By which I mean the one that makes you go “how could I have hurt myself doing that?”
I seem to have done something do my ankle while I was shaving my legs, topping my previous best of scraping my knee while washing my hair.
I was walking and for no apparent reason twisted my ankle and did it again probably 2 months after that first time. Walking, not running or skipping but just walking on a flat sidewalk. When people asked what happened I either told them I was playing basketball, playing football or skateboarding.
Oh, geez, I hurt myself every time I shave my legs.
I also burned myself three times today, once getting the turkey out of the oven, once scalding my finger on a hot pan, and the most spectacular was when I was building a fire in the fireplace, an ember leaped out and embedded itself in my arm, causing a second-degree burn before I could pick it off.
When my bf suggested that I was rather dangerous, I recalled the splashy injuries I used to get while prepping food for meals and working in restaurants. At least, I mused, I have learned how to use a knife without getting hurt.
Oh, and I once broke my ankle stepping on a slippery manhole cover while crossing the street.
Stupid, minor injuries? A day in the life of ggurl.
I just thought of another couple: (can you tell I’m having trouble sleeping?) Once, I was knocked off a ladder when the utility knife I was using to cut duct tape off the outside of my air conditioner unit cut into the wire that connected the AC to its power supply.
Also, less spectacularly, I acquired a free-flowing gash in my scalp due to getting up too quickly from a soak in the tub and bashing my head on the faucet.
I think this happened twice.
:smack:
Not an accident, this happened while I was younger.
We had an open stairway to the 2nd floor of our house that had 3 turns going up. That left not one but two balconies open for fun. I sprained my right ankle 4 times playing Superman jumping off of it. At 31 the ankle still cracks from the buildup of fluid anytime I walk.
Just a matter of time till the arthritis sets in, I guess.
When I was 10 I lit a firecracker, dropped into a glass medicine bottle, and tried to screw the metal lid on REALLY QUICKLY before it went off: I was leaning right over it, needless to say, and fortunately the left lens of my glasses absorbed most of the blast {the only time I have ever been grateful for wearing them}, but I still have a scratched left cornea from the high-speed bottle cap and resultant glass fragments, and was extremely lucky not to lose that eye. Pretty stupid, really.
I think I posted this one time already, but WTF:
The button on my slacks came off while I was at work, but I was fortunate enough to find a safety pin and make do. I went to the bathroom, unfastened my safety pin/button and went about my business. I then proceeded to “shake the dew off the lily” and skewered my penis on the safety pin. I screamed liked a, well, man who just got his penis skewered. I didn’t do any actual damage though.
Oh, man. I have a terrible, stupid, needless injury story. I still don’t know why I did this or thought it was a good idea.
It was about six or seven years ago, I was 19 or 20. Old enough to damn well know better… well. I used to wear these little black shoes that a friend of mine called “Peter Pan Getaway Shoes”. Black, with pointed tips, and absolutely no treads. When I say “no treads”, I mean *no damn treads * - the bottoms of those shoes were smooth, shiny, and slick. Why anyone thought these would make for a shoe worth walking in, I don’t know. Maybe they were sitting shoes. What’s worse is: I loved them. I didn’t have just one pair, I had two. I had a fricken’ backup pair. deep sigh
You think you see where this is going? You just hold on a little longer. It gets much worse.
So, I’m out for coffee with my then boyfriend, my best friend, and two buddies of all of ours. We think it’s a beautiful night out, and decide we should go for a little walk, perhaps down to the elementary school playground. I have no idea why, but we liked to hang out there when no one else was around - probably so no one would laugh at us for using the twirly slide, or using the swings. We were still kids at heart, and in a small town with less than nothing to do, walking to the playground was just something to do. So, off we went.
Did I mention it was snowing? And there was snow on the ground? Slushy, icy snow. Well, there was. Plenty of it.
You think you know where this is going, huh? You wait. Just you wait.
So we get to the playground. Whee. Fun is had. Twirly slides and swings. There is this one giant metal slide on one end of the big deluxe playground set. You know, it’s one of those big sets with a twiry slide, tires to climb, bars to hang off of, ladders, chains, spiral-ly stairs, wooden bridge? The works, baby. And at the end was this giant metal slide. The twirly slide is plastic. This one is a giant metal slide, wide enough to fit two or three kids, side by side. There’s a metal bar at the top.
Say it with me now: Giant metal slide.
Giant metal slide.
I’m standing at the bottom. I’m staring at that bar on the top.
You see it coming now, don’t you. Yeah. You might.
With my trusty Peter Pan Getaway Shoes, I somehow, someway, in some parallel universe in which gravity does not exist and my shoes are made of one side of velcro and the slide is made of the opposite side of my velcro… I thought, wished, hoped, dreamed, imagined… no… I believed with all of my heart I could run up that metal slide and grab that bar. Then I would stand at the top, queen of my world, nay… Pope of my world and it’s peoples.
…
I launched. At the bottom of the slide… I made it up maybe about a foot and a half. I ran on the spot for a good three seconds. Three seconds is a long time. Three seconds is an eternity, my friends. My life flashed before my eyes, I did not regret the things I did, but those I did not do, I closed my eyes and thought of England - all the cliches. I couldn’t fall backwards. I had propelled myself forward in my impulsive launch. Here comes the metal slide. Hello metal slide! Nothing to hang on to… this metal slide is too wide… too far from the bar… Peter Pan Getaway shoes have left the ground… then space and time and reality suddenly caught up with me with a violent SMACK. My face hit the giant metal slide. I slid the short distance dejectedly to the bottom. My friends pointed and laughed at my busted lip. I talbed libe dhis bor bree daybs.
I did manage to laugh at myself… I mean come on. :smack: :smack: :smack:
I slipped on dog shit and put my hand through a glass plate, imbedding a large piece of glass in my wrist. It’s my ugliest scar.
I know a young guy who claims he sliced his own left eye cutting the tape the was connecting his girlfriend to the bedpost. I know the injury happened, but I’ve always doubted the story, as he was arrested for drugs four months before the incident.
From just last year:
Sitting in my chair at work with my right leg tucked under my left. I spun around to get up and slam the right leg into the rounded corner of the desk. After a few minutes of the “owie! owie! owie!” dance, everything seemed to be okay.
Within three days, the area I’d hit was turning various shades of red, black, and purple. The leg below had swollen to about twice it’s size. Luckily, the bone wasn’t fractured and I didn’t get cellulitus. It took about 3 weeks for the majority of the swelling to go down. I had to sleep with the leg elevated for about 3 months, though.
That was my first, and hopefully last, workman’s comp claim!
Stabbed the palm of my left hand with a #1 phillips screwdriver. The tip was pushing up the skin on the back of my hand. It really didn’t hurt till the nurse jammed a cotton swab into the hole.
I woke up this morning with lots of pain in one of my fingers. I have no idea how I did it. Maybe it was when I was asleep or something.
Many years ago, I was bending over getting something out of the refrigerator. My husband was getting ice out of the freezer on top.
“Be careful,” he said, “Don’t hit your head when you stand up.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said in my snarkiest tone, “Don’t hit your heeeaaad.” After which I stood up and, yep, hit my head.
When I was in first grade or so, I ran into a large metal pole during recess. Teachers had warned us to not run into the pole. I had been going to that playground since I was really small, and my parents told me to stay away from the pole, but I’ll be DAMNED if I run headfirst into the pole. I think I got a concussion from that, IIRC.
This one I didn’t do, but a friend of mine did. When I was younger my 4 friends and I all lived in a court. We were very active and we always rode bikes and things like that. One day we started at the very end of the street to race to the light post in the court at the end. We were all racing, and my friend Kendall was in the lead, and as she turned back to yell, “See you later, suckers!” she slammed into the light post. She went to the right after the collision, hitting one mailbox, and her bike went to the left, hitting my mail box. She wasn’t badly hurt, thankfully she wore a helmet.
Then there was this one time a friend of mine rode her bike into a big pile of branches…
My life has been remarkably injury-free. No broken bones or stiches, despite plaing rugby for much of my youth and spending half my childhood riding a bike while not wearing a helmet.
My dumbest injurywas probably the one that gave me a small scar on the index finger of my left hand, running from the main joint where the finger joins the hand, extending about half-way to the first knuckle. I got it when i was about 11 years old. A friend of mine was at my place, and we ended up having one of those arguments that kids sometimes get into, and started wrestling and trading punches. I lined him up for a massive left hook to the head, but he ducked at the last minute and my fist went straight into the corner of the wardrobe. Opened up the skin and started gushing blood, putting an immediate end to our fighting.
In what is perhaps the epitome of the act of not looking where one is going, I once walked (not at all in a hurry), face first, into the centre of a six foot wide concrete bridge pillar. Fortunately, no actual injury occurred.
The one stupid incident I can remember in which I was injured was when I ran, at full speed, through a glass sliding door which I was under the mistaken impression was open.
I actually have two stupid injury stories.
The first occurred when I was shipped off to church camp with two of my best friends. This camp did not have cabins so my dad equipped me with a tent. He unfortunately forgot to pack tent stakes so we had to improvise. I ended up using some heavy metal stakes that were about three feet long. The stakes were hammered into the ground a couple feet away from the tent and stuck up out of the ground. All week I warned my friends to not trip over the stakes. Every time they would leave the tent I was telling them to be careful and watch out for the stakes. Skip to the last night we were there and what do I do? I catch my little toe on a stake and go flying through the air like a damn trapeeze artist cursing like a sailor the whole time. The way the light was shining on our tent, my friends could see a perfect sillouhette of me in all my acrobatic glory so the entire camp was awakened by my insane cussing and their maniacal laughter.
BTW, I found out two things that night: You can break your toe on a tent stake and church camp directors really frown on the use of the word fuck.
My second stupid injury took place in high school. My best friend and I were notorious for coming up with really dumb ways to amuse ourselves. I mean REALLY dumb ways. We were in shop class one day and of course, we were bored. She goes rummaging around and comes back with a box of thumb tacks and an interesting look on her face. Now this was the time when everyone was wearing the cheap birkenstock imitations and true to the fashion of the time we were both well equipped. We discovered that by covering the bottoms of our sandals in thumb tacks, one could get a good running start and slide about thirty feet down the hall and you made neat clicking sounds when you walked. We slid through the halls, in the gymnasium and around the cafeteria. It was great fun but the bell rang and we were separated. Before my next class, I had to dash upstairs to get to my locker and then dash back down before the bell rang again. Let me tell you, dashing with thumb tacks in your shoes while time saving on flat floors, is NOT a good idea on the stairs. I hit the second stair coming down and my feet and head quickly switched places. I took out about three people on my way down, one sandal flew to the top of the stairs and smacked a guy in the head, the other sandal sailed through the office door and I could not have gotten a better spread on my books and papers if I had stood at the top of the stairs and just pitched them into the air. No permanent injuries but plenty of bruising on my ego and otherwise.
You mean you don’t remember what you did last night? I mean you didn’t drink that much. :eek:
My stupidest injury has to be my latest. In the lecture hall we have chairs with “desks” that swing from under the chair. They swing out then swing up then swing back in and voila, instant desk. Well I wasn’t paying attention and pinched some skin between the joint as the thing swung out initially. Now remember these things are underneath the chair and you have to stretch down to reach them. I didn’t pinch my fingers, nor my hand but in fact about 5 inches from my armpit. If it wasn’t for the 
factor it would have hurt a lot more. And now I have a nice fat yellow bruise to display my contortionist stupidity. :smack:
In the 12th grade, I was at a friend’s house for a Halloween sleep-over party. A bunch of us spent the night making costumes that we were going to wear at school the night day. And of course, we carved pumpkins.
I was carving my pumpkin when the knife slipped and cut the middle joint of my pinkie finger.
And before anyone says anything–I was using a child safety knife.
The cut didn’t look too serious. I didn’t bleed that much and it looked like one of those band-aide-able injuries. But my friend’s father–a physician–said that it was much more serious. You see, I couldn’t bend my finger any more. It was as stiff as wood. He called my parents about it (recommending I go to the hospital), but my parents blew it off.
Fast forward a couple of days. The cut has healed but I still can’t bend my finger. To make matters worse, I keep bumping it into things because of the crazy way it sticks out. The pain from this trumps all the pain of the original injury.
My mother takes me to the hospital and we find out that my little cut with the CHILD SAFETY KNIFE had actually sliced a tendon. And I have to go in the next day for surgery to fix it.
I wish the story could end right there. But NOOO. My right forearm was out of commission for a couple of months while I wore this hideous cast (I had to keep my wrist immobile while the injury healed. Also, my finger was wired so that was kept in a bent state). Guess what I couldn’t do? Play my violin! Also, once a week, for eight weeks, I had to go to painful physical therapy. All because of a little bitty injury to my pinkie finger.
To this day, the finger is still weak. It bends now, but not all the way. And–no lie–I haven’t carved a pumpkin since.
i once got a stiff neck while brushing my hair. my head was turned sideways for the entire day.