Here we go:
I once had tendonitis in my shoulder from sleeping on my right side every night. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I injured myself sleeping. :smack:
In my experience, there are no happy stories that contain the phrase, “toolshed in the backyard.”
Thanks for keeping the streak alive.
One time I was out partying and me and a friend found this fiberglass bumper out in the alley by the bar. We decided it would be fun to try to wing it up on top of the adjacent building. She and I tried several times, and a crowd was gathering watching us. I’m sure we were quite a sight. She had one end, I had the other and we decided to take a running start and then try to do it. I fell and while I felt no pain at the time, I woke up with a broken wrist. Duh. I was definitely old enough to know better. And we didn’t even get the thing on top of the building. It was harder than it looked. haha.
And then there was the time I was trying to throw away this large piece of broken glass from a painting frame that had broken. My famous last words were, “I better get rid of this before someone gets hurt.” In the next minute I cut my arm and ended up getting stitches. It was a “doh!” moment.
Yes, it does happen like in the cartoons. grin I very nearly saw the stars and birdies.
My brother and I were out in the yard and noticed the rake laying there in true cartoon ambush mode. My brother muses idly ‘I wonder if they really do fly up and whack you in the face?’. It strikes me that this is a very good question, so without thinking I turn around, put one foot on the base of the rake, and push. :smack:
Funny thing is, you know how if a guy hears/sees anything relating to a painful groinal experience he’ll cover the bits in question and cringe? For years afterwards, seeing any rake-related cartoon nonsense made me wince and squint up my left eye. 
Oh, another one. When I was about 12, my brother and I were riding our bikes in the local school playground, doing skids in the gravel. Now, my old ratbike had no handlebar grips, so one particularly impressive skid resulted in the unshielded handlebars twisting out of my hands and burying themselves deep in my thigh - and by thigh, I mean about half an inch from the family jewels. I still have a perfectly circular scar about the size of a 50 cent piece in my groin, and occasionally shudder to think about how close I came to actually castrating myself…
Then there was the time I broke my elbow slam-dancing at a punk gig, and was so drunk I didn’t notice until the next day…but you don’t want to hear about that.
My dad use to ride a motorcycle to work everyday and if we where good, he’d give us a ride around the yard when he got home in the afternoon. One time (I was about seven), even though I had been instructed time and time again not to, I rested my leg on the ultra hot engine and a small round patch of skin bubbled and blistered (thankfully not that bad and not that much since contact was brief for obvious reasons).
I remember once breaking three toes kicking the wall in a fit of anger. Obviously the wall got its sweet revenge.
I know I have other more hilarious injuries, I just need to think of them.
That reminds me something a friend of my brother did! We were all eating bananas because we seriously had no other food, and I wondered aloud if banana peels really are slippery, like in the cartoons. So this friend takes his banana peel puts it on the wood floor, takes a few steps back from it, and sprints towards the banana peel. His heel caught on the peel, and his foot slipped right out from under him resulting in him landing flat on his butt. He brusied his tail bone doing that, but MAN was that funny.
AH HA! When I was 30, after having not skated in 8 years or so, I took it up again. First day-Man! This is such fun! Why did I ever stop? 
Second day-Broke my elbow doing a 50/50 rollout on the fun ramp. 
:o
Haven’t skated on anything but an alley since.
My dumbest was playing street hockey. I turned to follow the action out of my end and just fell. Must’ve failed to pick up a skate or something and just twisted around. Anyway, I went down hard. My right arm went out to catch myself, straight out, locked elbow and all.
Next thing I know I get this incredibly uncomfortable feeling in my shoulder. I pick my arm up thinking it’s just a massive cramp and feel this sensation of somehting going back into place and a feeling of incredible relief. I’m not sure if it was a complete or a partial dislocation, but I’m guessing partial.
What’s so stupid about that? I only sat out a shift that night and played for another hour, ironman style (no breaks). Never went to a doctor. Played again the day after. :smack: I’m reminded of how stupid I was whenever the thing pops out on me.
Sadly, if I had it all to do again, I’d probably do the same thing. 
Okay, time to come clean. I’m currently nursing a very badly sprained ankle. Why?
Well, two weeks ago or so, I was walking to work. I was wearing sneakers. I was, walking on smooth, paved road. It was not wet, it was not icy, it was flat, smooth, on the slightest incline. And then, I was no longer walking to work, but sitting on the ground wondering why my hand was suddenly scrapped and why I was on the ground. My feet had, apparently, collapsed from under me. I stood up - right ankle a little teeny bit swollen, but it’s mild, right?
Half an hour later I stood up at work and nearly collapsed from the pain. My ankle had ballooned hugely and was incredibly painful to put weight on. So, I toughed out the day, iced it, saw the doctor. Bad sprain; she could see the bones bieing pulled apart. They gave me a brace and told me to take it easy.
Flash-forward to this past Monday. I’m rushing through the airport, trying to make my connecting flight. You know those moving sidewalks? I was walking, quickly, down one, and when I got to the end, I came down on my bad ankle. There was an audible pop and pain. So, my self-imposed three weeks of rest before going back to karate has now doubled. :smack:
Next story, also a sprain. I was on a camping trip. It was my day to fill up the multi-gallon water jug and haul it back to the campsite. There were two ways to get there, one slower around on the trail, the other up about three feet of a very steep, plant-free cut-through. It had rained that night, just a few hours ago. The very steep cut-through was nothing but mud.
So, me, being a genius with a huge, heavy container of water, decide to try to walk up a mud-slicked wall. And failed, spilled gallons of water all over myself, and sprained my wrist. I did a week of trail maintanence, mostly digging ditches, with said wrist before seeing a doctor. Never been right since. (The wrist, not the doctor).
Freshman year of college my desk was placed under my (lofted) bed. It wasn’t possible to actually stand up unless the chair was pushed out quite a ways from the desk. One day I miscalculated and stood up with my head right under the metal side bar of the bed. That hurt a lot, and left a knot for a couple weeks.
Ever worse, though, was that at the same time I managed to get my hair caught in the bedsprings, and it only got worse as I moved around trying to get loose. Picture a girl standing under a bed, more and more of her hair falling victim to the underside of a bed that’s a couple inches shorter than her…
Oy.
After thirty seconds or so I realized I’d need to stand still and patiently free myself. It was a lot of fun.
You win. You did it on purpose. I couldn’t see the rake I stepped on, as it was hidden in tall grass. This was at camp, btw. If only I’d been a litigous 12 year old…
I once walked into a tree and a branch stabbed me in the eye. It hurt and I had to wear an eye patch for weeks. It wasn’t really dark, but I was tired, and rather than going around the tree I guess I was going to walk through it.
When I was eleven, I was riding a 4-wheeler for the first time by myself at my cousin’s house. I was happily vrooming around this large mud pit that made up their property, when all of a sudden, something went wrong. I was bouncing all over the place, I couldn’t control the handlebars, the throttle seemed to be stuck and I couldn’t find the brake for the life of me, so I put my feet down to try and stop this high powered ATV like a bicycle…
And I ran over my own right foot. :smack:
My leg was dragged under the wheel, and it came back up on the back side of the 4-wheeler. To add to it, as if I needed some more pain, what finally stopped the damn thing was the high speed crashing into a 3 foot concrete drainage pipe, which wasn’t where it was supposed to be, ya know, under ground. I flipped over the handlebars and whacked my head on it, supposedly. At least that’s what they tell me when I ask about it today…
Riding 4-wheelers with no supervision and no helmet is pretty stupid, so maybe this counts. I can’t recall any way I have hurt myself when I really shouldn’t have been able to, like sleeping…::snicker::
Hunh. I always thought it was just one of my ex-GFs who did this. She was actually quite graceful about it–every so often, she’d just collapse down into a crosslegged sitting position.
As for my own injury, it was from unpacking boxes in a new apartment. I was kneeling on the floor, with my torso twisted to the right to reach a box. As I stood up, I untwisted and managed to crank my knees down toward the left. My knees still make loud popping noises.
I once slept wrong and got my neck stuck turned to the left for a few days. I seriously could not move it back without intense pain. That made going on the computer a hard task.
I sprained my knee going to bed.
I don’t own a bed. Well, I do, but I lent it to a friend and haven’t gotten it back yet. So, I sleep on my couch. That’s fine when I’m the only one on the couch. But, when the Sometimes Boyfriend (Less than a boyfriend, more than a f*ckbuddy) comes by, the couch doesn’t cut it. One of us always ends up on the floor, sometimes him, sometimes me, and neither of us ever remember getting the boot or doing the booting. So, we started using the hide-a-bed function of the couch about a year ago.
The night in question was actually the night after the STBF was over, but I hadn’t folded my couch back up. My living room is very small, so when the couch is unfolded it takes up most the room. The foot of the hide-away is only about 6 inches from the entertainment center, and both sides are around a foot from the walls. I had just had a shower, and was heading to “bed.” Not being able to walk to either side of the bed, but wanting to get to the middle of it, I thought I’d just walk my way across. I took one step onto the hide-a-bed when the spring holding the matress up snapped (sprung?). My right leg was falling through the bed while my left leg was already well on it’s way, and certainly committed to what should have been my next step (NO feet on the floor!). At the same time, I’m falling towards the entertainment center, and desperatly trying to shift my weight as to not brain myself on it. I managed to miss hitting my head on anything, but landed on my left side, with my right leg still stuck in/through the bed, twisted as far as I’d think possible. I could still walk on it gingerly, but had to trade all my good shifts (I’m a bartender) for slow shifts for a week.
Also, I shouldn’t be allowed to exist while drinking. Over the last ten years I’ve injured myself to various dregees while: Drinking and Jogging, Drinking and Bathing, Drinking and Smoking and most recently Drinking and Microwaving (I had a burn that’s exactly the size and shape of a Spaghetti-O)(The Spaghetti-O Incident).
~Sami (Thy name is Klutz)
Please, keep the laughter to a dull roar…
At the tender young age of 17, I broke my collarbone stage-diving at a concert for a band named "Crumbsuckers". I had been doing the whole moshing and stage diving thing thru most of the songs and just happened to perform my last dive as the song ended and no-one was paying attention. Shoulder and head met floor..... and the Master Killer was taken to the hospital....
I will never live this down…
Jogged a memory.
I hit myself in the head with the “rake trick” once.
The rake was lying on the ground and I thought, “oh, I’ll gently step on the ‘rake’ part, slowly lifting the handle to my hand so I don’t have to bend over.”
Well, of course with my full weight, I moved the ‘rake’ part through its 3 inches in a split second while moving the handle tip through a 6 foot arc in the same amount of time, and WHAMMMMO! Right past my “claw hand” that was going to catch the rake and right into my forehead.
Very dumb.
I’d say 70% of all injuries done to myself are the result of sheer stupidity rather than simple accident.
Talking with a friend today about how to make Rocky Road, I advised her (perfectly seriously) that it’s not a good idea to stick your finger in the melted chocolate to see how hot it is. Of course, she couldn’t fathom why anyone would be foolish enough to do something like that, but also immediately realized that I was speaking from experience.