I broke my ankle jumping off of the bottom step of the bleachers before a softball game. It was only 4 inches off the ground, and I thought I could do it. I’m a daredevil!
Oddly, I went 3-4 that game, with two doubles and a triple. My mom used to say “no brain, no pain.” The break was confirmed 3 days later when I walked down the hill for x-rays.
My number one stupid injury was when I decided to take up whittling. I got a nice 2" x 2" stick of white pine, and was going to try to carve one of those cool wooden chains. The problem was I had never carved or whittled before. After all, how hard could it be? To top it off I was using a pocket knife. Well, I’m whittling away when I was really bearing down to cut off a big chunk of wood, when I hit a knot in the wood. I was pushing down so hard that when I hit the knot the pocketknife flipped around (rotated) in my hand so the blade was facing towards me and slammed shut. Obviously it wasn’t a lock blade. Anyway, when the knife slammed shut it closed down on my knuckle of course. Blood was everywhere. There was an open gash on the top of my pointer finger knuckle, and I could see the bone after the bleeding slowed down.
You know the worst part of it all was? About 30 seconds before that happened my wife said “be careful and don’t cut yourself”.
Hemming a pair of jeans. I didn’t think a needle could go through a fingernail *that * easily, backwards, while trying to push the needle through three or four layers of demin. For years, I had a dot under my nail, although the nail had grown out.
When I first started collecting knives, I bought an elegant dagger. It had a 6-inch blade that would ring when I dragged it across my hair. I was showing it to a friend when the UPS delivery man rang the bell. When I slit the tape on the package, I used the dagger. Just like I would have on a pocket knife, I put my index finger on the back of the blade. There is no “back” of the blade on a double-edge dagger, and I instantly had a two-inch cut on my finger. Yow!
A few years ago, my ex (before being an ex, of course) and his best friend and I were all sitting around, yakking about nothing, and downing frozen drinks like they were going out of style. I have never been much of a drinker (and even less of one after this incident) so after my third pitcher of frozen who-knows-what (“We didn’t have much Kahlua left, so I threw in a bunch of other stuff instead!” says the ex) I was starting to feel a little… off.
So I went into the bathroom, and was just trying to get the world to stop spinning, and trying desperately not to get sick (because, I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I have a horrid fear of throwing up).
C (ex’s friend): What are you doing in there?
Me: Taking a shower!
C: I don’t hear the water running!
Me: …Fine.
I stand up to turn the shower on, and the next thing I know, it’s dark, and I hear my ex yelling my name. I come to, lying in the bathtub, cold water pouring over my head, my lip in extreme agony, and my right hand bleeding like crazy. Apparently just as I leaned over to turn the shower on, I passed out. I ended up with 4 stitches in my finger and a lip the size of Canada. (At that point in my job, one of my most commonly stated phrases was “Paperless Purchasing”. You try saying that with a lip the size of Canada.)
I still blame C, because if it hadn’t been for his “I don’t hear the water running!” I woulda just sat where I was 
Although, I have to hand it to him, because he sobered up almost instantaneously, where the ex was too drunk to breathe.
Never been drunk since.
I was about nine years old, and I was playing hide and seek with my sister and cousin. We had just moved in to an older house that had a barn in the backyard, and I really hadn’t explored it yet. I was “it”, and while I was searching the backyard, I heard a noise in the barn. I figured it was my sister or cousin, so I went to have a look around. It was really dark in there though, so when I heard the noise again I freaked out and ran out the other door. Well, the other door was a good five feet above the ground outside, and there were no steps. I swear I hung there in midair about three seconds before I fell to the ground and twisted my ankle. It didn’t end there, however. Still freaking out, I started running away from the barn…but instead of looking where I was going, I kept my eyes on that door to make sure that nothing was following me. That’s when I ran into the barbed-wire fence. It hit me mid-thigh, and I flipped right over the top of it. A barb was caught in my jeans, so I kind of sat there on my head with my legs up in the air until my pants ripped.
Yeah, it’s funny…now.
One afternoon when I was in the first grade, I was sitting out on the concrete basketball court during PE. I found a small shard of glass, and while playing with it, decided to run my left index finger along the edge to see how sharp it was. Surprisingly, it was fairly sharp - took about six weeks for that to heal, and I still have a noticeable scar on my fingertip. Freaked the PE teacher out, too.
Almost two years ago, I was helping assemble props for a performance of one of my plays. Said prop was a coconut, which had to be cracked. Stupid me was trying to open it when the sharp sharp blacde slipped and cut a pretty deep gash in one of the fingers on my left hand. I bound it up in six band-aids at once and went on with life. I did this for four weeks, until I had healed completely except for a long scat down the side of the finger.
I’m damn lucky there wasn’t more damage- I really should have seen a doctor. Oh well. I survived slicing my finger open cracking a coconut.
I once held a blister-pack of gum up to my mouth to pop a piece in. When I broke it open, the edge of the foil totally sliced my bottom lip open. I looked like someone had knifed me in the face.
But that’s not nearly as stupid as my brother. Growing up we had a very large hill near our house which you could see most of the city from once you got to the top. In the summer, the side of this hill is thick with burr patches, stinging nettles and various brambly twigs and such. When my brother was about 12 or 13 he was biking near there with one of his buddies. His buddy dared him to climb to the top and then bike at full speed down the side of the hill. Well, my brother has pretty much absolutely no sense of self-preservation or caution, so you can pretty much guess what happened. He smashed through every obstacle and came to rest as a bleeding heap at the bottom. Split lip, lots of gashes, various welts and bruises, big goose egg on the head. He was quite proud of his, er, “bravery”. My mom nearly burst every capillary in her body when she saw him. 10 years and a few scars later, he’s still the same. 
Once, while camping, I tripped over my sneaker (which I was not wearing at the time) and fell face first onto the edge of my cot. It bled all over the place and it turned out that I broke the cartiledge in my septum, and for a few weeks my nose would click if I moved it from side to side. I broke my nose again this summer during a pillow fight when someone fell on top of me. His spine hit me right on the nose. It didn’t bleed this time, but it did the clicking thing again, although higher up this time, and I got two half-black eyes. They were bruised green and yellow close to my nose, but you couldn’t see it if I had my glasses on.
I’ve also been known to fall down for no reason. It’s like my legs just don’t want to work. I’ll stand up and immediately collapse in a heap on the floor. This doesn’t happen very often, but it’s hilarious when it does.
Reminds me of another one - eating a cup of Jello pudding. I had pulled the foil lid back, but it ripped so that a small piece of foil remained. After I finished the cup, I knew there was pudding to be had on the underside of the remaining foil. I used my finger to swipe the underside of it, and promptly sliced my finger open right at the first joint.
A mistake I never made again.
I’ve also cut myself numerous times on metal twist-off soda lids - not bottle caps like Jimmy Buffet stepped on, but the ones that look pretty much like the plastic ones do now, only made out of metal. I kept finding little lacerations - not deep enough to bleed - on the side of my forefinger. Took me forever to figure out where I was getting them from. But the worst one was when I was doing a little compulsive habit of mine, pushing in the little metal tabs on the bottom with my thumb. As I was pushing one in, a jagged piece from the adjacent tab stuck itself right in the side of my thumb. Yow.
I’ve lurked for three years and this is the thread that finally drew me out…
I had a really badly broken right foot a few years ago. It was in a cast up to the knee, and I had to stay off of it completely for months. Well, just before leaving to go home for the holidays, I was hump-humping (the noise one makes when using crutches to walk) around the apartment and packing. I wasn’t paying attention to where my crutches were and slammed my left foot into my left crutch. I wasn’t wearing shoes. I broke a toe, maybe two, on that foot. Although painful, I got myself to the airport the next day and took my vacation. The left toes healed in a few weeks and the right foot healed in a few months.
Of course, I broke the right foot again last Halloween by sitting down wrong on the floor. That was a nice one, too. It was, fortunately, a simple break and was healed in a few weeks that time.
Why does this happen? Well, a new podiatrist recently took a three-second look at my feet and said, “Gee, your feet are really crap!” Turns out I have structural abnormalities that make me prone to torque fractures. Nice to know.
The coconut pooped on you? Why didn’t you wash it off?
::d&r::
At the beginning of the semester, there was a class I had to add in order to graduate this semester. I misread the time and wound up running toward the class in a crazed panic- I was terrified that the class would be packed with people, they wouldn’t let me add, and I’d have to stay in school to take the ONE class I had left 
I ran to the door, and intended to do the ‘open the door, dash in, shut the door behind me’ but somewhere in all the panic I opened the door halfway, shoved my torso and head into the doorway, then slammed the door on my own head :smack:
This, of course, made a very loud BANG! noise which caused the professor to stop talking and turn to see the noise, as with the rest of the class who were all staring at me. It was very embarassing. I hurredly staggered to a vacant seat and sat down.
I found out later that the trauma I caused gave me a very prominent reddish-purple bruise on my forehead, which was probably there while I was sitting nervously in class :smack:
And it really hurts, doesn’t it? I was repairing a seam. I’ve also punctured my index finger the same way. My mother tried to teach me how to use a thimble but I’ve never gotten the hang of it.
And recently I managed an even stupider thing. Somehow while trying to break off a piece of a thick candy bar I ended up with chocolate shrapnel pushed up under my thumbnail, causing the delicate flesh underneath to turn fiery red and throb for several days. How embarassing.
When I first met todd33rpm, I became so besotted that one morning while delivering newspapers, I climbed back into my car, smacked my face on the steering wheel, and bloodied my nose. It would have been horribly embarrassing if anyone had been awake to see it, but luckily my customers aren’t up at that hour. It wasn’t even slick out–I was just thinking of…more important things.
When I was ten or so, I accidentally stuck a sewing needle under my thumbnail. It hurt, but I forgot to tell anyone about it (so nobody made me try to disinfect it).
Fast forward to several weeks later. My thumb got infected - yellow and squishy. :o I had to go to the doctor and get it popped. That was gross.
At my wedding, my husband and I were walking up steps to get a piece of cake. I don’t even know what I tripped over, but I went FLYING across the sidewalk and hit the marble.
Imagine a girl in a strapless wedding dress, hair all done up with tiara, who makes a flying leap where her dress almost goes over her head.
I’m still hoping the videographer got it, because I WANT to send it into a video show for MONEY:).
Not really sure if it’s stupid or not but I have a broken leg and probably could have avoided it if I had been thinking more clearly and had stopped or ran back to where I had just been instead of running towards the opposite side of the street in an attempt to dodge the truck that wound up hitting me.
“Oh, gee, there’s three tons of metal barreling towards me. I should run further into the lane it’s trying to enter inst…THUD”
Just yesterday at work I needed to quickly clip a hangnail- I grabbed my clippers, looked at the nail really really close, and clipped. BING! The nail hit me directly in the eyeball. My eye went all bloodshot for about half the day and hurt like a mad bastard. Um. DUH!