Yard Jart through foot? Check.
Miscalculate depth of pool when diving, giving myself a hell of a face rash? Check.
Sprained ankle multiple times wearing inappropriate shoes on ice? Yuppers.
Broken pinky toe by dropping jar of mayo? Of course.
Cracked sinus cavity due to twirling a baseball bat? Check.
The list goes on and on. I am only a danger to myself.
I once stabbed myself with a kitchen knife. In my right calf. I was carrying it in a bag, and of course the knife cut through the bag and managed to poke the inside of my right leg as my left leg was taking a step forward. I almost passed out on the sidewalk (from my body’s dumb reaction to the sight of blood, not from actual blood loss). That’s how I got my first stitches!
Also, one time as a kid, I got pretty bruised while wearing in-line skates and sitting on a bench. That’s right, I fell down while sitting. I was rolling my feet back and forth on the ground, and I rolled them too far back underneath the bench and propelled myself forward.
I once stuck a pareing knife in the inside of my right ankle when I dropped it. I found it difficult to walk into the bathroom for bandages while holding a paper towel around said ankle.
Why does reading these stories make my testes retract?
Back when I was around 18 or so, a friend and I were playing ‘catch’ with a 14-pound bowling ball. Inevitably, on about the third throw my right hand absorbed the ball’s impact with the floor. Nothing broken, although it sure felt like it at the time.
I’ve posted this before. The injury wasn’t serious, but it was definitely stupid.
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. 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.
Oooh, most of them. But a couple months ago, I was sitting in my favorite chair, we were all watching a movie, and the baby was on a nest on the floor near my feet. Well, he started to stir, so I leapt right up. Only, I didn’t realize my left foot was numb/asleep (I tend to sit on a foot), and I did a crazy dance to not fall on him, but fell hard on that ankle anyway. Sprained, I guess. Now it’s permanently (?) supinated and the podiatrist is noncommittal about doing anything to rectify the problem. I look like I have a palsy of some sort. This on top of the horrid plantar fasciitis I have, starting last year from wearing flip-flops to an amusement park 4 weeks post-partum.
I hate getting old.
Random stupid injuries: I regularly grate my fingers when cooking. I constantly burn my tongue if I taste things, cooking. I’ve put a contact in where I already had one, because it rolled to the side of my eye. Once I was unsure of where the contact went, so I spent an hour pulling the front of my eye. :smack: I’ve given myself a black eye tweezing eyebrow hairs, so now I just shave them if I want to look like I care about any shape. (very thick hair roots, not my fault)
I’m a guy, so naturally (?) I hurt myself a lot as a boy, in a variety of creatively stupid ways, but one specific episode stands out. There was a relatively shallow swimming pool at a house my parents had rented in Portugal for the summer holidays, and I played a game where I’d empty my lungs, sink like a stone to the bottom, then kick myself back to the surface for a quick breath. Rinse, repeat, like a crazed water bunny. It was great fun, except I’d keep my eyes closed when breaching the surface to avoid getting stung by the chlorinated water.
And so I boing, boing, boinged facefirst into the pool’s side, with great force.
Then ten minutes later I did it again for good measure. First time could have been an experimental fluke, you know ?
Several years ago: Hey. Hey, man. Hey, you remember that thing you can do where you roll the Bowie knife backwards over your thumb and catch the handle so it’s right back in a good grip? That’s cool. It looks badass. You should make sure you can still do that, in case you need to look badass with a large knife. Yeah, that hasn’t happened ever in your life, but who knows? Yeah, you should go find a big knife.
Good job, dude, that’s a big knife. A lesser man would consider that maybe he should stop listening to the beer telling him to do knife tricks, or maybe wait until tomorrow, or at least put some tape over the blade. Those guys are just not living life to the fullest.
In all fairness, if you watch the movie Runaway Train, there is a scene where Jon Voight’s character Manny is assaulted by another prisoner, who manages to stab him in the hand. He then taunts the attacker by flicking his blood into the attacker’s face and (IIRC) threatening him with a stool. Manny was a badass. I had a lot of blood flowing out of my hand, and could have flicked it into the face of any attackers, if they weren’t me.
This obviously means that I am at least as badass as Manny, but if the trick had worked I wouldn’t be bleeding so I wouldn’t be that badass, so it’s a good thing that I need to find my first aid kit right now.
If the blood stops before I have to find a doctor, and my fingers still work reasonably well, I could probably snag another beer and find my butterfly knife and see if I can still open to a reverse grip from closed.
Just now: Prompted by this post, I just drank another beer, found my butterfly knife, and determined that I can still open to a reverse grip from closed. The Bowie knife thing, tho? Not doing that again. Yay for progress!
Broke my nose in a fight.
I had had enough wine to decide that I ought to cut french bread with a bread knife instead of pulling it apart like civilized people do. It’s hard to cut good french bread with a bread knife. I ended up sawing partway through my finger. Doctor gave it two stitches.
I still have a scar from this, although anymore, it just blends in with the rest of the lines on my forehead, but it used to be more obvious.
I played clarinet in the seventh grade, and had a band class. I had not learned to take the clarinet apart by laying it across my lap. Instead, I was holding it up, parallel to my body, and it was kinda stuck, so I yanked really hard, and jammed the center section into my forehead. Bled like, well, a head wound, and I had to go to the nurse’s office for ice and a Band-Aid.
It was hard to live down. I noticed ALL the clarinet players holding their instruments across their laps to take them apart after that.
Well not nearly as dramatic as the others but it was yesterday.
I was busy, and finally had a minute for a bathroom break before my next meeting. I was rushing from my desk to the bathroom, looking down because normally my injury hazard is sleeping dogs in my path when slam - my left shoulder went right into the door jamb.
Kept me up half the night last night because it’s the side I normally sleep on so I’d fall asleep, turn over and ow, holy fuck!
Not an out and out injury, but good enough.
Last summer, my gallbladder died on me, and was removed just before it broke down and went septic. The gallbladder disease damaged my liver, to the point that last September, I needed a liver biopsy to try to figure out what was going on. In between those two events, I lost A LOT of weight.
So, biopsy day comes, and my instructions are to take only my blood pressure meds. Mind you, the dosages were set for me when I was 60 lbs heavier, 4 months before.
I had my biopsy. All was well on the table, but post-op, I had trouble with low BP, and I stayed longer than usual because they didn’t know why I was low. The fear was an abdominal bleed. Finally, I squeaked up just enough to send me home, and I spent most of the day sleeping. Discharge instructions were BP meds only.
Around 9 PM, I took those and went to bed. Around 3 AM, I got up to pee. It dawned on me that I needed superhuman effort to not fall dow, and I was profoundly deaf. My BP had tanked. My former colleagues from the Rescue Squad picked me up, and measured me at 80/40. They were shocked I was even conscious.
I wound up in the ER, then a day and a half in intensive care with 4 IV lines and a femoral central line, pumping me full of fluid. Once again, the fear was an abdominal bleed. I had it figured out, and was yelling to anyone that could hear that this was a medication reaction. Finally, the doctors paid attention, gave me something to counteract my BP meds, and my pressure came right back. I dialed back doses on two meds, and dropped the third completely. After the fact, my doctor concurred.
I had another procedure after the biopsy, and went cold turkey on the BP stuff. Not a hint of an issue that time.
Sunday, January 20, 2013. A mild, pleasant day in the mid-Atlantic, given the time of year. The Firebug and I are messing around in a rocky place in the stream bed in the woods behind our house.
I decide to jump onto a rock a few feet away. As I’m doing so, I’m aware that the rock I’m intending to land on is loose, and the thought crosses my mind about how they always say jumping on loose rocks is a bad idea, and it’s immediately canceled out by another thought along the lines of “I’ve jumped on loose rocks before, and nothing’s happened.” So I jump.
And next thing I know, I’m lying face down in the stream bed, half in and half out of some (very shallow) water, saying to the Firebug, “I’m probably OK, but even if I am, we’d better go back to the house so I can get out of these wet clothes.”
Then I put a little pressure on my right foot - no weight, just a little pressure - but that’s enough to let me know that, for whatever reason, it’s no longer a load-bearing foot. A break? A sprain? Hell if I know. (I’ve never sprained anything, so I have no idea what that feels like.) All I really know is that, while it doesn’t hurt, that will surely change fast if I try to put actual weight on my right foot.
So I alternately crawl and hop the ~200 yards back to the house, laughing like crazy the whole time at my own stupidity and the ridiculousness of the situation I’m in, and send the Firebug inside to get my wife so she can drive me to the ER.
The outcome? Complete rupture of the Achilles tendon in my right leg, a couple of weeks before I can walk with one of those ski boot-type boots enclosing my foot, and a couple months before I can walk normally, let alone drive.
You’re supposed to hit the other guy!
Stuck a large fishhook into my forehead. Stuck another one into my thumb past the barb. It had to be pushed through, the barb cut off, and pulled back out.
Had my chest slashed open with a butcher knife while playing with them with another idiot. Fifteen stitches.
While putting the chain back on another kid’s bike, I managed to trap my thumb between the chain and sprocket and rip the top off of it.
While riding my bike downhill, stuck my foot up near the fender to see what was rattling, and flipped ass over teakettle when my foot got stuck between the fender support and the tire.
In college, my girlfriend demanded that I go get her French fries from student union building about a quarter mile away. It was a solid -60F in Fairbanks that weekend, but off I went - without gloves or ear protection. Frostbit both ears.
As an adult:
Got distracted while dicing onions and shaved off a finger tip.
First day on a building demo job, I stuck the flat end of a Wonderbar behind a piece of molding, pried it out with unnecessary vigor and mashed my fingers between the sharp curved end and the wall. What didn’t bleed became blood blisters.
Using a chisel to cut out the recess for the strike plate on a hung door; the damn door kept trying to swing, so I grabbed hold of it with my free hand above and in front of the path of the chisel. With predictable results.
Trying to cut old carpet with a butcher knife so it would fit a space in our new Navy housing . As I went to move to a new spot, the tip of the knife caught in the carpet nap and my hand slid down the blade.
Most recently: I tried to smack a spider in the bathroom with a rolled up newspaper. It was just out of reach, and when I sort of jumped and reached to hit it, I hyper-extended my shoulder. I ended up having to go to the doc for a cortisone shot, as I couldn’t lift my arm. The worst part was explaining how it happened. According to my wife, the worst part was that I missed the damn spider.
Went to the Gulf of Mexico in Texas in June. I’m a pale redhead. Kept putting on sunscreen … problem was, it was spray sunscreen and a very windy day. My sunburn was phenomenal. To add insult to injury the TSA guy took away my Solarcaine because the bottle was too big for carry-on.
Not the “stupidest” but definitely the best story for my chiropractor: I went to Six Flags Over Georgia and took my neck out on the first rollercoaster of 7 - the Georgia Cyclone. Likely whiplash or something. I did 6 more rollercoasters plus other rides with my neck in massive pain.
Currently dealing with excruciating lower back and sciatic pain from … one hot yoga class. I don’t know which bend/twist/pose did it, but it hurts to even think right now.
I was closing my trunk one day and somehow, someway, the raised letters in CIVIC jumped out and bit my hand (I blame that pointy V). It hit my hand just right and broke open the skin between the last two knuckles in my hand. Three stitches and I could see inside my hand a little bit.
Fell out of my computer chair and caught a caster right between the butt cheeks. Hurt like a sonuvabitch.
Think I was 12 when playing with my hatchet and nearly trimmed 1/16" off a fingertip. Stopped playing with sharp objects after that.
'Bout four years earlier, Dad was burning some debris in his old oil drum and I had been poking at the fire with a long branch. Then absentmindedly put the hot end of the branch on my bare foot. Didn’t exactly burn my foot but did end up with what seemed like a huge bubble of skin there.
Oh hell, it’s doing that for me - and I’m female.
Some very very cringeworthy stuff here. My own are pure amateur stuff in comparison. But let’s see:
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Stuck a safety pin in an electrical outlet when I was 6. I have no clue what possessed me to do this.
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Tripped over my own damn feet too many times to count. This has resulted in, so far, only 3 broken bones but a lot of sprains.
One of my brothers had 3 broken bones when he was growing up: a hand, a foot, and an arm. He got the cast off the foot one morning, and broke the hand that same afternoon rolling down a hill in an old truck inner tube.
We knew where the orthopedist lived (down the street from close friends) and used to wonder how much of that house we’d paid for.