Last night I MADE my 175 pound wife get on my shoulders so I could see if I could stand up with her on my shoulders. (I’m 50, 5’8", 190 pounds)
So when I stood, my left ankle collapsed and rolled and for a split instant my turned ankle was supporting 365 pounds of pressure.
It might have a tiny crack in it, or the Achilles tendon might be strained. Something popped badly, could have been a tendon ripping off the bone. Right now I can get around easier than a classic sprain where all the ligaments tear and the ankle swells up to the size of your neck and there’s little swelling or discoloration.
I’d been doing some soldering, fixing a car stereo (loose wire, easy fix). I finished up, and put the radio back in the car. Later on, I went to put the pencil-type iron away, and picked it up - for some reason, by barrel end, not the handle.
I hadn’t unplugged it.
I had to actually shake it off my hand, and stood for a moment, thinking “This is really gonna suck in a moment.” Unplugged the iron and went into the bathroom to run lukewarm water on it - that’s when it started to hurt.
Result: Right hand blistered, with a bit of char towards the base of my palm. The blister went down after a week or so. My right pinkie still feels a bit…odd, decades later. A little more sensitive, I suppose.
It’s a new plow to me, but I should have seen right away what I was doing was wrong.
After lifting the plow with my tractor and moving it to a flat place to hook it up to the truck, I started working on getting it hooked up. This (new to me) system allows you to set the height of the attachment arms of the plow to the truck, and then pull the truck into it. The plow has a foot attached that supports and adjusts the height for attachment to the truck.
So… I pull the truck close and see it does not quite line up. Well, the adjustment height foot has a pin in it that can be pulled, or nocked out with a hammer
The steel light bar is attached to the plow. I forgot about that, and it was right above me. It’s sort of a new design.
When I got that pin nocked out, the light bar crashed into the top of my head, along with a lot of the weight of the plow. Bled like a sonavabitch.
I’m usually much better than this, and am used to working on heavy equipment. I really, really needed to step back for a minute, and cribbed the plow up before continuing. Stupid, stupid mistake. Could have been much, much worse.
Gonna have an embarrassing scar to explain if I lose my hair.
I was running a weld and had my hand in a bad position so rather than risk screwing up the job, I just ran the bead into the web between my thumb and finger. One of a lot of stupid things I’ve done to injure myself but because that one aches just now ----------
Other than having hallucinations and gettin a shiner because I thought I was James Bond and a piece of furniture might be a 197 year old version of Hitler…I got nothin…
I once sat down in the area of empty space where I thought a chair was. You never realize how important your tailbone is until it hurts you whenever you move anything below your waist.
This may not be an actual injury, but it sure felt like one and it was definitely stupid.
I fell asleep on a boat out on a lake with my arms up under my head, exposing the tender skin under my arms. I hadn’t put any tanning product or SPF there, so when I woke up I was tomato red and blistered all under my arms and along the sides of my breasts, all of those areas that never usually see the sun.
Talk about agonizing and painful. I couldn’t put my arms down against my sides for days and needless to say, couldn’t wear deodorant for days either. Even after the burn faded, any time I’d perspire for months afterward it stung.
What a mess - so stupid and so preventable. I’m still embarassed by this and it happened in my early 20s.
The first time I broke my nose was when I tried to squat on a skateboard a go underneath a park bench. It was at the bottom of a hill and I was traveling at a fairly decent zip. P:eek:W! right in the schnozzola. The black eyes I incurred made me look like Robin. I was about 12 or so.
Rather recently I went to unplug the charger on a flashlight that has a built in stun gun. Accidentally pushed the switch and zapped the shit out of myself. Duh!:smack:
Well, there was the time a little old lady broke my nose at the supermarket…
Let’s just say it involved her swinging a big box of laundry detergent and me standing up from getting something off the bottom shelf at the same time. Smashed glasses, broken nose, blood everywhere and I had only myself to blame.
I pulled a muscle in my hip or butt area when I coughed one time. I was in my 20s. I had to miss some family party that I really wanted to go to because I was in so much pain.
I was swatting at a bee that was in my face and I ended up popping myself in the nose hard enough to make it bleed.
I slit my tongue pretty good once licking a sharp knife and another time licking a can top. I don’t always learn from my mistakes.
One time I was doing some minor maintenance on my dirt bike and a nut did not want to budge. When it finally broke free my hand slipped off the (too short) wrench and raked across the rear sprocket. It opened up a really nasty cut on the side of my hand from the bottom of my pinky to almost my wrist. Spreading the wound apart, I could see disturbingly deep into my hand. I use a towel now to cover sharp things like that when I’m working on them so at least I learned from that one.
Riding a kid’s dirt bike as an adult I did something stupid and my leg got pinned between the gas tank and the handlebars so when I flipped over the handlebars it destroyed my ACL. A fun follow-up is that after surgery my knee was still draining when they sent me home, so the next day I got to pull about 6 inches of drain tube out of my knee by myself. It didn’t really hurt but the feeling of it uncurling inside my knee and coming out the incision was unpleasant in a way that made me want to throw up.
Another time I was doing a wheelie on my own dirt bike but I had stupidly left the choke on and it bogged which threw me off the bike and most of the (surface) skin on the outside of my left calf was removed. More stupid was being on a bike at all when I was still in the middle of rehab for a recent surgery (metal plate and a dozen screws). But I got to wear shorts to work for a week or two until it had scabbed over good enough for long pants so that was pretty cool.
A couple of years ago I was drilling holes in a circuit board using what amounts to a dental drill bit on a Dremel drill press. I’m left-handed and was using that hand to lower the drill. My right hand was holding the circuit board which was long and thin, and rather floppy. It came out of a MIDI music keyboard which I was adapting for a project.
Not exactly sure how it happened but I got distracted while moving the long circuit board under the drill and lowered the bit into my right index finger through the nail. I instinctively pulled my hand away when I felt the bit go in and it snapped off from the drill press. My finger was bleeding and it hurt a bit but I convinced myself that the broken bit was NOT in my finger. I couldn’t find it on the bench or floor but it’s a tiny bit and could have been anywhere.
The finger was sore and the nail was ugly but I figured time heals all wounds. About two days later the missing bit started to rise out of the hole in my fingernail. After about an hour of watching it, I grew impatient and used a small pliers to finish the job.
The broken piece was about 3/16 in length. It several months for the nail to look normal again.
I’m playing Ultimate Frisbee and one of my teammates has the disc. I’m pretty to close to him – maybe 20 feet up field, and I’m wide open so I’m expecting a pass. To make the pass easier I open my hips to him, which pretty much means that my left foot (in cleats) is pointed perpendicular to the direction I was going.
Unfortunately, he misses the throw and puts it well in front of me. I’m so close that I have no hope of adjusting and saving the throw, but I instinctively try to dive for it anyway. I plant my left foot, still perpendicular to the rest of my body, twist my left leg to bring it in line with my right leg, and push off to dive forward. My cleats do their job and keep my left foot from slipping back into a reasonable position, so my ACL lets go instead and tears.
Of course, I didn’t come within a mile of actually making the catch. I never had a chance of making a play, which is what made the injury so infuriating.
A buddy of mine and I used to bring our butterfly knives to school and we’d play with them on the bus because back then you could get away with that sort of nonsense.
Anyhow, we started doing this thing where one of us would grab the other’s knife by the blade and that guy would yank the knife away to the underwhelming amazement of the people around us.
One time, of course, he yanked the knife away before I could loosen my grip and it slit all my fingers on that hand.
Fortunately the cuts weren’t serious - kind of like really bad paper cuts - but it was definitlely stupid.
Heh - my foot was perpendicular to the direction I was facing when I did my ACL (described a few posts above). While I was upside down in the air I heard and felt it pop and I knew I needed surgery before I hit the ground.
I don’t know if you got pictures of yours, but I got the ones they took during my surgery. Torn does not begin to describe what it looked like. It looked like it had exploded. I don’t know if sometimes they tear or rip more cleanly, but there didn’t seem to be much left of mine.
Here’s my favorite stupid injury.
I was trying to track down a problem with my forklift. I don’t recall the exact problem, not starting maybe? Either way, I decided it wasn’t getting fuel and I decided I needed to know if propane was making it’s way to the engine, so I started with the tank. I took the hose off the tank and and to test the tank valve (about one in, say, a hundred are bad) I wanted to know if there was gas in the hose that goes to the engine. Gas in the hose, good tank, no gas in the hose, bad tank or bad connector or something alone those lines, but more testing involved.
The connector looks like this. There’s a little button in the middle. When you connect it to the tank the button is pushed and fuel flows into the hose. I recall seeing our forklift guy once push the button with a screwdriver…I pushed it with a key. The amount of pressure that came back out that hose was enough to knock my hand back and send the key out of my hand. But that wasn’t the problem. The LP was cold, my hand was frozen for about 15 minutes and probably about 2 hours before it felt back to normal (and it stunk like propane for quite a while). I really thought I was going to have to go to the hospital.
I mentioned it to a forklift repair guy a few years ago, he said he does it all the time (it makes it easier to connect it to the tank without all the back pressure on the little button, but it helps if you have a piece of bent wire to do it so your hand is out of the way…or if you use a screw driver you at least know it’s going to happen. He also said sometimes he’ll crank the engine a few times to let some of the pressure out of it.
That effin’ hurt.
That was one of the more stupid things I did on purpose. As for by accident, about a year and a half ago I rolled my ankle and broke my fall by sticking my arm out to catch myself on a stack of boxes I saw next to me…had surgery to fix my torn shoulder 6 months ago, still in rehab for that one.
