel better about my stupid injury. It’s not close to being as dramatic as some of these. It is stupid, though.

Our rotary clothes airer broke, so I stripped off the washing line and strung it across the garden. I had quite a bit left over and remembered using something similar as a skipping rope as a kid.

Without thinking, or stretching, I decided to do some skipping. Ten seconds later, my foot begins to hurt a little. Two months later, I’m still limping on a damaged achilles tendon.

111

Um, what planet are you from? :eek: (or did you injure both hands?).

I must never again use a knife to open packages. Wound up driving around a new city trying to find a doc-in-the-box that I vaguely remembered seeing, to get stitches in one finger, after a failed attempt.

Another time (trying to cut the plastic thingy holding an apple corer/slicer to its backing card), the knife did me no harm… but the apple corer/slicer did. Shoulda gotten stitches that time, probably, but I toughed it out and spent a week with the finger wrapped in a ton of gauze to keep me from flexing it and re-opening the cut. Fortunately it was the ring finger, so people could tell I wasn’t flipping them the bird.

Walking in my kitchen, rolled my ankle, slammed against the edge of a doorframe, broke my glasses and cut my cheek. :smack:

Leaving a visit with the orthopedist (for knee/shoulder issues), rolled my ankle right in front of the elevator, spraining it badly. My husband happened to be with me, so I sent him back to the ortho’s office to borrow a wheelchair. They said “we can see you but insurance won’t cover it since you were just seen!”. I said “no, I can diagnose a sprained ankle, can I just beg an Ace bandage”… sent my husband out to the car to get the cane we keep there (this is a pattern, ya see), and I hobbled home.

I did that once while getting dressed. Standing on one foot to put my underwear on over the other - something I do every day of my life - and my back went SPROING. Managed to get to the bed, somehow, and told the office that I’d be working from home that day.

112

Ripped off the top of my thumb while trying to put a chain back on a kid’s bike; caught it between the chain and the sprocket. I was a teen, so the stupidity may be somewhat forgiven.

Tried to swat a spider in the bathroom a couple of years ago, hyper-extended my shoulder and needed a cortisone shot to knock the pain and inflammation down.

Managed to jam a wood chisel into my palm while trying to cut an opening for a lock’s strike plate.

Ran a fish hook into my thumb past the barb when I was a teen. It had to be pushed on through so the barb could be cut off. Ouch. On another occasion, I got a large treble hook snagged on a rock in a river. Pulled to the left, no luck. Pulled to the right, no luck. Pulled straight back and felt a stunning smack to the forehead, where the hook had stuck.

113

My ghod-playing frisbee with a pane of glass is an act of pure genius compared to some of you. :smiley:

114

I was at my boyfriends house. It was supposed to be a sober house, not a real one the guys just agreed seeing they and I had drug problems.
Well one night we sneak into his room and get wasted. I had to use the bath room down stairs. Well I feel at the top step, after one little landing.
My BF got kicked out and I waited 3 days to go to the ER they had to rebrake it to reset it. It sucked so bad. I felt so ashamed.

115

Was riding the instructor’s horse in a jumping lesson and the horse jumped bigger than I was used to so the instructor was getting irritated with me pulling on the horse’s mouth with the reins. I’m coming around to the jump again and the instructor suddenly yells, “LET GO!!!” so I did – and for some unknown reason I really truly let go of the horse and did a superman dive straight over the horse’s head. Luckily the horse slammed on the brakes as I did a forward roll in the air landed flat on my back, looking up at the underside of the horse’s head and neck.

There was a larger than usual crowd at the barn that day (of course), and the loud thump I made when I landed drew their attention. With a show of concern the instructor told me to get back on and “DO IT AGAIN!” So, I get back on, come back around, and danged if I didn’t literally do it again, landing even harder on my back, knocking my helmet askew and looking up at the mystified horse. No one came over to check to see if I was okay because they were all laughing so hard they were doubled over trying to breathe. (They did eventually check to make sure I wasn’t crying, because whoever cried had to buy the beer.) I was able to drive home but once I got there I wasn’t able to get out of the car.

116

I have to say, I did laugh a little at this mental image, of the horse looking down at you as if to say, “What are you doing? You’re not supposed to do that!”

117

This one wasn’t self-inflicted:

Dad took one of my brothers and me shopping. Being still small enough to use the seat in the cart, Dad put me in there. My brother, an angry bastard in his early teens, got mad at something (possibly me) and shoved the cart into a water fountain.

Took a few weeks for anyone to notice that my leg was broken.

118

I wonder that the majority of teenage boys survive to adulthood. A few examples of my own life y’all have reminded me of;

-Stepping on a landscaping rake thinking I can catch the handle as it swings upward, smacking myself in the face?

Check.

-Lighting a bonfire with a quart of gasoline and a roadflare? (missing eyebrow, and all the hair on my arm, and almost down to the scalp on one side, not life threatening, but detrimental to dating.)

Check.

-Having a minibike engine throttle cable jam up while screaming into a copse of trees, thus thinking of reaching under the seat for the cable, and grabbing the spark plug wire by mistake. Half pulled it out, and the electric shock cause me to jerk the handlebars to the side. Instead of driving into the trees, I cartwheeled side by side into them.

Check.

-BB gun, no BB just the air pumped up. We took the old tylenol capusels that you could pull apart and filled one with ketchup. Trying to make our own movie style bloody squibs. No squib effect but there was a stray BB that imbedded into my thigh. It worked its way out of the wound about 2 years later.

Check.

Did you know dropping a bowling ball onto a .22 bullet on a driveway makes it split and go off like a firecracker? Just random trivia without bloodshead y’all might want to know. When we realized some of the bullets did fire we stopped, Og alone knows why all those toes were spared of being shot.

-Breaking a toe a few minutes later while kicking that bowling ball down the street like a soccer ball. (I did mysteriously find it in my front lawn that night like a gift from the heavens.)

Check.

-Bowling ball part 3; Climb onto a school gym roof and throw off said bowling ball. We were expecting a Wile E. Coyote like explosion, noooooo, it bounced like a superball. About the 10th toss, with approprate eenui and complacency, like ducking around the corner, safety considerations were compromised. It finally did go off like a bomb. My friend said he heard a chip whiz by his head. From here, 28 years later I can see the pizza slice sized wedge that; by rights should have leveled him in the face, on my bookshelf.

-my favorite, and keeping to the OP. Bored rural teens really did play mailbox baseball. I was sitting on the doorsill of a ginormous mid '70 Buick. I insisted we stop at a railroad crossing. Looked at that red glass lense of the crossing gate warning, took a Ruthian overhand swing and—

BLAMMMMO

The aluminium bat bounced off the lense and came back and hit me square in the forehead. Knocked my ass out cold. Fell out of the car and had to be picked up by my friends and hauled back inside. Apparently they spent several minutes in a panic wondering what in the hell to do with me until I came to.

Ahhhhh, my mispent youth. I find it hard to believe I’m a productive member of society today.

119

Luckily, you did a Superman dive and not a Chris Reeve dive. :slight_smile:

What, too soon?

120

With each son (at different times) I pick a prickly pear, cut it open and let them eat it telling them not to grab it.

They did.