About 10 years ago or so, my then wife and I bought ourselves inline skates. She was a former ice skater and took to them immediately. Me? Notsomuchthanks. I was “okay” at best.
One afternoon we skated through the parking lot in our apartment complex down to the tennis courts. Since no one was using them, and they had such a nice surface, we decided to skate there for a while. At one point she challenged me to a race. I knew she’d win, but what the heck. She won, but she had to use the chain link fence to stop herself, resulting in a hairline fracture to her ring finger.
As we were skating back to the apartment to get the car and take her to the ER, I went over a speed bump and buried one of the wheels on my right skate in a broken section of asphalt. I realized I was falling and tucked my arm so as to land on my shoulder and not break my wrist. My wraparound sunglasses met the pavement and sliced a three cm gash over my right eye.
I saw on the curb while my wife skated back, got my medical kit and her car. I gauzed my wound up and we went into the ER together. When we checked in, they separated us. Apparently when one person has a gash to the head and the other has a broken hand, they suspect there was a fight. Our stories matched, since they were true and all. She got a finger splint and I got 10 stitches and some nerve damage that lasted most of a year.
My then wife and I had a waterbed. It was the kind with six tubes rather than one reservoir. I decided I wanted to firm up the bed; so I took the head off the shower (we were in a second story apartment, so no hose access), pulled each tube out of the bed in turn, dumped out the old water and filled it more full, holding the tube upright while standing in the shower.
Of course, these things are heavy and awkward as all get out, not to mention that they get slippery as they get wet, being that they’re just vinyl cylinders. I was on the last one. I unscrewed the cap and went to turn the thing for draining when my hand slipped.
The tubes weighed about 50 pounds each and I was keeping a really firm grip. Of course, when it slipped out of my hand, my hand flew upward and I poked myself in the eye.
Trip to the ER, antiseptic drops in my eye to prevent the lacerated cornea from getting infected. gauze for a day, eye patch for a week, full time sunglasses for a week after that.
Good thing you weren’t the poster above you - if a couple came in with the wife having a broken finger and the husband having flame-broiled testicles, anyone would be deeply suspicious.
Feeding my cat. The tab broke off half way through. I could squeeze the can enough to slip my thumb under the lid. As I did it ,I thought that if it snapped back i could possibly get cut.
Result 6 stitches.
Vaguely related, along the lines of “what a fine pair we are”, with a little bit of ridiculous injury method thrown in:
One Saturday, my husband was riding his bicycle to work, and saw a customer with his young son on the sidewalk ahead. They recognized him and started waving, so he waved back with his right hand… then (IIRC) the car ahead braked quickly and he squeezed his brake hard. The left one, which only stopped the front wheel. Meanwhile, the car ahead had continued on, and so did he, minus the bike underneath him - over the handlebars.
He’d chosen unwisely to not wear his helmet that day. He did a shoulder roll square onto his right shoulder/upper arm and then his back, tucking his chin in to his chest, in an attempt to shield his head. It worked, and he actually pretty smoothly rolled over and got back up. (The customer’s son was exclaiming about how cool that “trick” was, in the meantime.) His right shoulder was numb, but he had a history of pinching a nerve in that shoulder with impact (high school football, for instance), and figured it would be better eventually and went off to work. He had trouble lifting his arm much above his waist but again figured it was a pinched nerve. By the end of the day, he asked me to set up a (hopefully Monday) appointment with a doctor for him, which I did.
The next day, I had an appointment to get my eyes checked and new glasses made, which I desperately needed. His shoulder was still bothering him. I get examined, eyes dilated, prescription written, and order placed for glasses. We get back to the car, and he can barely raise his arm to the steering wheel to turn the key. Not only is this a bad thing, but it also means that driving will be not recommended, not the least because the shifter is on the steering column. Meanwhile, my eyes are dilated and it’s a bright sunny day, with me wearing those “hang on your glasses” disposable sunglasses.
We decided, just barely, that I would be the better driver in this circumstance, and that I would take the “back roads” home. We got home fine, and his shoulder turned out to have a convex chip of bone knocked off right about where your muscles in the arm attach. Combine that with practically all of those muscles/ligaments/etc. getting “pulled” with the force of the impact/skid, and his arm just was not working right.
The moral of the story is don’t wave with your right hand when bicycling, wear a helmet (you’re not always going to be lucky), and try not to get yourself in a situation where both you and your partner might be incapacitated to one degree or another.
Honestly, I injure myself in funny ways all the time, and nothing sticks out in particular.
As for recent - a few months ago my roommate and I are hanging out downstairs when the “tickle monster” decides to come to town, and in a giggling fit, I try to get away, hitting the back of my head HARD on the corner of our coffee table, which is actually a microwave turned on its side with a thrft-store afghan over it. Blood everywhere, but I’m eventually OK. Now that I’ve started shaving my head again, I’ve got a nice scar there.
As for funny, but not necessarily that painful, I had this cool trick when I worked at McDonald’s (actually, there are tons of injury stories from this place too) where I would get a large coffee cup, and stick it over my hand, then make a fist and the cup just shatters off my hand. I did that one day, and then looked at the bloody remains. I somehow managed to cut myself on a foam cup.
When I was a wee child (not sure how old–somewhere in the 3-5 range, I think) we used to visit some neighbors who had what we called the “kiddie bowl.” It was a big metal bowl, large enough for a child to sit in. You sat in it and…I don’t know…just rocked around. There wasn’t much to do in my home town, apparently.
Anyway, I wanted to play in the kiddie bowl, so I hurried over to it, stepped on the lip…
…and propelled the other end of the bowl, which was right at mouth height, upward into my poor little teeth at a high rate of speed.
I think I only lost one (baby) tooth, but I was scared to death–there was blood everywhere! They hustled me into the bathroom and rinsed my mouth out until it quit bleeding, and I think I got over it fairly fast.
Was cutting an apple with a huge, serrated bread knife. Totally wrong tool for the job. Sliced my left index finger half off at the second knuckle. Must’ve done some nerve damage because it was 15 years ago last month and it still hurts.
I’ve posted this before. The injury wasn’t serious, but it definitely ridiculous.
I cut a finger and drew blood with seafood cocktail sauce.
Not the bottle. Not the bottlecap.
The sauce.
Normally, after using the sauce, I don’t clean off the top, so a dried, thin layer of sauce develops on the glass under the cap. It winds up projecting a little horizontally.
One day I thought I’d clean the bottle by wiping the top with my finger. I tried once, but since the stuff was fairly dry and hard, it didn’t work. I tried again with more pressure, thinking that would work. It didn’t, and about a second later I felt my finger stinging slightly. I thought, “WTF?” I looked at my finger and saw a cut that was starting to bleed slightly.
I bandaged my finger and threw away the bottle.
Some months later, I tried it again, thinking, “Remember what happened last time, don’t use a lot of pressure.” Same result.
I tried this a THIRD time months later. I thought “Be VERY careful this time.” Same result.
I really won’t use my finger next time. Really. That would be stupid.
Thanks for the stories, all–I’m actually tearing up at some of these, I’m laughing so hard.
In high school, the caferia had the most innefectual plastic knives I had ever seen. I once attempted to demonstrate exactly *how *ineffectual by drawing one across my wrist dramatically. And promptly began bleeding.
In college, I got into the front passenger seat of a car and neglected to raise my right foot quite high enough to clear the doorframe. This dislocated some ligament or tendon, resulting in excruciating pain any time I either changed the angle of the knee or put any weight on the leg. (I thought the knee was dislocated, and the ER said it was sprained, but once they straightened the leg and the errant bit of tissue popped back into place, with an audible/tangible POP, everything was pretty much okay.)
An exboyfriend once punched himself in the testicles going after a particularly annoying mosquito.
Weirdly, I’m glad it went where it went. An inch in the wrong direction and I’d never have been having children.
When I had the colostomy done it was clear that I’d been in an accident, what with the broken ankle, bruising etc. When I had it reversed six months later there were no such obvious injuries. I’m sure all the medical staff thought I was some kind of sexual deviant.
Compared to you lot, I haven’t had that many injuries. There was one time that I was on a train to Scotland, with my foot slightly in the aisle, and a passing woman in high heels stepped on my big toe. She carried unknowingly on her way, with my big toenail halfway up her stilletoe heel. It was ripped completely away from the nail base.
I had to go the same route to get some tissue to wrap my toe up and clean up the blood, so I saw the tiny bloody prints she’d left. Coming back from the loo, I saw the huge, detailed and bloody footprints I’d left on the way up - as well as several passengers looking at me in horror because they’d seen what happened.
Given that I probably should have kept my legs further out of aisle, that counts as an injury I’ve done to myself.
I’ve often wondered what that woman thought when she eventually found a bloody toenail on her shoe. Probably ‘ew, some people are so disgusting, leaving their bloody toenails all over the place!’
The only other one is ‘yada yada yada I’ve had so much to drink and I’m still not drunk!’ cue me walking straight into a lampost.
Neither of those is anywhere near as good as the stories you lot have posted, but I wanted to keep this thread going.
I was installing the toilet in the bathroom when my father was in the hospital for a heart attack after he ripped out a couple rooms in the house. I was tightening the hold down bolts and tightening the water feed tube. I then started to get up and whacked my head on the water tank of the toilet. I had a goose egg on the top of my head and had to be sure to stay awake and be watched for half a day.
I had a friend that broke her arm the first time she used inline skates. She had all the gear but that didn’t save the arm. She never did that sport again.
This is one of my Epic Stories that people I know insist I tell new people I meet. (Another one is the Rabbit Eyeball story, which I’ve posted here before.)
When I was 14, our marching band was invited to perform at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York. Families from a high school in New Jersey hosted us in their homes.
It’s 2 a.m., the morning before the parade. My friends and I are up, dressed in our uniforms, and piled into the car ready to drive to the parade route for early morning rehearsal. Suddenly, oh crap, I forgot my flute on the dresser upstairs! I dash out of the car, running into the house, when suddenly I see stars and I am on the ground.
Now I must emphasize that it was 2 in the morning, dark, I had gotten very little sleep, we had been sightseeing and rehearsing all week, staying up late, and most importantly of all…this California girl had never seen a storm door before. I had run full speed into a thick, clear piece of glass covering the front door.
Shaking off the stun, I ran upstairs to grab my flute and stopped to check myself in the bathroom. I had a cut across my nose and blood had stream all down my front, ruining my white uniform. When I got to the rehearsal site, I got a change of uniform and swallowed a handful of ibuprofen. It felt like my whole face was on fire.
In the end, I marched and played the whole parade route with a broken nose.
