I had a cartoon character injury!
Last winter we had a very big snowmageddon followed by an ice storm; this made my giant pine trees angry and sad. I was standing under one when an ice-laden branch broke off and hit me on top of the head.
It was just like being bopped on the head by a cartoon hammer because I disappeared under the snow like Bugs Bunny. Unlike a cartoon, there was some bleedin’
I think I’ve posted this before. Opening a shrink-wrapped pallet of copy paper boxes, I had trouble tearing the plastic wrap. Grabbed an X-acto razor knife, cut the wrapping, then cut the strap around one of the boxes. Set the knife down on top of the pallet. While I was opening the box, the knife rolled off the pallet and dropped. With better reflexes than reasoning, I shot a hand out to catch it. Blade sank straight down into my palm like a spear. Didn’t hurt a bit.
I was pouring boiling hot water out of a kettle into the sink after making a tea. Dropped a teaspoon into the sink. Reached in to pick up the teaspoon … right under the stream of boiling hot water. :smack:
Tearing around the desert in an open topped dune buggy-it was open range and suddenly a cow stepped out of the brush in front of me. Hit the brakes, turned the wheel, skidded like crazy on the gravel and hit an old cottonwood. Not all that hard. Sitting there thinking “wow, dodged a bullet there!” when I heard a creaking and breaking noise overhead. And down comes a huge limb of the tree and hits me squarely on top of the head. 2 black eyes.
Drinking and playing with an “unloaded” pellet pistol. (years and years and years ago) Some tells me that it’s a bad idea messing with any kind of gun while drinking. “Oh it’s not loaded” Shot it into my hand to prove it. It was. Pellet lodged in there about 1/2"
My fingers always seem to get the worst of it.
A long time ago, I was working in a kitchen for a chain of barbecue restaurants. One day, I was cutting chickens into quarters on a band saw. I was wearing chain mail gloves that covered thumb, pointer and middle finger of each hand. I tried to brush a piece of fat or skin off of the saw table, and I felt what seemed to be a very heavy hammer hit my ring finger of my right hand. I had nearly sawed off the end of my finger.
About twenty years later, I was leaving my apartment to go somewhere. As I pulled the door closed, I felt my keys dangling in my hand and moved my left index finger to keep the key out of the door jamb when the door closed. So it was my finger that was caught in the door jamb when the door closed. It sheared off a piece of my finger about the size of a mini-M&M. Since I was no longer thinking clearly, when I found the tip, I threw it away.
Classic case of “Not using the right tool for the job”: I used to work in I.T. One day I was having trouble with a tower’s faceplate and tried to use my little Swiss army knife for something that really required a different tool. It’s a little hard to explain via cyberspace but, basically, the knife blade folded back and cut me rather badly on my right index finger. I bled copiously and had to go to a clinic to keep from bleeding out (okay, I wasn’t bleeding quite that badly - but let’s just say that I did leave lots of DNA on the carpet at my workplace). I had to get stitches and now I have a nice scar on that finger. That’s the first thing that popped into my head. Not the worst injury in the world but, yeah - pretty stupid.
You are all cracking me up!
Let’s see. . . when I was about eight I dropped a big rock - let’s say about 10 pounds- on my bare foot. That part is pretty mundane but when it happened I literally picked up the injured foot and hopped around in circles on the other like a cartoon character. I’m pretty sure I saw stars and birdies flapping around my head while I did it.
Once a boyfriend was house sitting for someone and I stayed over. Combination of unfamiliar surroundings+ a bit too much wine+ pitch dark = me thinking I was flopping down backward on the bed only to be met with floor and a big old carpet burn to the tushy.
This reminds me of a couple of others I’ve done: once, when I was a kid, I was helping make some brownies. The mix we were using came with a small can of chocolate syrup (you know, to make the brownies more moist - the kind I prefer). Well, we opened the can up at one point (no pop-tops back then!) and so irresistible did I find the syrup still clinging to the underside of the lid that I decided to put the whole cut lid in my mouth and lick the syrup off as I pulled the lid out of my mouth. I’ll leave it to your imagination what doing that did to the insides of my mouth’s cheeks. At least I learned from that and have never put a cut lid in my mouth like that ever again!
The next one’s not really an injury, but it WAS stupid and what made it even MORE stupid is that I did it TWICE (in consecutive years): chewing on a pen to the point where I ended up with a mouth full of nasty ink! Can’t believe it took TWO times but I’ve never chewed on a pen like that since the SECOND time I tasted pen ink!
One time when I was around, oh, I’m not sure - 9 years old, I was making myself some instant oatmeal (you know, the kind that used to come in little packets that you would pour the contents of into a bowl and then put boiling water in the bowl and stir). My mom was in the kitchen with me along with a couple of my older female relatives. Well, my mom had been impressed with the way I “made” my own oatmeal (parents, I’ve noticed, tend to be very proud of their kids’ accomplishments, no matter how mundane) so she called my two other relatives over to watch me make my latest. Well, I must’ve choked under the pressure 'cause I somehow managed to pour boiling hot water all over one of my hands. Needless to say, I quickly went from anticipating some hot cereal to nursing my one hand by leaving it in a large bowl of ice water!
I once ate some bad frozen French Toast for breakfast. The next twelve hours of puking weren’t so bad, but I started spitting up blood, so off to the ER. The endoscopy revealed I had torn my esophagus just above the stomach. Two weeks of light eating and ant-acids. And no more frozen breakfasts.
Once upon a time, in my wild and misspent youth, I participated in a mud wrestling for charity event (it was the eighties, sue me). A partner and I drew the tag team match with two sisters.
In the process of me being pinned, a loud SNAP was heard. The audience became silent. I had a broken leg. The rest of the evening was spent taking an ambulance ride and getting cleaned up, x-rayed and a plaster cast in the ER.
The medical staff at the hospital did try really hard not to laugh.
I was in my late 30s when I dropped a liter bottle of water right on the base of my big toenail. I think I had the same reaction as you!
I had a knife fall off the cutting board point first on the top of my foot.
Fortunately, I had industrial boots on. Still I had a bruise the size of my fist for a week .
This is so stupid that I’m loathe to share it, but what the hell.
I was working as a dishwasher and one of the other guys thought up a “game” that consisted of filling a glass with water and then flipping it over as quickly as possible, the goal being to trap as much water in the glass as possible.
Well, I am a competitive person by nature and I was damned if anyone was going to beat me in this stupid game, so I filled a glass and quickly flipped and slammed it onto the stainless steel work surface.
And my hand went right through the bottom of the glass. 3 inch gash down the inside of my ring finger, 2 inch slice in my palm, several smaller cuts on other fingers, all of the above requiring sutures.
Good lead in to mine. This was a long time ago, it happened in 1982.
I had been working at an industrial shop for a couple of years, a place that handled rentals, maintenance and light manufacturing of theatrical equipment. I had been working with all varieties of table saws, pipe cutters, sandblasters, chemical solvents and other potentially dangerous items without incident.
So I get a little bit of a promotion - not a desk job exactly but I was managing paperwork in addition to my usual tasks. So on the very first day, I’m sitting at my new desk, mindless chewing on the capped end of my pen. Someone comes to ask me a question. I open my mouth to answer and I stab myself in the back of the throat with the capped end of the pen. Hard. Hard enough to draw blood. I had a wicked sore throat for weeks…plus the embarrassment and the “deep throat” jokes.
Similar thing here. One winter I had a persistent, powerful dry cough. Tore the cartilage in my ribs and had to make a trip to the emergency room in a rural southern Italian town. I think the place must have doubled as an emergency veterinary clinic, as I had to share the waiting room with goats and chickens.
Aaaaaaahhhh! That sounds horrible! I have a quick story from my days as a dishwasher but it was one that I heard about one of the cooks. As I recall he was a really nice guy so I was sorry to hear that this had happened to him, but…the story goes that he was preparing some au jus (it was a pretty nice restaurant, not some “greasy spoon”) and managed to spill a bunch of it on his foot. His foot was covered by a shoe or a boot at the time but apparently the au jus seeped through and since it was BOILING it pretty much burned the flesh off his foot which he discovered when he went to pull his sock off said foot. Ugh. For some reason that story has stuck with me for 30 years. Awful.
This reminds me of one my friend told about his brother. He was running with a straw in his mouth and fell. The end of the straw scraped a line all along the roof of his mouth. :eek:
The only broken bone I’ve ever had, suffered at the tender age of 11, was the result of inserting myself into a game of fat-ball (baseball but where the “baseball” is actually a volleyball – much easier to hit than a softball for kids) that I had nothing to do with.
I was crossing the outfield while the game was going on, and a fly ball came my general direction. I tried to be a showoff by running over to catch it, but misjudged it slightly. The volleyball hit me square on an extended pinky finger.
And because I waited a month to go see a doctor about it, at which point I was told the only way to straighten it would be to re-break it, that finger remains deformed today.
I was on a family holiday, and my (older) sister and I had a stupid game of who could run up the cast iron staircase and get their key into the door first. One time I tripped and landed headfirst onto an edge - 4 stitches just above my left temple so I have an odd, thin bare patch there.
A few years before my sister and I were at home and she lifted me into the air, then dropped me onto a class coffee table, headfirst - 4 stitches just above my right eye.
A few years before that, when I was a toddler, my brother threw a dart and it hit me in the cheek. I think they were trying to kill me?