Back in 2005 days before my interview for my university work placement I thought it would be a good idea to take advantage of the fantastic Scottish weather so I went to ASDA and bought a sledge. So far no injury. This shares a fence line with the hill myself and flatmate thought it would be good to go sledging down. So I hopped on my sledge and zoooooooom! The hill was a lot steeper than thought and my sledge began to take the path towards the fence. I dug me heels into the snow to try and stop myself but I was going way to fast. I tried to grab the fence before I smacked into it but I was going to fast and my foot struck it first. My foot go caught in the spaces in the fence and my body continued to roll down the hill. Eventually my foot dislodged and and I came to a halt. The shock and pain caused me to be motionless for a brief moment. My mate paniced and thought I was dead. I got up but couldnt walk. I had to hop down the rest of the hill to the car. My flatmate said “why didnt you just roll off?”. To this day I dont know why! My injuries from this was a severly damaged ankle, torn, bloody sides and a hurt pride! To this day I still have problems with my ankle luckily for me my interview went well and I still got the job. The next day I went back to ASDA and returned the sledges for my money back - I was NOT going to be using them again! 
I was sitting on the kitchen floor with a pair of heavy-duty scissors trying to cut the box away from a new dishwasher when the blade slipped off the cardboard and jabbed into my left calf. It went in about a half inch or so. Bled like hell. I should have gotten sutures, but didn’t. It eventually healed, but there is an ugly purple scar there.
I hurt my back so badly I needed a diskectomy, was disabled for most of a year, and am still partly paralyzed in one foot. This, while I was pulling on my underpants.
Two days ago I was at the gas station. I step up to the register to pay for a soda. As I reach into my pocket to grab some change, the fingernail on my left index finger caught on one of the brass studs on my jeans. Tore it mostly off.
It actually didn’t hurt that much until today, when I caught the remaining fragment of nail on my socks as I went to put them on and it pulled off most of what was left.
Yuck.
I was working in an office, and walked face first into an open cabinet door. Of a cabinet I had just opened (I had thought I’d closed it). It was a forceful walking-in to, and I’m amazed I didn’t give myself black eyes from the impact on my nose.
I also cut myself- twice- on the blade of my new food processor.
My idiot injuries are numerous since I’m a born klutz. However, the biggest one would have to be when I was 19 and thought I smelled the brownies I was baking in the kitchen burning. I ran from the living room, tripped over my own stupid feet and fell, face first, against the door frame to the kitchen and sort of slid down it. This resulted in my entire forehead being torn open right down the middle. When I went to the bathroom for a towel to stanch the copious blood flow I caught a glance in the mirror and saw my own skull. Blech. Took 60 stitches to put my face back together but the surgeon did a great job-usually no one notices the scar until I point it out.
Fuckin’a dude. Fuckin’a.
hehehe
My favorite “stupid injury” story is when I was hangin’ out naked in my then-boyfriend’s hot tub. I got out to go to the bathroom (and then to saunter sexilly to the bedroom) only I missed the step on my way out. I fell down on my hands and knees, gashing both of my knees and ripping a humongous chunk of skin off the top of my left foot. I was bleeding profusely…and naked.
I had to keep my foot bandaged for about 3 weeks and couldn’t wear shoes for over a week. I had to miss a week of my bowling league because of the injury. I limped for a long time.
It was hard to explain the nature of my injury, for sure. Plus, I have a very large and very permanent scar from it. And I really hate that ex, too!
My dad had problems like that. He could go out and fell trees and buck the logs into manageable pieces and split the pieces into firewood and load it all into the bed of his truck and then unload and stack it at home, or spend all day hiking up and down hills through the forest hunting for elk, all without a single problem.
But bend down to pick up the pen he dropped while sitting at his desk at work and his back is out for two months.
I am ‘absent minded’ in a ‘single minded’ way.
In Jr. High school I took shop 1,
while learning how to ark weld I wouls consitently everytime , weld a bead (arrow straight BTW) left up my helmet take off the gloves and pick up the metal I had just welded the bead on. Each time I yelped and threw the damn thing down I would think " duh,stupid it’s hot" .:smack:
My computer area is on a 3ft by 5ft table, I sit at one end of the table for the first month of haveing this table set up this way , everytime I would drop something
( yes I have butter fingers ) I would reach for the dropped item and slam into the edge of this table almost knocking myself out, and yes each time I did this I would think as I was counting them pretty stars ," duh stupid, move your chair back ":smack: :smack:!!!
I have one that’s still healing. I was opening a razor in the OR to shave a patient before surgery. I was in a hurry and didn’t pay attention to which side of the razor I was attempting to pry the cover off. My first thought was “I think that’s a chunk of my thumb”. My second thought was “That’s a lot of blood.” My third thought was “The surgeon is waiting for a razor.” Fortunately, gauze and tape are handy in an OR, and I had my thumb bandaged and the surgeon had his razor in about a minute. It was really embarrasing the rest of the day, though, when everyone asked me what happened to my thumb.
At 16, I was opening a can of dog food on the can opener. It jammed, and I went to pound on it to get it started again. The lid popped up and I cut the base of my thumb, half severing the tendon. You could see all the way to the bone.
I was terrified of getting stitches… and even more terrified of telling my mother, who was not the most… sympathetic woman in the world and would have likely whacked me for ruining her day, so I bandaged it up myself and just let it heal on its own. I still have an impressive scar, and limited use of that thumb.
Then…I was 18. I was riding my horse in the indoor arena at the barn I boarded him at; he was just barely more than green broke and still a little unpredictable. They started the evening feeding of the other horses, and he heard. We were cantering, and he suddenly veered off, cantering right thru the door, into the stall area.
WHAM!!!
Right thru a low doorway. Only… I had a good enough grip on him with my legs, it didn’t take me off the saddle, just knocked me flat on his back. Broke my nose and skinned a strip off from nose to forehead.
I was seeing stars and dizzy, and when I unsaddled him, I took my western saddle, about 35-40 lbs., into the tack room, carrying it with my thumb thru the hole under the horn. I went to swing it up on a rack about shoulder height… and didn’t get enough ‘oomph’ behind it. The saddle fell backward, tearing out all the ligaments in my thumb.
I came home, and my father insisted on taking me to the emergency room, fearing a concussion. I was more concerned about my thumb, now looking like a Polish sausage. After a thorough exam, I was found to have a mild concussion and broken nose. The thumb had torn the ligament.
The doctor showed us the X rays, and said, ‘it looks like that ligament has been cut before, in the past, and never healed properly.’
Dad: ‘No, nothing like that ever happened.’
Me: ‘Ummmm… well, there was this can of dog food…’
Several weeks in a brace and the thumb healed properly this time. :rolleyes:
I was working out once, lifting weights, with a friend/coworker, when I mentioned that I needed to bump up my cardio rotuine. He asked if I’d ever played raquetball, I said no, and he invited me to give it a try.
The gym had raquets and balls you could sign out and use, so we did, and hit the court.
I wasn’t any good of course, but it was pretty fun, and I was starting to get into it, but I hadn’t considered my footwear: running shoes. NOT a good choice for raquetball.
The resulting, inevitable foot/ankle sprain had me on a cane for weeks, limping painfully for a month or more after.
Just a few years back, I seriously sprained my left shoulder. Don’t ask me how; I don’t know. I wish I did, if only to avoid doing that again. Ever. Best as I can figure it, I must’ve rolled over or something while sleeping, pinning my arm underneath me.
Thing is, with a sprain (at least the only other one I’d ever had, from The Raquetball Incident mentioned above), you typically know immediately that something is very wrong. The screaming, wailing, and gnashing of teeth usually lets everyone else know that something is very wrong, too.
But not so much, in this case. It ached a bit one morning, and grew progressively worse over the next several days, to the point it was pure hell just trying to lift my arm up high enough to pull a can of soup off of the cupboard shelf.
The real bitch of it was that I had just rehabbed my other shoulder to the point of usefullness after a motorcycle accident the previous summer. So for the better part of a year-and-a-half period, I was effectively reduced to one arm, or at best an arm-and-a-half.
Generally, I don’t think of myself as a clumsy person, but I do have a bit of a problem with the treadmill. I run about 10km a day so its not like a treadmill is unfamiliar to me, but yet we still don’t seem to get on…
Quite frequently I will be running, staring straight ahead, and then suddenly, whack! bang! wholllop! Im on the floor having fallen straight forward, hitting my head on the bar, and then shooting backwards off the back of the treadmill.
No real injuries other than the bang to the head, but complete and utter embarrasment fills me from head to toe.
A post here has reminded me of another idiot injury from this past summer. I was shaving and somehow managed to get my hand in the way, specifically my pinkie fingernail. I sliced through the nail and into my finger, which of course hurt like a motherbitch and bled everywhere. I bandaged it up, but I work in a kitchen so I didn’t like to wear a bandaid. It had stopped bleeding and felt okay, so I put on a couple of coats of clear nailpolish to keep the little edge of sliced-through nail from catching on anything. Fast forward to a couple of days later, I had just gotten off work and I was lounging on the couch. I took my hair out of its ponytail and I was sitting there watching TV and idly finger-combing it. I became considerable less idle when a strand of hair got caught on the little edge and ripped it away from my poor finger, causing even worse pain and bleeding than when I had first sliced it. I was practically crying, and I very rarely cry from pain. Needless to say, I was extremely careful with that finger for the rest of the summer.
It seems that very few people are weighting in with true idiot injuries. While many of these are quiet unfortunate and some are horrific, most were not caused by idiocy. Let me illustrate.
When I was 23 I was ironing a shirt on Christmas Eve to go to the midnight vigil. The iron did not seem to be hot. It wasn’t smoothing out the wrinkles. So I held my hand an inch or so away but couldn’t feel any heat coming off. I thought, perhaps I should hold next to more sensitive skin, so I held it up to my face.
I felt nothing and moved the iron closer and still felt nothing until I had actually applied the iron to my face. It was quiet hot. I burned an imprint of the iron complete with steam holes on to the right side of my face.
Luckily I’m a fast healer and don’t scar easily. The burns faded in about a week.
If ever someone “won” a thread, 'tis you.
I think the best idiot injury I’ve had is walking down the hall at my office and making a turn before the hallway. Face RIGHT into the wall, smashed my toes [not broken just stoved like hell] and made a couple of my friends about die laughing.
I’ve also managed to break my “2nd” toes on each foot, but have no clue how one of them happened. I know the one on my left foot is due to having it stepped on by one of my horses but the 2nd one? No clue.
Broke my arm at age 17 swinging on a flagpole. Before I started my brother said “Whatever you do, don’t let go”. Oops.
Also gave myself a nice little permanent lump on my thumb from a misdirected kitchen knife. Making yourself a sandwich when you come home drunk is a really bad idea, folks.
I learned the hard way not to buy cutlery from your ex.
My ex-boyfriend from high school (we parted on good terms and he was in my wedding five years ago) got a summer job selling Cutco knives. I wanted to be nice and help him, but I lived in a dorm and ate at the dining hall. But they were nice sharp knives, and I figured having a butter knife with a sharp edge might come in handy.
Fast-forward about a year. I’m going to summer school, and living in an on-campus apartment with a kitchen. I use my great butter knife to slice open a plastic package. It slips and cuts my middle finger on my left hand, and lots of blood ensues. I’m running around like a madwoman looking for the Band-Aids (in addition to being clumsy, I’m also disorganized), and wondering if it is possible to bleed to death from a cut on your finger like that- there was lots of blood. Then I started hoping that my atheist friends were right about there being no afterlife- I wouldn’t like having to go around for all eternity being introduced as “she who killed herself with a butter knife”. Fortunately, I did find the Band-Aids, and the cut did heal, though it left a scar that is still there more than 10 years later.
I’ve broken toes way too many times to count. I think I broke my little toe today slipping on the stairs. I just take some Aleve and tape it to the next toe- that’s all the doctor would do, so I save some time and do it myself.
I’ve sprained my ankle lots of times, too, and often have scraped knees.
I guess my clumsiness first showed up around age 2, when I learned about unstable equilibria- or why you should not stand on a rocking chair to get a toy down from the shelf. I still have a scar on my chin from that. I don’t really think that counts as a stupid injury, though, since I really was too young to know better.
While I feel kinda bad about laughing into said face, honestly… you left me no choice.
