July 4th, summer of '88, before my freshman year in high school. My brother and I were playing in a wading pool (it was for the dogs) and we’d put all my brother’s micro machines (he’s four and a half years younger) in with us. The area around the pool was dirt, so getting out meant dirty feet, so I decided to go for the landscape timber. As I jumped for it, I stepped on some micro machines, and landed on a nail that was sticking up out of the timber. I didn’t realize what I’d done, so as a joke I kind of screamed, “Oh my foot!” then I looked at the bottom of my foot and there was a 2 inch gash next to the ball of my foot. Then I screamed for real! I hobbled over to the deck and looked at my foot, and I could see the big white fat/padding things, and I was pretty disgusted about that.
Yeah, and I got to hear my dad gripe and complain about it the whole hour drive to town to get it sewed up. Fond memories.
Yeah, the worst I’ve had, unless you count that time my brother hit me in the mouth with a baseball bat.
Don’t know if this qualifies for worst/most disgusting injury, but here goes…
15 years old, seriously into softball (I played on 4 different teams one year) as catcher. During one game I failed to realize that the first baseman was some kind of little league super-hero in his time. He whipped a fast one home so I could tag the runner out. Instead he tagged me out-hit me in the nose so hard I passed out on home plate gushing blood, while three people ran in. What
burns my assto this day is that the ball dropped into my mitt after it beaned me. Those nimrods should have been out!
When I finally came to my folks had to pull me off the field, guess I was a little vocal about the three runs. Spent about two weeks with a nose like a rocket launcher and two very obvious shiners. I’m reminded of the humiliaton every time I look in the mirror and see my crooked shnozz.
Yeah… I remember wondering why none of you showed up at school that day…
However, since we’re on the subject of getting T-boned, I think I also qualify as somewhat of an expert as well, Ralf - there’s nothing quite like having your door caved in by a drunk driver doing about 60mph - snapped the door right off its hinges and in it came - thank God for steering columns for wedging things against. Still broke my hip and both of my legs (left leg must have looked pretty nasty with the fibula poking out of it). Shock plays such wonderful little tricks. I don’t recall much about the aftermath other than reaching for the door handle which was on a section of the door now twisted 90 degrees from its original position, pulling on it with no net effect, then turning to the guy who was in the passenger seat to say, “HEY, the F***ING door won’t OPEN!” Only after I had thought about it a bit did it occur to me that the handle was parallel to the ground and, based on that little clue, I decided there was probably something wrong with the door in general. Would have been handy if it did since I was pinned in place until the rescue crew pried me out - the rescue made a great photo for the local paper.
I racked up quite a bit of hospital time in younger years. Probably the worst was an accident that happened on a bike - I rode up a driveway where the pavement behind it had sunken, at an angle, just for a little airborne whoopee. Right next to the edge of the sunken pavement was a bike-tire size crevasse; well, maybe just a hair smaller than bike-tire size.
The front wheel came down right in the crevasse and stopped dead. The rest of the bike and I proceeded on, briefly. Until I came down on the right handlebar HARD!
The main event was my liver rupturing on the handlebar. Secondary events were a bent spine and a collapsed lung. They removed 2/3 of my liver and, eventually, due to adhesions, my appendix as well. When they typed my blood over a month after the accident it erroneously came up ‘O’ as I was still functioning on transfused blood.
A month was spent in ICU with nothing to do but play my own version of Scrabble limiting myself to the set of letters printed on the oxygen tent. All in all just under five months hospital time with various diversions such as pancreatitis and pleurisy.
Ah…, the good old days.
well, the story is, i was driving my fiance’s car. he is a cop. he had a spare pair of handcuffs under the front seat. i was stuck in traffic. (you can see this coming, can’t you?)
anyway, i was fiddling around with them and handcuffed myself to the steering wheel. them i realized if he had a key, i didn’t know where it was at and couldn’t find it.
you cannot pull your hand out of a handcuff if it is put on properly. cracked one of the bones in my wrist trying to get it out and the damn wrist proceded to swell up to the size of an orange (large), cutting off the circulation to my fingers.
well 1/2 hour and about 2 gallons of blood later, i decided to find a cop to unlock me. there’s never a cop around when you need one. of course the only thing i could reach to stop the bleeding is a kotex.
have you ever driven up to a police station and tried to get their attention? without getting out of the car?
i honked for 10 minutes before any one came out.
and of course they know me and have to go back in and get a camera to get a picture of this. by this time i am almost crying from the pain in my wrist. cops are really sick puppies.
finally, they got me loose. ended up with a bad infection in the wound, and a large picture of myself on the pd bulletian board. plus a lovely set of plastic handcuffs for a wedding gift.
My worst injury happened the first and only time I went skateboarding. It was grade 8 and I was using my best friends board and I went down his driveway and on down the sidewalk. I hit a crack that had weeds growing in it and I stopped dead…or should I say the board stopped dead…I continued down. I landed and I didn’t feel any pain…but I looked down and noticed my foot was pointed backwards. I had managed to break one of the bones of the ankle and both leg bones above the ankle, and dislocating the ankle. I called my mom to take me to the hospital. She drove me home saying all I had was a sprain…I said “Mom my foot is pointed backwards…take me to the hospital” They put me under , cause I didn’t want to see what they were doing. Of course when I came too the doctor gave me a complete description, I almost passed out again. I still walk with a limp today and I have sprained that ankle more times then I can count.
Keith
My worst injury happened about two years ago. I was on a school band trip in Florida during the spring. As it was Florida, it had rained just a few minutes before and the inside of the charter bus we’d taken was wet and slick.
We were at a mall in Orlando so we could eat lunch at the food court and shop. We didn’t have much time, just about 45 minutes. Since I’d been delayed (my band had just finished up a concert, so some of the girls stayed behind on the bus to change into casual clothes), I was sprinting off the bus.
I, being remarkably graceful, made it down two of three steps, but slipped and missed the third. I tumbled off the bus and onto the curb outside. My ankle hurt a bit, but I insisted that I was perfectly fine and the pain would go away if I just walked around a bit.
Three days later, I was sitting in a doctor’s office at home getting X-rays done. My ankle had swelled up tremendously and I had ended up in a wheelchair for the rest of the trip. Turned out that I had sprained my ankle. I had a long purple bruise down the side of my leg. I was on crutches for about a week, hobbling for two more. I still can’t run very well over uneven ground.
jessica
All told, fate’s been pretty good to my body so far.
Most disgusting happened when I was probably seven or eight or so. Climbing up the steps of a slide after a recent rain–charging up would be a better description. Feet skidded out on the metal steps and I fell probably two-three rungs before my skidding grip on the hand rails brought me to a halt, my head snapped forward and caught the edge of a step right above my left eyebrow. I climbed the remainder, slid down (faster that way) and went and found my older sister. Head wounds bleed very nicely, I probably looked like Carrie.
Most disgusting that I was greatly amused by was in a summer job in a warehouse-type mail-order business. Cardboard cut very deep into my thumb. Blood was flowing and dripping nicely from it. The amusing part was, this employer had many high school-aged girls working there, who parted like the Red Sea as I casually strolled to a bathroom, blood dripping thickly down my hand.
I feel faint reading this thread.
And I thought all those years of watching “Trauma: Life in the ER” had toughened me up…
God I have the heebie jeebies.
I had a Joe-Theismanesque injury to my arm.
I was playing tackle football with a few friends during college and we were all pretty inebriated (it was after the homecoming game). I was a receiver and a guy threw a really long pass. I dove for it drunkenly, and somehow my entire body weight, probably 180 pounds at the time, went onto my right arm as i came down. I was pretty drunk so I only realized part of my radius AND part of my ulna were both poking out of my skin when I saw my friends looking at me in horror. I then took a gander at what I thought was merely a sore arm. After that I sobered up pretty quicly, but the Budweiser helped take some of the edge off. Luckily someone called 911 almost immediately and I didn’t have any really horrible permanent damage. However, the Army said it was so bad I couldn’t be drafted, because a hand bone was pulverized as well and that damaged the nerve controlling my right pinky. Had to undergo 3 surgeries though (one to put the arm back in, one attempting to fix my hand, one because it wasn’t healing correctly so they re-broke it), and I had a cast on for more than 6 months. Plus, when girls asked how I hurt my arm, I could say “playing football.” Also, I became ambidexterous. But the important thing was that, miraculously, I made the catch. Apparently it was a nice one hander with my left hand.
Remind me never to read one of these sorts of threads again… I’m feeling vaguely sick now and I only got halfway down.
I have a very good imagination. That doesn’t restrict itself to imagery.
Okay, I can’t touch some of the stuff in this thread (I mean the whole broken glass in the knee thing, here), but I’ve had a couple of injuries in the “permanent scars” category:
The first happened when I was twelve. A bunch my whole neighborhood (with a fair amount of children in it) simultaneously got into a rollerskating phase - this was just about exactly when the first inline skates started showing up, and everyone thought they were the neatest thing ever. It was also just a little bit before the current (and correct) attitudes toward protective pads really got into gear - we didn’t need no stinking pads, and to be honest, neither any of the kids, or any of the kids’ parents, ever really thought about it. This changed pretty much because of me .
The scenario: It’s about 8:30 PM on a summer evening, just after sundown. It had been raining off and on all day, but had finally stopped around 6:30, so of course a bunch of people had gone skating, including myself. Because it was getting dark, though, I decided to head home, without taking my skates off. As it happens, my street ended in a fairly steep hill, which started just before my house, and dead-ended at a crash barrier whose main purpose was to keep cars away from the chain-link fence that protected an open storm sewer that passed by. I had ample time to think about this, because I missed my house.
I had front brakes on my skates, applied them as normal, and discovered that they don’t necessarily work very well on a steep, but well paved incline that’s still pretty wet from the rain. On top of that, trying to bear down on the front-mounted brakes started to pitch me forward, off balance, so I stopped doing it. Now I was past my house, gaining speed as I went downhill, and I had lost control when I started pitching forward.
Now, I thought almost immediately about the crash barrier. I realized that if I hit it at high speed, I’d be lucky to survive - even if I survived the impact, nobody lived that far down the street, so nobody would know I was injured. I had to stop, at any cost, before I sped up too much. I tried to move to my left, where there was a grassy aread, but I passed it before I got there. Finally, it utter desperation, I stopped myself by colliding head-on with a parked van. I actually did this pretty well, considering the circumstances - I lead with my hands, and pushe off at the moment of impact.
I had neglected to think of the bumper, which broke my leading right leg in two places. I had also not though about the possibility of a concussion, from the impact of the pavement on the rear of my skull, but that’s what i got. After I regained consciousness (without realizing that I had been out for 10-15 minutes), I tried to stand up, and my leg seemed to have an extra floppiness to it that hadn’t been there before. It took me another 20 minutes of screaming at the top of my lungs, while painstakingly crawling backward up the hill, an inch at a time, before anyone became aware of me - the bad luck was that it was a cat. The good luck is that my screaming sure pissed that cat off, and its owner came outside to take a look at what was making it yowl. Once he found me, I finally got to be taken to the hospital. I got to wear a cast for the nest four months, and I spent the whole time thinking how much worse it could have been - I still have a lump of scar tissue on the back of my skull to remind me of this.
My other big injury was serious, but not life threatening. I was 17, and hanging out with a friend of mine who had just gotten a Jeep, and proceeded to check out everything that he could do with it. Without commenting on how stupid I am, I’ll cut to the chase: we had been sitting on the hood of his car in the parking lot of a mall, and he convinced me to stay on the hood while he moved the car. Yes, this was quite stupid of me.
Without getting too detailed: he got up to about 20 MPH (which turns out to be terrifyingly fast, if it’s not something you have control over), then decided to slow down by braking suddenly. Needless to say, I popped off the front of the jeep. I got my limbs under me, and actually managed to land on my feet - at which point my momentum immediately knocked me over, and I immediately fell forward and slid. For my trouble, I gashed the hell out of the front of my head, I got a bunch of big scrapes on various parts of my body (not to mention completely ruining what I though was a pretty thick pair of jeans), and, worst of all, I scraped my hands.
I scraped almost all of the skin from my hands, because I had slid five feet on asphalt with that as my sole lubrication.
For my trouble, ended up having betadine poured over my skinless hands (that’s painful, kids), and having to wear, and change sterile gauze over my entire upper arms for a month. Anyone that didn’t call me the Mummy called me the Invisible Man. On the other hand, I got a bunch of neat scars from it, much more than I had when I broke my leg. In particular, I’ve got a lump on the front of my skull to match the one in back. Accessorizing is important.
ok first one is a result of not listening to my mom
we had a old tv antenna that was just rusting in the back yard my cousin and i broke off pieces of it and decided to play swords which wasnt bad but we were runing around and my mom says " dont ru naround wiht that its metal and youll stab your self … well later on iwas running and there was a plate of glass on the little stair top to the side door … i slipped and out the metal piece through the glass and then fell on top of it sliced a 6 in cut down my chest it bled but didnt need stitches i still have a little scar on my chest from it
second injury that cut my thumb off was the result of dumbness on my familys part
my mom had a knife that was shapened occasionaly … well shed been complaning ir was dull so my step dad sharpens it then my grandpa sharpens it more … im drying dishes i give it a quick swipe it cuts through the towel and 3 inches in my thumb it bled for 3 hours in the er and was 12 stitches
the last one was just dumb luck really
ok moms out doing something my and my serverly handicapped brother is swimming im wearing these trunks that are like a size too big for me its lunch time im making ramen noodles im boil the noodles and water … the pan has a loose handle and wiht my weak hands its heavy my borther does soemthing to distract me what i never can remeber my hand jerks turns the loose handle …
i dump a pan full of boiling water and noodles right down my shorts … first and second degree burn to my parts ensue the dorcto after going through the usual burn tratment tells me im 12 at the time oh yes you have no side effects sexual or other wise my mom about died
Nothing truly gruesome in comparison with what’s been written, but there they are:[list]
[li]Was about 12 years old and wanted to start shaving my legs. Mom said “No, you’ll regret starting so young. Wait until you’re older.” She was at work one day in the summer so I thought I’d give it a try. Worked pretty well until I tried to get the hair clumped in the razor out by dragging my thumb over it…longways. Eeeeeww! Two nice long, bleeding cuts on my thumb. Idjit. :rolleyes:[/li][li]Gymnastics, junior year. Warming up for our 2nd meet of the season, coming off the vault doing a 1/2 twisting layout. Was very low coming off, so when I landed, I was still twisting. Morons who set up the mats had set them up so the fold was up. My left foot got caught in the mat and I twisted half way around and sprained my ankle, but good![/li][*]Gymnastics, senior year. Practicing my beam routine (which I hated) on an old, slippery beam, wearing socks 'cause I hated the feel of sweat on my feet when I worked. Got to the end and was going to do my dismount (front flip off the end) and decided just before I started that I just wanted to jump off. Unfortunately, my body had already started its forward movement and I ended up landing head first on the mat, my fall cushioned by my arms. I had knocked my head really well and got up kind of dizzy only to find my left arm hanging in a weird direction. Tunnel vision, faintness, thirst, first signs of shock. I had dislocated my left elbow. Had to call the ambulance in to take me out and there was a home basketball game being played so it was pretty embarrassing. After all the x-rays and etc at the hospital (broke the head of my radius also), they “snapped” it back in. The doctor gave me a compliment when I didn’t yell out or anything. He said, “Geez, I’ve had football players with the same injury you’ve got that have made twice as much noise as you when we re-seated their joint. You must be pretty tough.” Or stupid. I haven’t figured out which. 
I did exactly the same thing when I was six years old, except the Z was in my arm. Imagine your forearm being bent at a ninety degree angle smack dab in the middle, halfway between your elbow and your wrist, and the wrist is bent back ther other way, immobile because it was broken too. That’s what my arm looked like. It was dreadful.
Mrs. RickJay once broke both hands falling out of a tree, and they were so badly mangled the bones in the back of her hands were sticking out the knuckles.
When I was 11 I had a 100cc dirt bike. I was riding it in the ditch along a county road and hit a culvert. Did an endo. The rear wheel passed the front wheel over the top. Sort of a summer salt on a motorcycle.
Whatever happened next is just dumb luck. The rear tire was still spinning, somehow it caught my head and drug it in under the steel fender. The fender went up under my helmet and scalped me. Flap of skin from my right eyebrow to the top of my head was taken off. Also ripped my right ear about half way off. Nearly broke my neck. Chipped some teeth.
Luckily, I was knocked unconscious, went into shock, and didn’t feel a thing. When I woke up, I thought I was going to die or already had. Lots and lots and lots of blood.
130 stitches later, I’m good as new. Still get some strange sensations on that side of my head because of nerve damage. Also, I can’t raise my right eyebrow so I don’t have any age lines on that side of my forehead.
Total ruined Thanksgiving day.
Wow, that’s harder to think about than I thought it would be. This happened 31 years ago.
Sophomore year in college. Plnnr is in the apt. alone, sitting at his desk, and has just finished a term paper. What better thing to do than have a beer and a toke, right? I proceed to fire up and soon attain the proper altitude. Then the telephone rings in the living room.
Around the corner from my desk was a wicker clothes hamper that had seen its better days, so much so that several of the strands are sticking out like little daggers.
Phone rings, I get up and tear around the corner (high as a kite and wearing shorts) right into the hamper. Ouch, that smarts. A pretty sharp sting right there at my shin. Think nothing of it - answer the phone. Blah, blah, blah.
Leg is really starting to hurt now, hmmm, I’m bleeding and there seems to be a little puncture wound. I reach down (rapidly becoming un-high) and notice that there’s a piece of what appears to be wicker sticking out of my shin! I pull and it comes out … and keeps coming out…and keeps coming out. A five inch piece of wicker, perfectly curved so as to fit around my calf by way of my shin, ended up coming out of my leg, followed by a good deal of blood. Now being completely unhigh I fainted in the floor and was brought to by my room mate getting home from night class. Tetanus shot and a bandage was all the treatment needed and a new hamper was purchased the next day.
I got smacked in the face with a hammer.
It was High School art class. Senior year. First bell. Right at the end of class. I was walking around the tables and BAM there is a blazing pain though my head.
The whole world did that cool slow motion thing. “Oh look, I’m not standing quite upright any more. Hmmm, Maybe if I lean over this way I’ll straighten out. Nope, that doesn’t seem to be working. How about if I… Gee, the floor seems awfully high today…”
I got knocked out. I know this because I woke up swearing like a sailor. A really pissed off sailor. The art teacher sat me up to take a look at me.
“Ooh, that’s not good.” What is this woman talking about? “Pat, could you get me a wet paper towel?”
I feel the throbbing start under my eye and touch it to try to figure out what’s going on. My hand comes away covered in blood. The teacher just asked for a wet paper towel, I’m covered in blood, it sounds like a good idea.
“Yeah, can I have one too?”
I actually said that. I wasn’t trying to be a smart-ass or nothin’. I just needed a wet paper towel to wipe some of this blood off, I had no idea what the teacher wanted one for.
We get me cleaned up. By “we” I mean the art teacher and three or four students. Including the cheerleader in the class. She was so pretty with the soft focus and the silhouette lens. Like Cybil Shephed on Moonlighting. I don’t think I mentioned it at the time. I hope not anyway. I don’t think I got in the way too much while they were trying to stop the blood from pouring out of my face.
The bleeding stopped and the Inquest began. What the Hell happened? One of the guys in class was playing around with a jewelers rawhide hammer. He didn’t see me and I didn’t see him. He was a basketcase. He thought he killed me.
I had to go to the school nurse. She called my Mom and gave me an ice cube in a plastic bag and a mint. A mint for a headwound.
Mom takes me to the hospital for X-rays. No broken bones. The hammer slammed into my cheek bone right under my eye. It only took five stitches. A Full House. Two were deep to hold my face together, and three were to hold the skin shut. They didn’t give me any medication. “Take some Tylenol” was what the doctor told me.
It was Election Day. My first time to vote. I remember voting for the school levy. I don’t remember what else was on the ticket.
The worst part was the next day. I go back to school. My eye is swollen like crazy. Not shut, but all squinty. It’s all black and blue, and it throbs if I turn my head too fast. The stitched are covered with antibiotic ointment that melts and runs down my face all day. I looked like Hell.
The worst part was for every class the teacher would have a form for me get signed at the office to prove I didn’t cut class yesterday. Every stinking class! I have this chunk taken out of my face, stiches and crazy bruising, the whole stinking school knows I was attacked by a maniac with a fire ax in the halls (the story grew). Skip class? Me? I wish.
Starting fourth bell, I stopped getting the stupid forms signed. There were seven bells a day then. They could expell me for all I cared, I was not going back to the office.
True story. I swear.
-Rue.
My injury isn’t as devastating as some in this thread, but it’s kind of disgusting. I was playing TV tag with the neighbor, who was always in bare feet. I went down and yelled “Addams Family” thus making me immune from being tagged. He jumped over me to avoid a collision but ended up cutting me with his toenail. I had to get six stitches right above my knee.
Some of the worst injuries I’ve sustained:
- Separating my shoulder while spiking a volleyball
- Separating my OTHER shoulder mountain biking (tried to hop a log pile, came down crooked and landed on my shoulder)
- Spraining my ankles numerous times playing basketball
- Broken foot sustained during sparring in taekwondo practice
- Sprained knee with cartilage damage sustained during jujutsu practice (note to self: when shoulder-throwing someone, DON’T drop them onto your own knee)
But the worst had to be the way I broke my ribs as a kid. I’m eight years old and climbing the tree in my grandmother’s yard. I get as high as I can, and being a bit of a klutz, miss a grab and fall out of the tree.
Directly onto a bamboo stake that’s sticking up out of the ground.
The stake penetrated my ribcage and broke a couple of ribs on the way in (my ribcage is still kinda misshapen on that side). Thankfully, the stake broke at that point and I fell onto the ground with the stake sticking up out of my chest. (If the stake hadn’t broken, I probably would have completely impaled myself.) My mother, standing in the doorway to my grandmother’s house, let out a scream that I can still remember hearing. They drove me to the hospital with the stake still sticking out of my chest. No serious damage was done other than the broken ribs; I was EXTREMELY lucky. When I think about what happened, it still makes me queasy.