I am in my 50’s. About a year ago, I was hunting for something in a store. I saw it in an unused checkout line so I went to get it. Well there was a large, short bucket in the aisle and I didn’t see it. I tripped, fell into it and couldn’t get out. My shins hurt soooooo bad. I lay there for a few minutes, in such pain and laughing because how dumb it was. Finally I was able to crawl up over the side of the bucket, hide nearby on my hands and knees and finally get up. No one ever saw me.
Regarding Mirror Image egamI rorriM eyeball papercuts: A co-worker was walking through a warehouse full of pallets stacked high with cardboard boxes. One of the boxes had its flaps open, at eye hight. He didn’t see it; as he walked past, it slit his cornea. He said that the pain was intense. I’m glad it didn’t happen to me.
On Dragonblink’s hole without a cover: Many years ago, my dad’s company sent his department to Jamaica to celibrate some productivity award. One fine evening, he was walking with two friends, side-by-side, down a Jamacian street – he was in the middle. Suddenly, his friends looked at each other in disbelief as he simply vanished from between them.
Further inspection revealed a two-foot-square sewer drain that was missing its cover. My dad had fallen in and had been saved from total disaster only when his arms flapped up like wings, stopping him at the shoulders.
They got help from the locals to pull him out. I don’t remember all of the damage, but one thing sticks out in my mind: The hole had a sharp lip all around and his shins ran down this metal lip on his way down, leaving behind long strips of hairy flesh.
As I recall, Jamaica took care of the hospital care; someone probably felt that it wasn’t too sporting to leave sewer grates off the holes at night to form urban Burmese tiger traps.
His co-workers had a plaque made up with a tombstone inscription, placed the plaque next to the hole with a wreath, photograped it, and presented him with a framed 8x10 photo of the scene of his accident.
Like Dragonblink and minor7flat5, my injury involves a hole with a faulty cover. When I was in fifth grade, I was playing in the school playground at recess, in a part of the field that was sort of off to the side, out of sight of the main part of the playground where the teachers were. There was a little raised area full of trees there, where I was playing “castle” by myself. As I was coming down from the raised area, I walked across a sewer grate/manhole/whatever that was there…and the cover promptly flipped down so that I fell in, up to my knee, with my other leg stuck awkwardly out to the side in this sort of forced split.
Naturally, I started screaming for help, but I was far from everyone else, and no one heard me for several minutes. Finally, some girls came over, saw that I was really stuck, and (after making fun of me…the little bitches) went to get a teacher. It took two teachers and the janitor to pull me out, and they couldn’t get the drain cover open too far, so the side of my leg facing the edge of the cover was badly scraped, all the better to accompany the huge bruise on the other side of my leg from knee to ankle.
They locked the drain cover after that.
First off, I want to say to all of you folks: OUCH!!!
Let’s see, seven years ago, I was riding my bike through the nearly empty parking lot of a strip mall at dusk. I was going along at a fair clip, and when I looked up, a car was coming in my direction. So I swerved out of the way, thinking I was going to sail around the corner like nothing happened. What I didn’t realize was that at the end of this concrete abutment (the sidewalk divider between two parking rows), it had not a rounded edge, but two concrete ends sticking out. If viewed from the top, it would look like a T.
The front wheel hit the abutment, and I went headfirst over the handlebars and landed on my face. I didn’t realize how gashed up I was until I limped to a sandwich shop and asked if I could use their restroom. There, I discovered that my face was all bloody, and my left arm was all ripped up.
I took the bus to the hospital and waited seven hours in the ER waiting room to be seen. As it turns out, nothing was broken. I still have the scar on the end of my chin, and my ears are still ringing - and they are never going to stop.
Strangest thing about it was, after the X-ray, the doctor asked me when I broke my arm. “What are you talking about?” He said it was clear that at some point my arm had been broken and the bone healed itself. I hadn’t the foggiest clue when or how it could have happened. How on earth does a person break their arm and not realize it?
When I was a teenager I had to wear a body cast after surgery. This was a cast that went up over my shoulders and down to about my hips. One cold, icy winter morning I was going out to catch the school bus. I slipped on a patch of ice (you know, that way you slip when one minute you’re walking along, the next second you’re lying on your back looking up, with no idea what happened?). Well, I also smashed and pinned one of my hands between the cast and the ice on the ground. Since I had no flexibility at all in my midsection due to the cast, I was trapped like an overturned turtle and couldn’t get up. I had to lie there until the 2 older guys who lived up the street walked by and helped me get up. They didn’t even laugh (in my presence…)
2 fingernails eventually blackened and fell off.
When I was a kid my brother and I were horsing around in the back seat while Mom drove around on some errands. My brother had one of those old-fashioned popguns that has a cork in the end of the barrel and string attached to the cork. You pull the trigger and the cork pops out.
So bro points the gun at me and shoots me, and suddenly I have a used staple embedded in my nose. Apparently, it had gotten lodged in the popgun’s mechanism somehow and when he pulled the trigger the cork popped out, and the staple was driven out with enough force to embed most of it in the fleshy tip of my nose.
It didn’t hurt at all, but for some reason my mom was quite upset about it and drove me to the emergency room, where the doctor numbed my nose up with some spray and pulled the staple out and only laughed a little bit.
Reading through all of these reminded me of some more incidents.
In 1976, I hitch-hiked from Ontario to British Columbia. Part of the way there, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, my friend and I were having a beer or five with the night desk clerk at the hotel where we were staying. We ran out of beer. I said “Oh, there’s some more up in the room.” So I went bounding up the stairs. I flailed my right arm out for no apparent reason and hit the wall, breaking three fingers. I still had the hard cast on my right arm when I got to Vancouver. It sure was an experience learning to do stuff with my left hand, like eating peas on a fork! After 3 weeks I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I soaked the cast off in a sink. Now I can’t hold up three fingers on my right hand. Two, yes. Three, forget it.
When I was 8, I ran out the kitchen door, across the porch and intended to hit the screen-door handle. Instead, I put my hand through the glass. I still have the scar on my wrist. I’ve had to explain more than once that I did not actually try to commit suicide.
I think it was the year before that when I almost lost my right eye. We lived near railroad tracks, and there were huge, wooden planks in the field near the tracks. We used to play in the field, and once I was running along a plank, slipped and landed on a rusty railroad spike that was protruding from the plank. The injury was less than a half an inch from my eye. I still have the scar from that, too.
And I’m not even going to mention the time in Grade 7 that I got kicked right square in the groin, and my testicles swelled up down to my knees. Nope, I’m not going to bring that one up at all.
Let’s see…
When I was in grade school, I was running with a rat tail comb in my mouth (for some dumb reason), and someone bumped me. I ended up with a hole in the back of my throat and could not swallow without pain for a week or so.
Also in grade school, I was chasing a boy (I had a crush on him) around the top of the jungle gym (looked like a space ship) We were about 5 feet above the ground, when I reached out to grab him and fell face first on the jagged concrete cementing the bars to the ground. Woke up as the playground coach was carrying me to the nurses office. The entire side of my face was scratched and cut up, luckily no stitches tho (I did have to wear an eyepatch for a week) I was darn lucky I didn’t break my neck…Years later, I would get pimples on that side of my face, and out came gravel.
When I was in my 20’s, I was sewing some bridesmaids dresses for a friend of mine, DRY CLEAN ONLY lavender taffita, mind you. I messed up a seam on one of the dresses, and instead of using a seam ripper to rip it out, I decided to use the point of my scissors. I ended up slicing my pointer finger wide open. I immediately stuck my finger in my mouth (for some dumb reason) and ran over to the sink, spitting out a MOUTHFUL of blood. I should have gotten stitches, but didn’t (it was layed wide open at the meatiest part of the finger) I just taped it together and taped it to the next finger for a week or so. The ODDEST PART was, allthough I had all three dresses right in front of me when I did it, I (thankfully) missed bleeding on any of the dresses. Not a drop!
Once, I was opening a gallon of milk, and I pulled the plastic thingy off so I could unscrew the cap, and I scratched my cornea with it.
Last year, I was in the shop with my SO, I was about 10 feet up on a ladder, pulling some nails with a prybar. I yanked a particularly difficult to remove nail, the prybar flew back into my forehead (at the hairline) 'Bout knocked myself out, or off the ladder, but managed to hook an arm around and hang on. My boyfriend was less than 15 feet away from me, but unfortunately, he had his back to me, and was running a sander, so he didn’t see/hear me. Luckily, he looked up a minute or two later, and ran over to see what was wrong (Head wounds, no matter how minor do tend to bleed ALOT, I was dripping all over the place) He had to come up the ladder and walk me down, and took me into the house to clean it up and see how bad it was. Again, luckily, it was fairly minor (no stitches)
I think I had better stop now, before someone thinks I am klutzy.
I cut the ball of my right thumb and bled copiously----in Long John Silver’s, a fastfood/seafood restaurant … on a chicken strip. A deep fried piece of boneless chicken.
As a steady stream of blood pours from my thumb, my soon-to-be-ex-husband whines “How can a person cut themselves on CHICKEN?” As if I knew!
I am very, very good at hurting myself doing weird and/or stupid things.
As a child of about 8, I was running up the embanked sides of a building in snow-slicked tennis shoes. I slipped, hit my chin on my knee, and bit clear through my lip, lower left side. Lots of blood, but no stitches.
As a college-age-you-should-know-better adult, I thought it was hi-larious to bang on some unsuspecting someone’s window to scare the crap out of them. I did it one time too many and ultimately got what was coming–I punched through a window, severing a tendon in my pinkie that required both surgery and physical therapy. For a pinkie.
Last December, as documented in this thread, I hit myself in the face with a hammer, splitting my right lower lip.
I’m just a big bucket o’fun, lemme tell yuh.
I was kneeling on a desk as a 12 year old with my feet on the chair behind me (one of those desks that has separated chairs). The chair promptly disappears and I fall backwards, hitting the wall with my whole back at once. I had a bruise about half a foot in diameter on my back.
A few years later, 15 years old, I was running in the dark for a bonfire and saw the reflection of the fire on the bench. I tried to run around the back of the bench, and instead suddenly hit the back end of a picnic table! I had hit my shins so hard that I dug a crater into one. They swelled up the size of coke cans on the front of my shins, and the swelling didn’t go down (nor did the bruising start) for about 3 weeks. Hardly any bleeding though. I have nice scars from it. It tooks about two months to heal, overall.
~Ailia~
www.glassmen.org
There is nothing beautiful about pain.
But it makes you stronger.
Not an actual injury, but frightening: I had a summer job that required quite a bit of creative soldering using soldering pencils. A coworker ran into a soldering problem that was most easily solved using four hands. She did the soldering, I reached around her from behind to provide the extra hands. She was so pleased when the joint was done that she turned around suddenly to talk to me. She was holding the pencil at face level, and somehow stuck the tip of it into my nostril. There was a sudden hiss as the moisture in my nose vaporized, and she jerked the pencil away. Some of my nose-hairs were crisped, but I had no detectable burn.
One Sunday morning, I decided I wanted a bagel. The only bagels we had were frozen, so I took one out and waited for it to thaw. Growing impatient, I took out a knife and cut the bagel in half so I could toast it, holding the bagel so that the knife could go into the bagel, saw through partially, hit an air pocket, speed up, slice through the rest of the bagel, and cut my finger to the bone. I put a band-aid on it, and the cotton turned purple with blood in about two seconds. I still have a little white scar.
While fishing in the Catalina Channel, I hooked onto a barracuda about 30 inches long. After I got it on board, I reached down to carefully take out the hook from the fish’s mouth. (I knew that 'cudas can give a very nasty bite, so I was being very cautious)
Suddenly a whale breached about 50 feet off the portside of the boat where I was fishing. The whale was at least as long as our fishing boat, which was about 45 feet in length. I was so surprised that I accidently lowered my thumb into the mouth of the 'cuda, and he chomped down! Hard!
I still have the scar on my thumb 40 years later.
When I was a bored kid, I threw a rock straight up to see how high I could throw it and still catch it. My reward for holding the palm of my hand out to stop the descent of a very sharp rock was 5 stitches.
When I was in High School I was driving with my arm out the window and “rear-ended” a bee. The reaction from getting stung threw my arm straight up into the top frame of the door, resulting in a small bee sting surrounded by a large black bruise.
A few years ago I spent the day fishing with my brother, catching nothing but a buzz. Towards the end of the day I caught a 13 pound channel catfish. Too bad I wasn’t sober enough to remember where not to hold it for the trophy picture. I now have a photo of me capturing the exact moment of sensing agonizing pain.
I prodded a car cigarette lighter with the tip of my finger to see if it was hot, and because I’m startlingly intelligent.
It was hot. Quite a pretty burn mark, though.
I slammed my head in a car door.
I stabbed myself with a pencil.
My brother stabbed me with a pencil.
I caught my foot under a roundabout and couldn’t walk for a week. I’m not if it was broken or not - Doctors, pffbbt! - but it healed okay and I got to limp theatrically for a fortnight, and that’s the main thing.
My younger brother stuffed half a bath sponge up his nostril and had to go to the doctor to have it removed.
The Boy lost a chunk of his buttock to a gate. (He was sitting on top of it, it swung shut, he was fourteen and reluctant to moon his mother, he left it for a week before doing so and by that time the wound was too full of teenage grime and boxer fluff to be sewn shut, he has a nice scar and also, whilst we’re on the subject, nice buttocks.)
The Boy also did the whole “walking through a plate glass window” thang. Cunningly it wasn’t his window.
The other day I got windburn whilst walking the dog. Danger dogs (ha!) me at every turn, I tell ya.
Does the insurance company file this as an “Act of Dog”?
You win.
Geesh, I’ve done quite a few of the ones listed here, cut finger open trying to slice off a piece of italian bread (uh, I think I’ll just take the pasta with marinara “To Go” if thats okay)
Slit wrist open while washing a glass, of course I had stuck my hand ALL the way in and was vigoriously swishing.
Had the cat almost blind me by making “kitten in distress” noises, mew! mew! mew! while on all fours cleaning out the closet. (Why???) Anyway she ran up across my back and swatted right for my eye. Missed by about 1/8 of an inch. She had never had kittens anyway, I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was.
Slammed finger in window while closing it and had to stand there screaming until I was released by someone else.
Burned eyebrows and lashes off cause the stove didn’t light fast enough, "turn on gas, bend down, open oven door, strike match, strike, strike, strike, dammit, strike, strik-BOOM!
This one is weird only because of the sheer mundanity.
I was 14 years old, gym class. We’re jogging across the field and back. I’m talking to a friend, not paying any attention. All the sudden I just fall. I didn’t trip on anything, I really don’t know how else to describe it. I just fell, and then tumbled ass-over-teakettle a few times.
After my wonderful display of acrobatic behavior, I sprang up and tried to play off like I meant to do it. Only when I look at my friends with a little ‘Ta-daa’ escaping my lips, I notice they’re looking at me a little strangely. They’ve got their eyes open wide and they’re not amused. They’re just stopped in their tracks, staring.
Finally one of them blurts out, “Your arm!”. I look down and notice my shoulder is about 4 inches lower than where it should be, and my arm is hanging limp and useless at my side. “Hrm”, I think. I’m still not in any pain at this point, so I ask one of my friends if they think I should go to the nurse.
After being picked up by my mom and taken to the hospital, I realized that I had broken my collarbone. The bones snapped right in two, and looked like an X on the x-ray. Both the top ends of the bones were just barely about to break through the skin. One more somersault and I thin they would have.
I had to have it re-broken a few times after that, and it’s never really healed correctly. I’ve got some residual nerve damage as well, and chronic neck and back pain.
All that because I just sorta fell. No cool story or anything. I feel gypped.