I’m talking crazy, off-the-wall stories that become the stuff of legend.
These two are not my stories, but I will share just the same as I try to come up with my most ridiculous injury.
This one just occurred last week. Keep in mind that the protagonist is a 26 year old man in a very good college. He just also happens to be goofy and never takes himself seriously. So while attending a picnic with people from his program at school (his major is wildlife ecology and conservation) he walked to get something from his friend’s car which was parked at the top of a nearby hill. On the return trip, he decided to see how many somersaults he could do down the hill. 7, apparently. But upon standing, with a lot of forward momentum and feeling rather dizzy, he smashed headfirst into a park bench. Split his face open from under his nose to the middle of his cheek. Before he got stitched up it looked like a vagina had sprouted on his face.
This is an older one, involving a different friend of mine. When we were teenagers, one of our friends worked part-time at a grocery store. We were waiting in the parking lot for him to get off work, and started pushing our friend Josh around in a shopping cart. We sent him careening down a slight hill, figuring the worst that would happen would be the shopping cart hitting some obstruction and ejecting him. A few bumps and bruises, worst case scenario. Well, sure enough, this shopping cart headed directly for another shopping cart at the bottom of the slight hill. But the closer he got, the more obvious it became that the shopping carts were lined up perfectly for his cart to couple with the other one. Josh tried to crouch as low in the cart as possible, but when they collided, his cart wedged itself into the other one and his face got smashed between the two bars on the backs of the carts (the bar you hold to push the cart). That required some stitches and dental work.
The first one (totally not my fault) occurred when I was four years old and at the beach. My family and I were on the swings and I went to put my bare feet into the sand to stop. Apparently there was a pull tab underneath the sand, something similar to when one pulls the tab and the thin metal lid off of a can of cat food. Sheet of metal makes contact with my big toe and slices a HUGE (at least it seemed huge at the time) chunk off of my big toe. That was a pretty bad day. Luckily it was just skin and it all grew back eventually. I stayed away from swings for a long time after that.
When I was around thirteen I opened a door onto my toe. To help my recently wheelchair-bound grandma get around the house better the family sawed off the bottoms of her doors for easier opening which meant that each door had a good inch between the bottom and the ground. It was just perfect enough to catch my toenail (on my big toe, same toe as the first story) when I was wearing sandals and pull UP ninety degrees. I screamed and just covered my right foot with my left, I didn’t even bother to look down because I knew it was going to be bad. Despite my pleas of “I don’t want to go to the emergency room, it’ll heal on it’s own! Right?” we went to the emergency room. Got a fun shot straight into my toe as the doctor set the nail bed back into place.
Somehow took a chunk out of my tongue while brushing my teeth one day. I guess I ran my tongue across my bottom teeth and I took out a chunk because I am just that AWESOMELY CLUMSY. It didn’t hurt and I couldn’t figure out for the life of me where that chunk came from but I almost fainted at upon figuring out what I just did.
My most recent injury involved an apple, an apple slicer, and an impatient nikoniko thinking it was totally okay to push the end pieces out of the apple slicer using her thumb. Lots of blood and a little half-moon scar on my thumb from that lesson.
Luckily nothing life threatening, just injuries where as soon as they happened I yelled in my mind “Really now, seriously?”
I opened the fridge door wide. Then I started it swinging closed, and simultaneously reached and opened the freezer door, resulting in me getting my left boob caught between them, causing an enormous bruised knot in my boob that took weeks to go away… :smack:
When I was first shaving my legs, mom and I shared a permanent razor. Normally it was pretty dull and I acted on that premise one day, not knowing Mom had replaced the blade. Nice long strip of my shin came off.
Second, I was closing my trunk one day and somehow my hand glanced off the V in the Civic logo (I have to assume it was the V since it has that point, and it’s always looked at me kind of shiftily). I thought, oh, that smarted, and then noticed the blood and being able to see inside my hand. Three stitches. :smack:
We were having a work party, and the PTB brought in one of those really long sub sandwiches. It was unsliced and they neglected to provide a large knife, so we were using one of the little plastic ones. I was slicing away at my section, and the extremely crusty bread sliced through the first couple of layers of skin on one of my knuckles. I did not bleed on the food.
Getting ready to go out to dinner with friends. Just got out of the shower and walking around the apartment in my robe and getting the excess water out of my ear with a q-tip.
Phone rings, I must answer it!! One punctured eardrum later, here I am.
Oh crap! There’s really not much room under this car and I have an X-acto knife clenched in my teeth. That was close, I could have rammed my OW I just banged my forehead on the exhaust, over reacted and slammed the back of my skull into the concrete, stabbing myself with the X-acto knife to the hilt in my thigh.
The list of stupid ways I’ve hurt myself could fill a book. Several books, in fact. I’ve tripped over flowerpots eighteen inches high and three fucking feet in diameter. I’ve burned the inside of my elbow on the side of an oven. I’ve tried to catch a falling knife. I’ve banged my head off a shifter in a car–twice in a row. You name it, I’ve stupidly done it.
It’s probably a toss-up between accidentally sticking my toothbrush up my nose (hint: toothpaste burns, A LOT) and breaking my toe by walking into a door. A screen door. I can’t explain it.
That… could have some INTERESTING and NSFW explanation
Probably my stupidest was my first* broken elbow. I’ve posted this one here before, but what the heck.
Scene: parking lot, largely unoccupied, with the occasional curb/grassy strip / curb separating different groups of parking spaces. Walk on asphalt, step up to step onto the grassy bit, but don’t QUITE lift the foot enough.
So foot catches on curb.
Newton’s first law of motion reads "Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. ". The foot, having an external force applied (by the curb), is now no longer in motion. The rest of me, having no such external force, remains in motion.
Quickly I try to get my feet back up under me. Causing me to run up onto the curb/grass, down the other side, and face-plant onto the asphalt. Fortunately I didn’t break any teeth, just the one elbow.
First of two. The second one was about 14 years later and not quite as stupid, but more spectacular - involving landing funny on one foot while waling down some stairs, and somersaulting the rest of the way down the stairs.
Working construction, doing traffic control. The stop sign I was carrying was on a pole long enough to reach the ground. It was a big heavy metal one, so I had the pole stuck in a traffic cone to help support its weight. The wind gusted, and the stop sign started to tip over. Since it was already out of my reach and falling, I stepped on the side of the cone to bring it back up to my hand. As it turns out, when something large and flat tries to push through air, it gets pushed so that it encounters the least resistance. In other words, I went from looking at a big “STOP” to looking at the edge of a stop sign heading for my face.
Other construction guys: Hey, how’d you get that cut on your forehead?
BellRung: I really don’t want to talk about it.
Grade 10 gym, I was trying to bounce a basketball. I was sort of a landfish, in that I could barely locomote without damaging myself, let alone dribble. Frustrated at my uncoordination, I slammed the basketball into the court, only to have it rebound and hit me in the face. It was a moment made for the movies. I got a little chip out of one of my bottom incisors, to boot.
I set fire to my nose with a flaming marshmallow Peep once.
I also tore the capsular ligament in my left shoulder and cut myself fairly badly on both elbows, both knees and my forehead when I managed to roll a tricycle (big wheel, for my American readers).
Both these injuries occurred during the same week- when I was 19. Ah, college.
I was at a rehearsal for a skit around Easter, and somebody brought a giant easter basket full of candy- so we were sitting around during a break eating Peeps and chocolate eggs. Somebody decided to set the last peep on fire, but I was still hungry, so I took it and tried to take a bite out of the unburned end.
Unfortunately, it spun over in my fingers as I was bringing it to my mouth, and the burning part lodged right under my nose… I threw it on the ground and crossed my eyes and I could see little flames licking up around the edges of my nose. I snorted them out, and ran inside to rinse off the burned-peep gunk, and realized I was going to have the world’s biggest blister on the skin over my septum for a while.
