‘Little brothers’… Sometimes, they’re a blessing. 
Other times, you wish you were an ‘only child’. :mad:
(I have three younger brothers.) 
Actually my little brother also has a “stupidest way you have injured yourself” story. He was at a dance and stepped back to let someone get past him. He put one foot back and it landed in a puddle from somebody’s spilled drink. Did a little overbalance wobble and was fine. The next day his foot was swollen, purple and he couldn’t walk on it. Turns out he had ripped a tendon and fractured the ankle in such a way that he needed two screws in it.
He has also popped his Achilles tendon, scalded his foot, and was t-boned on the back of his friend’s motorcycle, shattering his hip and gouging up his knee. All these happened to his right leg. which had me asking if we shouldn’t just lop it off so no other accidents will happen to him.
And I just remembered another one. He was wrestling with my other brother and was knocked into the wall. No injury there but as he slid down the wall he hit the lamp plug. The plug broke off but left the prongs in the socket, so he ended up with two parallel gouges on his arm as well as being electrocuted. Siblings, gotta love’em
Jumped off a building in a panic to avoid lightning. Had an argument with certain insurance company whose name rhymes with Pew Gross because they said I’d tried to kill myself. Won because I successfully argued that I hadn’t believed jumping off the building was dangerous.
My dad was playing softball. He was running in to home plate and tried to slide, feet first. He broke his fibula and tore the ligaments in his ankle.
Touched the mashed potatoes I was cooking to see how hot they were. Turns out they were really hot and burned my finger, so I put my finger in my mouth.
Which was covered with really hot mashed potatoes.
This is actually how my brother popped his Achilles tendon. Nice to see he is not the only one who tried this with unfortunate results:D
My Dad bought a Honda ATC 90 for me and my three younger brothers in 1976. (the one that we had was identical to the 5th picture down on the left, in the link)
The damn things were notoriously dangerous to ride, (for a variety of reasons) inherently unstable, difficult to control/steer besides the fact that the method of riding one is exactly counterintuitive. One of the major ‘design flaws’ was the fact that it didn’t have a rear 'differential. It just had a solid steel axle with a chain sprocket in the middle to power the rear wheels.When making a turn of any degree, it was necessary to lean to the outside of the turn, otherwise the thing would literally continue in a straight line, if you were on soft ground. WTF? 
The damn things were ‘tough’ though, due to the weird way that they handled and the inherent unstableness caused by the ‘soft and mooshy’, 10psi max, balloon tires, everybody (and I do mean everybody, me, my three younger brothers and numerous cousins and friends) that got on that freakin death trap (and rode it for more than 1-2 hours) crashed it! :eek:
The great majority of accidents were generally some degree of rollover, up to and including multiple somersaults, depending on the speed, . The only real damage ever incurred was bent handlebars and front forks, which were basically just pieces of heavy walled steel pipe. (With some chains and a ‘come along’, I got quite good at straightening them out after the more spectacular crashes.) 
One of the ‘iron clad/carved in stone’ rules of riding the thing was never, ever, for any reason, take your feet off of the pegs (if you could help it) while it was moving.
Due to the solid axle and the knobby balloon tires being directly behind your lower legs and feet, there was a very real danger of being dragged off and flipping it, at the least.
Getting to the ‘brother injuring himself by being stupid’ part of this long winded tale, my 14 year old brother was riding it down a dusty gravel road at about 30 mph with two younger cousins trailing a short distance behind him on a small ‘dirt’ bike. My brother was being a ‘dick’ at that particular moment by dragging his right foot and kicking up gravel and a big cloud of dust trying to prevent the kids from passing him.
I’m pretty sure y’all can guess what transpired, that big, soft knobby tire grabbed hold of his foot/lower leg and pulled it underneath.
He managed to stay in the saddle, but unfortunately, the foot that operates the brake was now between the tire and the road surface, having the hide scraped off the side of it, (almost to the bone, in spots) as he traveled another 40-50 feet, before coming to a stop. :eek:
After his foot healed up, he had to ‘pad’ his right shoe from then on. He had effectively reduced it almost a whole shoe size. 
I crashed one into a fence pole because I couldn’t turn. Nice, rusty metal pole–my head and leg on one side of it, the rest of my body and the ATV (which was still trying to go forward) on the other.
I was visiting family at the time, and my aunt just slapped some peroxide and bandages on me and sent me on my way. It wasn’t until years later that I realized somebody should have gotten me a tetanus shot, at the very least.
They forgot to mention that you have to lean the opposite way from the direction you want to turn, huh? 
Not too much, or it’ll ‘tip and flip’, just enough so that the wheel on the inside of the turn would slip a little.
The difference in amount between ‘just enough lean to make the turn’ and ‘too much lean, you’re gonna crash!’, decreased signifigantly and rapidly as the speed of the bike increased. :eek:
I imagine you figured that out pretty quick though, if you got ‘back in the saddle’.
Among my crowd, while those tabs still existed, it was standard to drop your tab from one beer can into the empty can you’d just finished drinking from.
I was packing up from a on site installation, on my way home after a three day trip. I had been using a miter-trimmer. One of these, a reallly scary device. went to pick it up and put it in the trunk of my car. Did I use the convenient handle? Nooo, I picked it up by the blade! Sliced the tendon in my left middle finger.
It still sits in my shop with the box labeled hand slicer.
It was Christmas Eve, I was working retail, people would not leave the store. I was late getting home, I was late starting dinner, I was late eating . . . You get the drift. So it was nearly 11pm and I was tired and bitchy, and I still had to prep the chestnuts for my stuffing. Bad idea.
I had to cut small crosses in the chestnut shells, which are hard, slippery and round. Of course I cut my left hand. T’other one and I got the bleeding stopped, but argued for a good ten minutes whether it needed stitches. He won.
So, we agreed to go to emerg. But it’s now Christmas morning, so we stopped and wrapped a plate of assorted cookies, put on our Santa hats and headed off.
The nurses loved us, the cookies were hugely appreciated, the doctor was humming a carol while he administered the anaesthetic. It’s all good, until he leaned towards me, sniffed, reared back, and gasped . . .
“Jesus H. Christ! You’re SOBER!!!”
Not the stupidest, but the most recent. I was opening a can of cat food, and somehow the lid sliced right into that fleshy area between the thumb and the rest of the hand. While the blood was flowing, the two fucking cats just sat there, demanding that I finish feeding them.
Anyway, the lid went all the way through that part of the hand, and required 9 stitches.
At the ER I had to answer some routine questions, like “Did you intentionally injure yourself?” [Yes, and my weapon of choice is a 9 Lives lid.] “Do you ever think of injuring other people?” [Yes, but only politicians.] “Do you get along with your cats?” [No, I try to poison them by bleeding into their food.]
I got a rescue dog, she was about 2, perfectly housebroken and obedience trained. She had been turned in because she was an alpha bitch and needed to be in a one dog home.
So the second day after I took her home, I went into the shower. When I came out, I took a couple of steps away from the shower, then bent down to dry my feet off.
The dog came in the door behind me and stuck her wet nose on the back of my leg at the calf. It was like an ice cube. My panic reflexes kicked in and my body jumped forward as I raised up my head from drying off my feet. I then slammed the top of my head against the sink edge; this made me jerk away from the sink, twist and fall on the toilet which when I landed on it, I cracked the seat. Still in panic mode I tried to jump up, which required me to grab a towel bar which I then pulled out of the wall.
Suffering a blinding headache. surrounded by the detritus of my bath, I sort of stumbled my way into the bedroom, where the dog was plastered in terror against a wall.
I just said quietly, “Don’t do that again.” Cause you have to say something.
Anyway, she was a good dog for the next 11 years, a constant companion on long walks, a judicious and wise guard dog, a friend to all in the neighborhood, well behaved in all respects, but it was years before I turned my back on her after I had a shower.
Man, if only that dog had had a video camera …
I’m not sure if this is fair, as it wasn’t MY stupid injury, but I was present, and I DID almost rupture something laughing.
Few years back, the management in my office was having an ugly tie charity contest thing. One said manager recruited me to help him create his hideous tie. Supplies: ugly pink tie, huge fake flowers, plastic dinosaurs, hot glue gun. How does a 34 year old man manage to both purchase a hot glue gun, and yet not understand the concept behind it?
“So does it get hot?”
" . . . yes. That’s why they call it a HOT glue gun."
"Can I touch it?’
“What? No! It’s HOT!”
“How hot?”
“I don’t know, touch it and find out.”
Boss apparently has all the deep understanding of sarcasm of a four year old, as he reaches out and touches not the puddle of hot glue, but the NOZZLE of the glue gun. Screams in pain and jerks his hand away, bringing the glue gun with it, flesh seared to the metal tip. Accident reports, emergency room visits and me finishing the tie alone later- he didn’t even win. Maybe if the tie had been light enough to show the blood . . .
My own stupid injury- trying to repack an ice auger into its original box, and it just won’t quite go. The smart thing would be to grab the handle, pull it back out and see what’s causing the snag. But then I wouldn’t have a story to post. I just reach in there, all willy nilly with my easily sliceable fingers, and give it a push. And my hand just whooshes right past it, like it wasn’t even there! Maybe my hands were sweaty. I pull them off to wipe the sweat off and try again, only to be greeted with a rush of blood. The blade sliced through the tip of my middle finger, cleanly bisecting both finger and nail, right up the middle. Needless to say, I did not finish repackaging. In fact, I doubt anyone did, as I don’t think there’s a protocol in place for reselling items that have been bled upon.
Another one…
I was at a new job, a college intern. Someone was showing off some of the stuff they were working on, some nifty material called “zeolite”, that has this property of heating up when making contact with water. Really? Sure. “Here, take this peice of zeolite, put it in your hand, now spit on it, and it will get warm.” So I do so, expecting it to get mildly warm. It starts to get* incredibly* hot.
Now this was supposed to be a fun practical joke. The standard reflex is to say “ouch” and fling your hand to get the hot thing off it. Except for some reason I’m not standard, and I’m worried about making a mess or starting a fire or some such silliness, so I’m looking for a “safe” place to ditch the burning hot cinder* in my hand. Like a garbage pail, where the fire** can then be contained and extinguished. So I’m holding it and looking around while my hand is charring***. Finally I drop it. And I’ve managed to get a blister from the burn.
Which is unpleasant, and I’m asking around for a first aid kit, and I get sent to the on-site health clinic. Okay. I proceed over there, tell them I burned my hand, have to explain how I burned my hand. Cue workplace injury statistics, and the unforeseen (by me) bureaucratic mess involved. And then having to report to my supervisor, and explain why I’m injured. Which resulted in some choice comments to the senior engineers about not doing that kind of thing any more.
*Not really, it just felt that way.
**Not really, just my imagination of what was likely to happen with a very hot object on loose paper or something.
***Not really, it just felt that way.
Some time ago I got one of those “ginsu” knifes and saw the commercial that demonstrated how it would cut a can, so I decided to test the claim. I got a empty soup can and started sawing away. After cutting a bit, the knife slipped and cut my finger down to the bone.
I still have the scar…
Perhaps not so embarrassing since can be passed off as being 8. Running across basket ball court and jumping on to large thin puddle that had frozen to “skate”/skid another 15 feet or so. Tripped and landed on upper front two teeth which shattered on impact. Walked home to explain to parents with tongue holding the nerve endings of those teeth against the roof of mouth.
Another playground idiot injury involved the slide with the hump in middle of it. The slide is supported by the ladder and by some poles mounted in post holes with concrete around them on the sides. Who knew that if you try stick your feet way up in the air you could roll over the side of the slide and plant your head on the concrete around the posts. Broken skull, several weeks in a hospital to monitor the swelling and let bone set. Banned from participation in any sports/athletics for a couple years.
When I was older and should have known better, I was trying to use my tongue to taste whether a toy motor was good. I expecting that spinning the motor would act as a generator and produce a bit of voltage I would be able to taste much like the sour taste of a good 9volt battery. This was just to save the trip to get a volt-meter. Holding the motor and spinning it required two hands so I used my front teeth to hold the leads against my tongue. These are the teeth that were replaced with caps in the prior incident. The metal backside of the caps conducted the small amount of juice from the motor directly to whatever was left of the teeth nerves. I fell against a wall and crumpled to the floor while my brain tried to catch up with how much pain I had experienced for that fraction of a second.
I laughed so hard whilst sitting on the edge of a hotel bed that I slid off and smacked my eye on the corner of the nightstand. Had the most PERFECT black bruise around my eye, and everyone thought I was just going for the ‘smokey’ eye look. 
(Yes, alcohol was involved, hehe)
My brother, soon nicknamed ‘Moose’ because of all his accidents, practically started life on a first-name basis with whatever local hospital we lived near. First, he shot out of my mom in the middle of the hallway at the hospital, when the doctor told my mom ‘Nah, you got lots of time yet’; my brother popped out right into his hands just to prove him wrong.
A couple years later he decided to see what would happen if you stuck dad’s key into the outlet. That was the first time, but not the last, I ran into my folks’ bedroom to tell them “Matt’s dead!”.
He turned to flip off a friend he was arguing with, whilst riding his bike, which would have been fine if there hadn’t been a car in the neighbor’s driveway blocking the sidewalk. He completely macerated his crotch region, and wore my flannel nightgown for months. <Never did get it back!!>
I think he was 11 or so when he tried to take his eye out. Well, he wasn’t TRYING to, he was TRYING to cut the ties holding a silly-looking number sign on the handlebars of his <new> bike. He knew to cut away from him, but that didn’t work, so he tried the other way. He neatly cut out his tear duct; the surgeon they found to fix it flew from DC, was Pres. Carter’s eye surgeon, and he’d only performed the surgery once or twice before. This was his first success. 
No one who knows my brother was at all surprise when he became a paramedic.