What's the stupidest thing you've ever done to injure yourself?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

Little Scarlett was four years old and loved to read. She spent a lot of time next door at Grandma’s house, where the stairs to the basement were in an open stairwell at the side of the enclosed garage. The door at the bottom of the stairs had a nice bright bare bulb over it, level with the garage floor, perfect for reading by in that dark garage. So little Scarlett took her little kid-sized folding chair (you know, the kind with the rounded bars at the bottom for legs?) and pulled it over to the edge of the stairwell wall, to get as close to that nice light as she could. There was no railing, so she got really close – right on the rounded-off edge where the floor became an eight-foot drop. That night little Scarlett’s mommy took a picture of her in the bathtub with her fat lip. She said little Scarlett was lucky she didn’t break her neck!

Now Mr. S has many stories (in a car-train accident, tripped and turned his foot around 180 degrees, set himself on fire, sent a flying board to smack himself in the forehead, and so on), but this one is my favorite. At work it was slow, so they had him and a few other guys taking apart some cubicle walls. You know how they’re held together with those little clips? Well, you have to slide them up and out of their slots. Mr. S was using a screwdriver for this, and the one he was working on was stuck. So he applied all his force – and it worked! The clip came loose, and the screwdriver flew up and drove itself right up his nose. I have two thoughts about this: (1) If it had gone into his brain, I’d have his Darwin award on my mantel; and (2) it’s pretty darn funny that he had to fill out an injury form (“How can this injury be prevented in the future?” “Well, I won’t stick screwdrivers up my nose anymore.”).

And may I say that I’ve never cringed as much in one day as I have in the ten minutes I spent reading this thread.

42

I was 11 and pushing closed a cracked window in my classroom (Ironically I was the one who cracked the window in the first place). The window was a bit stiff and I gave it a good push and the extra force caused the window to break horizontally along the crack.

The window crashes to the ground outside (from the 2nd floor) and the rest of the class burst into laughter. I think to myself “Aaaaw shit”. Suddenly I feel a slight tingling on the inside of my right wrist. I look only to see an inch long cut across my wrist where it had obviously glanced off a piece of the glass still in the frame. The skin had pulled back a bit showing a nice white tendon, some muscle and blood. I shout “I think I cut myself” and run out room. Class goes silent.

Luckily there was a school nurse there that day and she realised that no blood vessels have been severed (hence the slight tingling and not the spray of red usually associated with cut wrists). Doctor did a crap job stitching it up and the scar is still quite prominent but it does get looks of admirations from quite a few goths before I explain how I got it.

43

In the fourth grade I was naive enough to believe that a fall from a second-story window would kill a healthy fourth grader.

Now for the rest of my life when I am asked the question, “Have you ever attempted suicide?” I have to answer, “Yes.”

44

This is awesome. Wonderful thread…

OK-- stupidest injury of mine. I’ve posted this before, but its appropriate.

I’m watching the finals of the 1998 (I believe) Memorial Cup. (GO WINTERHAWKS!) (For those that don’t know the Memorial Cup is the championship game for the Canadian Hockey League-- which is major junior hockey. Imagine it being similar to AAA baseball, but the players are 16-20 years old.)

Anyway… the game goes into Overtime. My Hawks are playing well, but are going against a good Guelph team… face off in the Guelph zone. Robinson wins back to Ference/ shoots, save rebound Russell spin move shoot SCOOOOORE! WINTERHAWKS WIN! Upon seeing this I instantly leap off the couch in unbound glee and go running like a madman into the kitchen.

Now as I run into the kitchen I leap with my hands fully extended and slam them into door frame. As I continue into the kitchen, it doesn’t take long to realize, my hand is not continuing with me. A chunk of skin has caught on the corner of the frame. Well, it finally gives, but by now I’m literally off my feet and vertical like a cartoon. I slam into the floor and slide across the kitchen, not stopping until I slam full speed into the dishwasher.

When all is said and done… my palm now has a loose flap of skin hanging there that needs to be stitched up. Plus, I broke my middle finger on my left hand. Not sure where that happened…

45

I witnessed this one…

Scenario: A bunch of guys are camping out. There has been excessive alcohol consumption. Some trees have been felled for bonfire fuel.

One guy decides that some of the tree sections are too long (they were about 4 feet long, and approximately four inches in diameter). He lays two logs parallel to each other and another log across them making a wide “H” figure. He takes his stance at the base of the H. He uses a fourth log as a club and swings mightily in an attempt to break the cross member of the H.

Now, these logs are green and don’t break easily.

The log he swung rebounds and strikes him right in the face. He does a backward swoon, cartoon style, and ends up in the dazed starfish position.

Result: Split lip, black eye, swollen nose, and near death from laughter-induced asphyxia of all the observers.

46

Backing up to admire some yard handywork, I stepped onto the business edge of a hoe, causing the handle to lever up and hit me in the back of the head. I turned around to see who had whacked me and then realized I was all alone.

47

Heh, I just remembered another one. About a year ago I was helping a friend of mine install a sprinkler system. He was doing one of those nifty trenchless installations, which require a big-ass machine to pull the pipes underground. At the end of the day, I hitch up the trailer, and he begins to load the machine onto the back. Of course, what I forgot to do was actually lock the trailer on, I had just set the thing down on the ball. Of course the front end shoots skyward, and the tailgate of the F-250 was down. The tailgate flew into the air, smacking me in the forehead as it went up. I was dizzy for a minute, but it didn’t make the best contact in the world, so I remained concious and complete. Lucky me :slight_smile:

48

Boy Scouts, 1980 (I think). Whittling with my brand-new Swiss Army knife. A stubborn piece won’t come off. I think, “I’ll just cut it off backwards!” Toward my hand. Blade goes right through impediment, and at least a half-inch into my left thumb. The first morning of a week-long backpacking trip. My dad (a doctor) looks at it, says “You won’t need stitches”, bandages it up, and we go backpacking. I’ve still got the scar. Fairly impressive, too.

Two or three years ago: washing dishes after (or possibly during) a party. Scrubbing out a pilsner glass with surprisingly thin walls that had fallen on its side earlier that evening. Glass shatters, leaving a V-shaped scar on one of my right knuckles, and two smaller scars on fingers.

And my favorite one of all (despite the lack of scars). Junior high (or possibly early high school). At my dad’s for the weekend, we go up to the lake to do a little camping and sailing. Playing frisbee. My dad tosses a long one, and I run after it. Looking backward toward the frisbee, not forward where I was going. Which turned out to be a bad thing, because I ran, at full speed, directly into a concrete picnic table. Don’t think I knocked myself out or gave myself a concussion, but I did lay on the ground with the world spinning for several minutes. Man, was my dad scared. I think he felt guilty for being the one to have tossed the frisbee in the first place.

And Scarlett, I agree; this is just about the most cringe-worthy thread I’ve ever read. :shudders:

49

When I was was 4 or 5, I was at my grandparent’s home and had found my uncle’s bow and arrows. I for some reason (??) decided to play w/ the arrows and had one in my hands w/ the blade near my face…I was standing in the doorway as my uncle walked out of the house and the screen door came back and rammed the arrow into the roof of my mouth.

When I was in 6th or 7th grade or so… a neighbor and I were playing out in her yard. I was “flipping” her. I’m not sure how to describe this except that I was helping her to do “cartwheels” w/out hands. This was fine except for the LAST one we did… now, I need to preface this by saying this was the late 70’s…back when it was cool to have “feathered hair”. I flipped her and as I was doing so realized I was in great pain!! Her COMB that was in her back pocket was stuck in my upper arm! OUCH!! Yes, I have a scar…wanna see??

As an adult, I tried to cut a frozen bagel and ended up slicing into the skin between my thumb and index finger.

I can’t believe you have suckered me into admitting these!!

Ohhhh, I wanna tell some on other people…

My sister swallowed a paper clip!!

A guy I dated once decided he was going to play with all of the “butterfly knives” that we passed while walking through a flea market…I told him he was gonna get hurt…he shrugged me off…and then he stopped…he had “knicked” himself w/ the last one he had played with!

50

Oh man, Rysdad, ha, that reminds me…

A couple of buds worked all summer pruning trees and had this enormous pile of timber assembled from carting all the cutting out to their place in the country. So they decided to invite all of us out one Saturday night to drink beer and stay warm with a big-assed bonfire.

We were all sitting around the blaze, buttin’ stumps and spreading bullsh*t, when all of a sudden some forgotton aerosol can in the pile exploded. It comes screaming out of the fire like a missle on a clothesline making this incredible shriek and sportin’ a smoking tail.

NAs luck would have it the biggest bullsh*tter of us all was sitting right in this banshee’s path. Duncan, spouting off about some past feat and wearing some stupid Indiana Jones hat, catches it right in the chest. Wham! Due to surprise or alcohol or stupidity he doesn’t move for about two seconds and then he comes completly unglued. He screams, jumps up, screams again, bats wildly at his chest with a glove and an agitated beer can, screams and turns to run away. Screaming.

Now Duncan has poor eyesight. He wears Coke bottle glasses to make up for it, which make his eyes look comically tiny. It’ll be a long time before I forget the sight of him running into the side of the trailer that brought all the wood out, bouncing off (like he needed another stunning), backing up, running away again, hitting the trailer neck knee high, sailing past me smoking from the chest and looking down at me with those tiny little eyes. Screaming.

I think it was about ten minutes before I could crawl up off the ground and go check on the guy.

51

Remember when you were a kid and still entertained the notion, that, under the right circumstances, you could fly–or at least float? I was one of those little kids that needs the little “cape does not enable user to fly” I jumped from a large oak tree with my superman cape weraing my bat girl underoos and broke my arm.

Several months later I was MUCH wiser. Tried the old jumping from the roof with an umbrella–thought I would float. Nope–landed flat on my ass and broke my tailbone.

Someday I’ll tell y’all about my missing big toe…

Recently, I went over to my new neighbor’s house and saw this giant fluffy kitty. “Well hewo miwster kittums–aren’t we cute—awww you want your tummy wubbed huh? do ya?” My hand was promptly shredded and bitten by her 24 pound Maine Coon…

52

  1. I was 7 or 8 at the time. My big brother and the neighbor had a bucket filled with slugs (Look like snails without the shells) that they were torturing by pouring salt on them. Their outer skin shrinks when salt is poured on them. Well, my genius brother decided the salt was working too slowly. He and the neighbor decided to use kerosene to speed up the slug-death. Did I mention the bucket was made of plastic, like an empty butter container? The fire quickly spread and my brother tried to put it out by stomping on it. The almost completely melted butter container slipped from under his foot, flew through the air and the flaming, slug filled melted plastic fire ball landed directly on my face. I spent a month in the hospital. Had second and third degree burns covering most of my face and burned all of my hair right off.
    (Burning hair and flesh has to be one of the worst smells on the planet.) I am, thank god and modern medicine, virtually unscarred by the incident. I actually have to point out the little marks left by the burns and required no reconstructive surgery.

  2. Many years later while unpacking a set of brand new Ginzu knives I was demonstrating to my niece my “imagined” wonderful fighting skills. I would pull the knife from it’s cardboard sheath and assume a Kung-fu stance yelling “samurai” as I did it. The knife cut through the cardboard (duh, it’s a Ginzu… it can cut through an aluminum can) and sliced my finger to the bone. End of samurai sword lesson. My niece still reminds me of my “skills” whenever I do something dumbass.

53

Once when I was thirteen years old the snowblower stopped working when I was trying to clear the driveway with it. Looking at the snowblower in puzzlement, I noticed that a wheel on the visible part of the engine which spun when the engine was operating was not, in fact, spinning. So I tried to spin it by hand, hoping that this would make the engine work again.

I didn’t notice anything wrong right away because it took a few seconds for the heat from the engine to melt through the glove that I was wearing. After that, boy was I glad I was standing next to a big pile of snow…

I stuck to the shovel after that.

54

One other acquaintence story…

A guy we called Leechy had just purchased a set of those nunchaku/numchuck/sticks-on-a-rope things, and was demonstrating his prowess with them. He was slinging them around in the air, behind his back, under his armpits–everywhere. Bob says, “They don’t look so dangerous to me.” Leechy responds, “In trained hands, these can be deadly,” and begins twirling them helicopter fashion. I guess he was going to launch into another fighting display, but he mis-timed something, and with a mighty swing, he conked himself right across the top of the head - hard!

Stunned, he slumped to the floor, an impressive goose egg quickly appearing on the top of his skull.

He was right. They are dangerous. They cause death by comedy.

(Those things have been forever renamed “slapsticks” by his friends.)

55

Being nigh-invulnerable, I don’t have any stories about injuries requiring stitches or worse. But I do have a few scars with stupid stories behind them.

One of them is on my forehead, just below my hairline. I was about 15 at the time, and decided to see just how high those signs hanging above the aisles in the grocery store are. Not as high as I thought.

One that didn’t leave any scars, but could have been very serious happened on a ski trip, I was 19 or so. Like all guys, I wasn’t content with the groomed and official trails. So I took off through a little deer-path just a little wider than me. For those of you who don’t know, to slow yourself while skiing, you either turn, or do a “snowplow” by making a V shape with your skis. This trail allowed neither. I realised this only when I was getting uncomfortably fast. Remember the speeder scene in Return of the Jedi? Same deal. So, I got desperate (and stupid). I saw two trees just on either side of the trail, stuck my arms out and caught them. The laws of physics being what they are, my feet (and skis) swung up, I was horizontal about 5 feet above the ground. Then, next thing I know, I’m horizontal on the ground, and my skis appear to be growing out of the ground. I could barely move my arms enough to get back up, but I did, and made it back down the mountain.
I was much more careful - for about 2 days.

56

I have spent way too much time trying to defy the laws of physics (and murphy’s law), lol.

  1. My mom and I had just arrived home and I wanted to go to a friend’s house, which she said I couldn’t do. I decided I’d make a run for it and she’d never catch me. I jump out of the van and ~ hey wait a minute, I can’t move! ~ I’d slammed my thumb in the door. Needless to say I didn’t make it to my friend’s house, instead I got to go to Urgent Care and find out I’d broken my thumb. The nail fell off eventually and it still doesn’t grow right to this day because I broke it behind the matrix. :rolleyes:

  2. When I was about 6 or 7 my older brother was chasing my friend and I around the yard and she grabbed my hand and yanked me to follow… right into a sharp edge on the gas grill. 7 stitches in my cheek for that one.

  3. When I was really little I was at my grandma’s and she made waffles with a waffle iron. I didn’t understand the concept of heat apparently, so I touched it. Just with the tip of my finger, but damn, I was only a baby!

  4. As a teenager I had just finished curling my hair and wanted to pack my curling iron in my suitcase, so I grabbed the barrel of the iron… before letting it cool down. You’d have thought my #3 story would have taught me better, wouldn’t you?

  5. 8 years old… I had a tv set in my bedroom on top of a chest of drawers. I was bored during commercial breaks, so I decided to “climb” the dresser. Physics proved me stupid. The whole thing fell over on me and trapped me in between the dresser and my bed. The tv missed hitting my head by about 1/4". Smoooooth.

  6. Arrived home from god-only-knows-where in my car and went around back to look at the tailpipe (don’t remember why). I thought it looked bent, so I touched it. Apparently #3 and #4 weren’t enough of a lesson…

Ok, here’s a story of my mom’s from just last week. She tried to defy physics, too. She decided while washing dishes that her hand really wasn’t bigger than the opening in the glass she was washing. The glass exploded and cut her hand up real nice. Oi!

And how 'bout that idiot in shop class in jr. high? In wood shop the first thing they tell you about the jig saw is to NOT put your thumb behind whatever your’re working on as you push it toward the blade. Mr. Smart Guy forgot that quickly and sliced his thumb up. Dork.

There are plenty more, but those were the ones I thought funniest. :slight_smile:

57

Well, I have a couple. One was when I was learning how to make arrowheads out of obsidian. I was in the 9th grade at the time, and the guy who was teaching us said, “Now, be careful, the flakes are sharp.”

Freshman Angel’s thoughts: Hm…he said it’s sharp, but I’d better check. ::runs edge of a flake across upper palm. Sees blood.:: Oh, whaddya know? It’s sharp!

The other, infinitely more stupid injury occured just last summer. I was staying at my SOs house for a few days, and I really, really didn’t want to leave. One of my friends gave my young, in-love, overly-impressionable mind an idea: if I broke a bone, I wouldn’t have to stay there.

So I talked my SO into holding a couch above my wrist (as bad as my wrists are, I figured a fracture wouldn’t do any good). I ask him to drop it. He won’t. He says he doesn’t want to hurt me.

I reluctantly agree. “Okay, just let me get out from under here…”

I knock into his legs while getting out. He loses his grop drops it, assuming I am clear. I wasn’t. The wooden leg of the couch landed on my left index finger.

I still have an odd red mark from that…and he of course feels absolutely horrible.

I am such an idiot. :o

58

When I was 10 or so we had this huge tree in my backyard. My older brother and I climbed it one fine morning. My brother reached our favorite branch first. He’s sitting on the branch and in the coolest thing my 10 y/o mind has seen he leaning on another branch that’s a little higher and further back like it’s a recliner.

I want to be cool. I sit on the branch and lean back. I however have failed to notice that I’m not quite as long in upperbody as my brother. I plummet 20-30 feet to the bottom of the tree. No broken bones or concussion but did not all the wind out of my body. Spent the rest of the summer on the ground.

59

Freshman year pep rally --Scooting over on some bleachers, to make room for someone else. Not realizing that the set of bleachers next to it had been pushed back into the wall, anya falls off, lands flat on her back, knocks self out and has the worst backache for three days.

While attempting to clean my room, I put the cuticle trimmer on the bed. While changing position on the bed to pick up more crap up off of the floor, then manages to open up a cut on my knee with the cuticle trimmer.

Last summer, i went canoeing, and when the boys were getting in and out of the canoe, the damned thing capsizes, and i get dumped in the drink. The second time this happened, i had just gotten back in the canoe and was not seated properly, and canoe overturns again. Finally, we made it back to the pier, and while trying to get out of that wretched canoe, it overturns again. My little buddy tells me that the canoe cost some $4000 dollars. I said i would not give anybody a quarter for it.

60

Let’s see if I can set this up properly…it really would be better to have a diagram.

When I was eight years old, my family took a trip to Florida, staying at many different hotels along the way. One day my sister and I (she was 11) were playing hide-and-go-seek/tag around the hotel to blow off some of the energy we had building up after sitting in the car for hours and hours.

The hotel (or motel–what’s the difference again?) was one with the room doors on the exterior, with balconys and breezeways surrounding an interior courtyard. The exterior walls were constructed out of that pink, powdery plaster. I guess it was supposed to look tropical.

I was the hider/tagee, and had just managed to escape my sister. Let me try to describe my hiding spot:

I had my back to a wall, facing the interior courtyard. There was a breezeway to my immediate right, going back towards the exterior/parking lot. The wall on the opposite side of the breezeway for some reason extended out further than the one I had my back against, so I couldn’t see very far around that corner.

I was expecting my sister to come running down the breezeway behind me and pass me on the right, and I would slip behind her before she ever knew I was there.

I stood there, waiting and waiting, and the tension grew. My nerves were taut, my senses alert. Any second now…

And then my sister appeared around the corner, in front of me. I panicked, turned left instead of right, and ran full tilt into the wall.

I was covered in a pink powdery substance from head to foot, with a sore nose, poofy lip, and scarred chin and forehead. My sister got a stomachache from laughing so hard.

No permanent scars, but I am still often reminded of my humilation by my loving sister, who still suffers stomachaches from time to time at my expense.