The first when I was eight or so. My parents owned a small trailer for hauling brush and such stuff to the sump (can you tell I lived in a rural area?) Anyways, it had but two wheels, and when not in use, was stored on the lawn. Well, my friends and I had great fun getting inside, and running from end to end to make it tip one way, then the other. The goal was to get it to balance and stay that way, it never worked, but it was still fun to ride it. So one day I was merely watching for some reason, but a little too close, for when the side I was stadning next to (the back end) popped up, the tailgate came undone and fell down cutting me right along the side of my left eye. Ouch. Had to go to the doctor’s up the street and get a tetanus shot and everything. Man, that hurt a lot.
But the weirdest injury I suffered was in sixth grade when I had, get ready for this…cat scratch fever. Stop laughing. It’s a real disease, I swear! Not just the title of some bad 80’s hair band song! Our cat scractched my leg at some point, and the bacteria he got from walking around everywhere and killing birds and mice got into my system and caused a lymphnode near my groin to swell to the size of a golfball. Yeah, at first, the doctor was confused, and thought that the swelling would go away, but it didn’t. And one night it started really hurting, and I passed out from the pain to wake up after some surgery. They tried to merely “drain” it by inserting a needle, but that didn’t work. So the next day I went into surgery again and they lopped the damn thing off. So since then I have been going through life sans one lymphnode…I miss the little guy.
This will be brief because it hurts to even think about it. I was body surfing in the ocean off RI a few years ago. A rather large wave pushed me down to the bottom and dragged me along for a while, through all the rocks and sand. I got up, noticed my chest hurt a lot, looked down, and saw that my right nipple had been ripped in half by a dull rock in salt water. It hurt so much I’ve got the goose bumps just thinking about it. I have a scar that runs right down the center of my nipple, as well as about an inch above and below it. yuck
ohhhh many years ago, I got my ears pierced again, because the first time I 'd had them pierced I took out the earings and it closed up.
Now the rest of the story can only really be assumed because we’re still not sure what happened to my ear.
While in the mall with my mom, not 10 feet from where I’d had my ears pierced, I felt them and noticed that the front of my earing was gone but the stem was still sticking out the back, thinking that the front had fallen out of my earing i pulled on the stem.
Buttt… the stem wouldnt budge, and now that I felt around, Irealized that there was an earing sized lump in my ear lobe.
Yes, the earing was inside my ear. The only way that we could figure out how this happened was that, the girl who pierced them had used my unhealed scar from the first time as a marker, not to mention that those particular earings had stems that were too thick, the were about a miimeter thicker than normal, that makes a big difference in such situations.We guess all the factors enlarged the hole, and the earing was sucked in.
We went to the emergency room, they had to put 3 or 4 shots in the side of my face to numb my ear, and they just poked it out.
I still have that earing to this day, its really freakin thick, I could have sued. As a matter of fact, the same thing happened to a friend of mines daughter, and she had the same earings on, i could get a class action suit going .
A little undramatic, but once I was sharpening a pencil in an automatic pencil sharpener. I used my thumb on the end of the eraser to push it in. What I failed to notice was that on this particular pencil there was no eraser, just that metal band. The band drilled a perfect little circle into the flesh of my thumb, down to the bone. For a while I could impress my friends by pressing down the skin around it so that a cylinder of flesh stuck up in the center of my thumb like some sort of futuristic skyscraper.
I guess you can say I had a “self inflicted firearms wound.” Well, not really. Read on…
My dad collected antiques when I was a kid. One of his “treasures” was an authentic cannonball. This thing was as big as a bowling ball and weighed 80 lbs. One day, when I was about 12 years old, I rolled the cannonball outside to show it to someone. To prove how “strong” I was, I picked it up to waist level. I then proceeded to put it back down.
Well, I set it down too fast. My left hand’s pinky finger got caught between the 80 lb. cannonball and concrete driveway. Smush. My pinky looked like a banana after being run over by a car. Flesh and blood was everywhere, and the bone was sticking out. The rest is predictable… went to the hospital, got it operated on (skin graft), etc.
Today, the pinky is still there, but it’s about ½ an inch shorter than my other pinky. And there’s only one joint instead of two. The bonus is that it’s a neat conversation piece. The bummer is that I like to mess around with the bass guitar every-now-and-then, and I can’t stretch more than about 5 frets.
And oh, the cannonball… my dad gave it to me about 12 years ago. It’s sitting on our living room floor, in the corner.
December 2000, I was walking along the beach on Virgin Gorda, one of the BVIs. I was hit from the side by a waist-high wave that spun me around. Well, actually, it spun MOST of me around. My right foot had been about ankle-deep in the sand at the time, so it stayed put. The pivot point was my right knee, which gave way with a horrible hollow pop. The current dragged me out several feet, causing me to experience a near-drowning occurrence, while simultaneously enjoying the sensation of feeling my kneecap bob around on the side of my leg, where it is definitely not supposed to be.
I had to be evacuated from the beach by a rescue boat (after being strapped to a backboard and carried by several burly men back out in the surf that had just attacked me), and was treated in a clinic that kept goats in the side yard.
I swear this conversation with the doctor took place.
“You need an X-ray, but the nearest machine is on the island of Tortola.”
“How can we get there?”
“You’ll have to take the ferry. The last one leaves in about 10 minutes.”
A couple of weeks ago, I woke up with a shallow scratch on my forehead. The thing was about two inches long and I have no idea where it came from. No watches on my wrist or anything that could really do me any damage.
My first thought upon seeing it: “…I look like Harry frickin’ Potter”
I had a spike/nail go all the way through my foot.
I was remodeling this old house, and had just torn down the back deck. It was an old, heavy, way overbuilt affair which had some 5-6" nails in it.
I jumped down from the house to the ground (about 4’) and felt an odd but sharp pain in my right foot.
I looked down and saw a bloody spike poking out from the top of my work boot. Alarmed, I lifted up my foot only to find a large chunk of wood attatched to it via the nail. (2X8 about 8ft long.)
Stealing myself for the pain, I lifted a little bit higher, got my 22oz framing hammer out my toolbelt, and gave it a good whack right behind my foot.
The nail/spike came out with a blinding rush of pain an quite a bit of blood.
I had to have someone drive me in my truck to the emergency room to get the blood to stop and get all the right shots. My truck’s interior was covered in blood when I finally got around to cleaning it.
The spike missed all the bones but went all the way through from top to bottom. Lucky and unlucky at the same time, verdad?
When I went back to the project later, they all called me Jesus. And no one knows why…
Would you believe I accidentally shot myself in the hip with a nail gun? A small, (almost) headless finishing nail penetrated the skin and lodged deep within the muscle tissue. Just to make matters worse, the surgeon who removed it, after succeeding after a few attempts, exclaimed: “Aha! Nailed it.”
When I was about 8 or 9 I was riding on the back of my friends bike while he pedalled and as we turned the corner the bike frame snapped down the middle catupulting him forward on to his head while I came down on the upturned frame. The snapped frame went through my jaw and knocked out two of my back teeth, my friend was crying and had a golf ball sized lump on his forehead but the moment he saw me he stopped crying and just totally freaked out. I had a cool scar and story to tell for the rest of the summer holidays, now the scar is very small and half way down my neck…
My other weird injury happened about 7 years ago, I woke up in the morning to find I had impaled the cartilidge in the end of my nose on the corner of my open tape deck and it was wedged firmly in. I had to steel myself before pulling it out and it made my eyes water for a long time. Still to this day the cartilidge is still slightly exposed and becomes more so if I have a cold because the wiping breaks the weak covering of skin.
[hijack] Aranea, I was just in Virgin Gorda last week; I can absolutely picture it, goats and all.
[/hijack]
I used to get into the car and start closing the door before my head was all the way in the car. I had a terrible fear that someday I would close the door a little too fast and rip both my ears off. But after years of injury-free door closing, I realized it was just a silly, groundless fear, so I stopped being careful about it. Luckily, when I did finally slam my own head in the car door, neither of my ears were ripped off. But they still hurt like a motherf*cker afterwards.
Another odd injury was when I was playing peek-a-boo with my cat. He snapped a paw out and hooked it in my upper lip. It wasn’t so bad until I pulled away and the claw ripped out. Only took two stitches to fix, and I learned a valuable lesson: Never use your face as a cat toy.
The weirdest one was, well, weird. There was a yam protruding from a hanging fruit-basket at my folks’ house. I approached it, shark-like, as if to take a bite from it…and sprained my jaw. I have no idea how.
When I was small, I was running somewhere with a crayon in my hand, tripped, and fell. Apparently, I managed to inhale the crayon. Did it break up as I fell? Was it up the nose or through the mouth? II was a toddler at the time, and I have no memory of the event, so to this day, I don’t know. I just know that Mom told me that I managed to inhale a crayon once.
Another, less serious story: A few weeks ago, I took our dog outside to do his doggy thing. I had some loose change rattling around my pockets, and I thought I’d put it in my car’s change compartment, so I didn’t lose it. Between trying to keep an eye on the dog and trying to put the change in the car, I managed to slam my throat against the sharp corner of my car door. That was a painful one.
When I was five years old, I was racing my sister through the house. Stepped on a rug and started to slide at top speed.
Slid face first into the wall and broke my nose. After that, I learned to block oncoming objects with my arms. My nose didn’t change - thank god - but you can still feel where the bone healed.
I stabbed myself in the hand with a fork. I was reaching into my backpack to grab a book, when I discovered that I had left a fork in there after lunch. It went about 3/4 inches into my left palm, staying close to the skin. I yanked my hand out and had this fork dangling from it like some goofy alien stainless steel parasite. I literally shook it off and proceeded to make a bloody mess of things. I also discovered words I never knew I had in my vocabulary.
That was a couple of weeks ago. I still have a very straight and rectangular mark visible under the skin, where you can plainly see where the fork’s tine went.
I remember one time when I was a kid, I was riding a bicycle past some kids kicking a soccer ball. One of them kicked the ball towards me, and I figured I could just bunny-hop my bike over the ball… I don’t remember ever hitting the ground, but I wore the road rash for at least a month.