Stupid injuries

breakstuff

Not a injury as such, more of a luckily avoided stupid injury. I was digging over some soil with a fork to break it up when I encountered a really compacted lump. I lifted the fork and forced it down with all my strength and to my horror I completely missed the part I was aiming for, and instead hit my foot, forcing one of the fork prongs all the way through one of the trainers I was wearing. I was all ready to scream out in pain, when I realised I couldn't actually feel anything. It turned out the fork had passed through my shoe and in between my big toe and the next toe, completely missing the flesh. Percy Thrower was definitely looking over me that day.

munckee

Fell through a garage roof as a kid while scrumping apples and couldn’t walk for days. 

Knocked out cold after head butting a lamppost when my pedal got caught in a girls spokes and we both fell off. 

My best mate dropped a 20 kilo weight on my big toe utterly smashing the bone. 

My brother threw a dart through my foot into the floor and nearly blinded me by removing the plunger from an arrow before firing into my face. He also stabbed me in the hand with a fork. 

stimpsonslostson

breakstuff said:

Not a injury as such, more of a luckily avoided stupid injury. I was digging over some soil with a fork to break it up when I encountered a really compacted lump. I lifted the fork and forced it down with all my strength and to my horror I completely missed the part I was aiming for, and instead hit my foot, forcing one of the fork prongs all the way through one of the trainers I was wearing. I was all ready to scream out in pain, when I realised I couldn't actually feel anything. It turned out the fork had passed through my shoe and in between my big toe and the next toe, completely missing the flesh. Percy Thrower was definitely looking over me that day.

If we're talking near misses... 
A couple of years ago I was attempting to set a Squat PB in the gym.
I got to the lowest point in my movement when I felt a "snap" in my stomach, but strangely no pain. 
I carefully pushed the weights up & completed the rep, still no pain, when I reached standing my shorts fell down. The snap was the drawstring breaking!
I've never been so relieved to show a room of strangers my pants! 

MtB

And we wonder why the NHS is in crisis?

Grunfeld

Johnnyseven said:

When I was quite young I decided it would be a good idea to cut an orange in half whilst holding it in my hand.

I used to work in a hand unit and whereas the blokes were typically injuries of the type: "stuck my hand in the hand-mashing-machine," the women were over represented with your type of injury only it wasn't oranges.

Their story was invariably trying to pry apart frozen beefburgers with a knife.

Right through the flexor tendons.

A non-trivial injury.

Emp_Fab

As a kid I remember playing 'ghosts' by running up the street after the other kids with a bedsheet over my head going "WoOOOoO!!".  Ran full tilt into a cast iron lamppost.

I still remember the blue flash I saw.

Another time, I decided to cut the grass with a small hand-pick.  Straight into the side of my foot.  I still have the scar now.

Apparently when I was a toddler I had a penchant for sticking metal knitting needles into the back of the TV set.  The mind boggles.

More recently, I was slicing cucumber after a few glasses of red and my sister-in-law complemented me on my knife skills.  My ego decided to show off so I sped up - and sliced the skin off the top of my left index finger between the end and middle knuckles.  There was a lot of yelping and blood.

octatonic

I tried back cutting with spiral cutters on a router table and when the router inevitably flung the neck blank I was making across the room it flipped about and scratched my face just below my eye.

I was wearing eye protection so nothing serious was at risk but it was a dumb mistake.
It was one of three close calls that made me decide that I am better at playing guitars than I am at building them.
Eventually something really bad was going to happen.

Hurling_Fruitmig

I’ve got a tiny scar on my forehead from when I decided to find out what would happen if I connected a half dismantled transistor radio to a model railway transformer and turn it up to 11. The answer was a disappointing pop a split second before narrowly avoiding taking my eye out with radio shrapnel.

viz

Fell out of a sherry shop into a stack of bicycles and broke 4 ribs. 

bluechargeboy

- I had a broken laundry basket and I decided to cut it up with tin snips to put it in my wheelie bin instead of taking it to the skip like a normal person. Ow, plastic shards are sharp! Still have the scar on my arm.

- Nearly put my eye out trying to remove a car stereo using a butter knife (I cracked my contact lens) (it was my own stereo).

- Scar under my chin from childhood, getting out of a swimming pool and pretending to slip back in, cracked my chin on the edge.

- Dislocated my ring finger on my left hand due to holding a heavy bag wrong for someone to work on their roundhouse kicks. Yes, he kicked my hand. Guitar playing went off the rails for a while, that was quite a scary one!

LuttiS

Near miss - While rather heavily imbibing.. fell out of a third floor window that i was perched on. Luckily, i fell into a bush that wasn't very far down as the house was on rather a steep hill.. so probably only fell a couple of meters, had the wind knocked out of me and a lesson learnt about where to sit when drinking

crunchman

Was fighting with my brother over a mixing bowl to lick out when mum was baking.  He let go of the bowl, and it came back and hit me in the chin.  Still have the scar now.

ToneControl

Moominpapa said:

Not in the same league as others in this thread, but I once snapped a tendon in my finger as I was trying to pull off a sock when going to bed. Injured myself pulling off a sock, FFS.

what's the "safe level of putting on socks"?

strtdv

When I started road cycling I did the inevitable "forget you're clipped in when coming to a stop" thing. Minor scrapes only thankfully.

I've seen a couple of excellent ones in A&E though, including a man who accidentally circumcised himself with a hoover.

crunchman

strtdv said:

When I started road cycling I did the inevitable "forget you're clipped in when coming to a stop" thing. Minor scrapes only thankfully.

Everyone who cycles has done that at some point.  Thankfully I didn't injure myself.

I've seen someone else do it.  No sympathy from his mate who was with him - just doubled up laughing himself silly.

Haych

About six years ago I was revonating an old touring caravan and was fitting a new window seal.  I was cutting a strip of seal capping (just a plastic strip the fits inside the seal and makes it look a bit prettier) with a stanley knife.

I was using my left hand as a lever and my left index finger was directly in the path of the stanley blade.

I saw the potential disaster about to unfold and thought to myself that if the blade slips it's going stright through my finger.  No sooner had the thought occurred to me than the blade did slip and sliced right through the tip of my finger, right down to the bone!

There was a lot of blood, a lot of swearing and a lot of nausea.  Because it was a clean cut with a new stanley blade it didn't require stitches and the doctor at the hospital simply super-glued the cut back together.  If I'd known it would be as simple as that I'd have done it myself!

It was a couple of months before I could play guitar properly again, though.

equalsql

My father was a skilled butcher and had an impressive set of knives when I was a youngster. My brother and I decided to have a sword fight with a couple of my dad's long ham knives, like you do when you're a stupid teenager.

I lost.. which meant an unpleasant afternoon in A&E getting fixed up with my extremely angry father in tow who made sure that I received the full penicillin backside jab with a needle big enough to sow elephant hide, ooopphhh.
That was an eyewatering experience! 

ICBM

Last year I came out of the shop where I had been dropping off the morning's repair work and saw a traffic warden writing a ticket for my car. I ran to the car so I could drive away before he put it on, but halfway I somehow tripped over my own feet, flew through the air like Superman and landed on my outstretched left hand.

It punched the two bones of the forearm back past the end of the humerus, breaking both of them, one rather badly. I ended up with six weeks off work, a metal end to the radius bone, a permanently slightly crooked elbow and weak left arm, and some pain when making certain movements - though luckily mostly not when playing guitar or bass now.

But I still got into the car and drove off . After the first attempt to use the gear stick I rapidly learned to change gear with my right hand while steering with my elbow...

With hindsight, getting a £30 parking ticket would have been more sensible.

not_the_dj

I cut into the side of my finger with a bread knife while making a bacon sarnie. Lots of blood and I still have a numb side to the side of that finger as it was a deep but narrow gash.

Dislocated my finger climbing out of a Vulcan bomber....(this was at an air museum), I was coming down the ladder carrying my young son under my right arm, he'd successfully climbed the ladder into the plane, but then didn't want to get out. There's a kink in the ladder where it goes from angled to vertical for the last couple of rungs, I missed my footing and for a split second we were hanging from my left hand before we dropped the foot or so to the ground, I think my wedding ring snagged on the rung.....bloody painful.

lasermonkey

Just thought of another one!

I think I was fourteen at the time, and a friend an I were skateboarding down the steepest hill in the area. You could get a decent turn of speed going down it. Anyway, the pathway we were skating down had a ditch running parallel to it, separated by a grass strip. Being autumn, the ditch was completely full of leaves. I had the brainy idea of skating down the hill, getting some speed up and the turning sharply onto the grass. This would surely stop the skateboard dead, catapulting us into the leaf-filled ditch, for a soft landing. What could possibly go wrong?

We both hurtled down the hill. At a suitable moment, we both turned onto the grass and, as predicted, sailed though the air and into the ditch. Brilliant! Let's have another go.

As we were nearing the top of the hill, ready for another descent, I noticed that my left leg felt cold. Weird. I lifted up my trouser leg to see what was going on. I could see two parallel cuts on my shin, both of which had a white thing in the middle. The white thing was my shin bone. I thought I'd better head back home, but checked again after a few minutes. Predictably, I was bleeding like a stuck pig.

The doctor just taped the cuts closed with micropore tape, and they healed quickly. I still have the scars.