When I was maybe 12 or 13, I wondered how hot a car’s cigarette lighter got. Answer: damned hot.
I scratched my cornea pretty bad about a month ago while opening a beer bottle with a LeatherMan. You know how plastic bottles have the warning that says not to point it at your eye when opening? Now I know why. That hurt really bad, and it looked like a firework went off -in- my eyeball.
Toasting marshmellow that caught fire and tried to SHAKE the fire out.
Yeah, good plan. Fell on my bare thigh and managed to give me second and third degree burns. Was particularly pleasant getting the sticky marshmellow scrubbed out of the wounds.
Oh God. The other injuries make me queasy but this one truly scares me because it’s so very likely to happen to me. :eek:
And in only a second or two!!
Oh, yeah–been there, done that.
Parents: “Don’t use our bed as a trampoline.”
Us: jump up and down on their bed.
Me now: noticeable scar, just beside my eye, from falling onto a wooden bedpost.
The little tab came off the cat food can. But it did open a little bit. So I started to pry it open. As i did it ,I thought if this springs back i could get cut.
It did. Result 6 stitches at the emergency room.
Freshman year, college:
Roommate and I are descending stairs for light-night pizza. A highly efficient person, I decide to start vaulting the edges of the typical switchback flights simultaneously amusing myself and saving precious, previous footsteps.
Except that I forgot about the ground floor cafeteria, which means the span between the first two levels is about twice that of the rest. This time, vaulting the railing between either switchback leaves me about to cheerfully drop about twenty some-odd feet onto concrete stairs. My pivot hand, still planted on the railing, abruptly locks tight around the painted, greasy steel.
Momentum carries me over the railway, my arm picks up the slack… and swings me into the side of the ascending stairs I’d just leaped off. Face first. Into the concrete corner. Still hanging from the railing. By dubious and questionable fate I caught the entirety of the impact with my front two teeth. They explode out of my mouth in a hail of hydroxyapatite shrapnel. Several fragments lodge themselves firmly in my lips and need to be removed a few days later when they start to migrate back out and give me Angelina Joline lips.
Surprisingly there was no pain. Bubbling obscenities through frothy blood I managed to get a toehold on the railing below and make it unharmed the rest of the way down. With a lipring, glasses, and awestrikingly handsome face I suppose losing two teeth isn’t so bad. A root canal, two oral surgeries and some really fuckin’ expensive porcelain crowns later, I could finally smile again.
I’m fairly graceful and coordinated for the most part. Still, I have a couple. My first paying job was as a small engine mechanic in a shop where my dad worked. I had to do an oil change on a riding lawn mower. I fired it up and let it run for several minutes so the oil would be warm.
These things have a square bolt head as the oil plug/dipstick. I drained the oil and then went to open the plug to put new in. Tight as a drum. Tapping the end of the wrench with a mallet didn’t get it to budge. I leaned over the thing and pulled as hard and steady as I could on the wrench. Of course, the plug broke free and my left forearm smacked firmly into the side of the still searing hot muffler. 20 years later I still have a light scar from that one.
Another, truly clutzy moment. My beloved dog was lying in the hall facing the bedroom door. I was at the head of the perpendicular hallway and felt compelled by love to run up to her and give her belly rubs. I ran down the hall and just as I was bringing the last step forward with my right foot, I caught the little toe on the door jamb for the bedroom. I pulled that bad boy about 45 degrees sideways.
Instead of getting, “Who’s a good girl,” whispered with my face inches from hers as I knelt down to give her love, the poor dog got, “AAAAARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGH!!!” bellowed into her face when I hit the ground in a collapsed pile of pure pain 2 inches from her nose.
I once went on a rodeo kick, resulting in my climbing on top of a very large, very ornery, animal, tying an absurdly tight rope around it and my hand, and then attempting to hold on. It also resulted in a screwed up wrist for several months.
The things us guys will do because a woman likes us… :smack:
While I was in the navy, I kept pestering a guy who relieved me on watch because it was his first watch, and I kept pointing out stupidly obvious stuff for him to watch for. This annoyed him, so he went and got a bucket of water and chased me out of the engine room.
I had, of course, forgotten we had had a general quarters drill earlier, and that the hatches were still bolted down. I ran up the stairs to escape the crazy man intent on soaking me, turned once, went up another flight, saw white, then black, and woke up on the ground 10ft below to bellows of laughter.
I got up, crawled through the small scuttle in the middle of the hatch, and walked down the passageway towards my berthing. Felt a trickle of sweat on my neck, wiped it away, and of course my hand came back red.
I went to medical, and they had a new guy there that needed a checkout on the stapler, so i volunteered, never having had staples. Word to the wise… never get staples on your head. They stick out way too far and are highly annoying. (I also got in trouble because medical said they had to stay in a week, which was unnacceptable since they were so annoying, and removed them myself with a pair of snips.)
Yeah, sharp, isn’t it? Particularly when it’s been groomed into corduroy by a piste basher and frozen overnight, then cunningly hidden by the thinnest coating of fresh powder. I can attest that taking a running face-first slide down a slope of that stuff, thinking it’s powder snow, is damn painful. :mad:
So let me preface this by saying that my vision is going to shite. I have MS, and two years ago I devolped a lesion on my optic nerve. ‘Optic neuopathy’ or something or other. My depth perception is total crap, even with corrective lenses. I’m not allowed to drive anymore.
Three weeks ago, we spent 12 hours moving my MIL to her new home. I was very tired when we finally got home, but the horses needed to be fed. I went down to the barn to hay the horses. The hay is stored on wooden pallets. Wooden pallets are varied in the spacing of boards, and some of them are broken. Imagine walking through a mine-field whilst your arms are full with 40 pounds of hay.
My right foot managed to find a crevasse in the boards, and I went down hard. Twisted the right ankle something awful, and managed to hit my head on Something Hard on the way down. For the better part of a week, I had a lump the size of a golf ball on my temple, and a wicked limp from the twisted ankle. The lump on my temple turned into a nasty looking black eye. It’s just now clearing up.
I feel so stupid! I feed the horses twice a day, managing the obstacle course of pallets, and that one time I lost my balance and wrecked. Sheesh.
I’ve posted this one before, but when I was 24 or 25 I broke my wrist riding a shopping cart down a hill. It’s exactly why I’m not terribly hard on the folks from jackass.
This wasn’t really a long term injury but when I was in my twenties I did try and pry a plug from the socket using a metal fork. I was, as you might expect, electrocuted. I tend to have brain cramps like this every once in a while.
One of these days I’ll be caught on video and become famous or, you know, die and make my way into the Darwin Awards.