šŸ„ Random Injury Stories



  • Continuing the discussion from The WTF Cooking Show Thread:

    @abarker said:

    Wouldn't have helped in my case. Of course, it wasn't a cooking accident, so would need to start a new thread.

    Growing up, my parents had an old drill press (don't remember the make, so can't link a representative picture). Anyway, due to the design, the shaft occasionally needed to be cleaned to remove saw dust, and then greased since said cleaning removed any previous lubricant. There was a key to be inserted to keep the shaft extended during said cleaning operations. One important thing to note is that the key was basically just a polygonal piece of metal that slipped into an opening in the shaft, with no notches to keep it from slipping.

    One day - I must have been 16 or 17 - I was cleaning the shaft. Everything was going fine until the poorly designed key slipped. The shaft shot up and caught my left index finger, tearing a chunk (about 1cm longx0.5cm wid) out of the pad. It was all the way down to the bone.

    While I don't have a picture of the original injury, here's one of the scar:

    So, what fun/interesting/random/gross injury stories do you have?


  • FoxDev

    I ran a lawn mowing job as a teenager to earn spending cash under the table. Did pretty well for myself, even bought my own walk behind mower.

    anyway one day i was adjusting the deck height for one customer that wanted a very tight cut (too tight if you ask me but that's what he paid me for). This was after mowing five other lawns in the row.

    Anyway I suddenly smelled bacon. very delicious bacon. quite strongly.

    burning bacon even.

    then i realized. that wasn't bacon i smelled. it was me! I was resting my shin against the very not muffler.

    To this day i have no sense of touch on that patch of skin. none whatsoever.

    I'll spare you a picture. I don't have one from then and the scar is personal....



  • @accalia said:

    Anyway I suddenly smelled bacon. very delicious bacon. quite strongly.

    burning bacon even.

    Do you have any porcine ancestors, by chance?


  • BINNED

    @abarker said:

    Do you have any porcine ancestors, by chance?

    Well.,. maybe not porcine, but porcupine might explain some things...

    I'm sorry, couldn't resist! I'll be going now...


  • FoxDev

    no, but burning flesh smells like bacon.... if you havent had the chance to be around it before. :-)


  • ā™æ (Parody)

    Long pig.



  • @accalia said:

    but burning flesh smells like bacon

    Which led to jokes in my fraternity house after an episode I was involved in (no pic as work and the scar has faded enough to only show if looking closely).


  • FoxDev

    I forget exactly how old I was, but I was in primary school, so probably about 9 or 10. During a PE lesson, I was monkeying around on an A-frame, when I thought 'hey, why not swing off the frame and see how far I go?'.
    Slammed my left arm hard on a balance beam, breaking the ulna about 2" from my wrist.
    Took ages to heal properly as well; I kept breaking the child-strength casts the hospital kept applying. After a few weeks of that, they finally put an adult cast on; that didn't break šŸ˜„

    Oh, and there was another time I was cycling on some sort of school activity week trip (I was probably 15), and one of the pedals fell off. Thankfully nothing broken. But some quite serious abrasions on my left arm that needed dressing šŸ˜†
    It's surprising how quickly accidents happenā€¦ I don't recall the actual fall, just that I was cycling normally, then was on the floor, in a fair bit of pain.



  • @RaceProUK said:

    During a PE lesson, I was monkeying around on an A-frame, when I thought 'hey, why not swing off the frame and see how far I go?'.

    Sounds like you've got the wrong kind of animal for your avatar.



  • When I was about 7 or 8 I tried to jump over a brick wall. It didn't go well. Also I was wearing shorts. Didn't actually hurt too much, but I had about half an inch of exposed shinbone, which freaked me out at the time. (I mean, you're not supposed to see your own bones, it's not right...) I think I still have a scar, but it's so faint I can barely see it now ā€”fortunately, it was a pretty narrow injury, so all the skin grew back.

    I have some photos somewhere at home which document my decision to always wear gloves when cycling. I'll see if I can find those, they're fun..



  • Oldest scar I have: I'm not sure how old I was, but it couldn't have been more than 6, and probably more like 3. (We moved out of that house when I was about 3, but still owned it and rented it out until I was 6.) I was sitting on the back of our old sofa and fell off, hitting my head on the latch1 of the old-fashioned, double-hung living room window. I still have the scar on my forehead, although as I have gotten old and wrinkled, it's a lot less noticeable that it was when I was young.

    1 Like this, but stamped from sheet brass, rather than cast, so the edges are thinner and less rounded.

    At somewhere around 10, the schoolmate who sat behind me was annoying me by touching my ear. I reached back to brush away his hand, and discovered that he was using his pencil to touch me when the point went deep into the palm of my hand. 40+ years later, there is still a visible residue of graphite, although it too has faded over the years until it doesn't look much different than the normal variation in skin color.

    As a teen, I dripped solder onto my leg. It melted through the polyester pants I was wearing. (Hey, it was the 70's; polyester double-knit was cool at the time.)

    I've managed to slice pretty deeply into both thumbs at various times. One of them took forever to regain normal feeling beyond the cut.


  • FoxDev

    well that's probably when she decided that monkey and monkey derivatives were not the way to go! šŸ˜ƒ


  • FoxDev

    @accalia said:

    monley

    ā€¦that word does not exist in my databaseā€¦ by which I mean my brainā€¦


  • FoxDev

    ..... wow... got it right the first time, two words later got it wrong.....

    -shrug-

    whatever. lysdexics have more fnu

    :-P



  • Hmm, I've been pretty lucky so far in life including a couple off-road motorcycle accidents I really had no business walking away from relatively unscathed. I do have a small spot on one of my palms where fingerprints no longer grow thanks to a welder burn, but there's not much of a story to that. I had a habit of never wearing gloves while welding (oxyacetylene) and also ran my rods down to about 1/2" in length before tossing them. Surprisingly it only hurt for about 3 - 4 seconds.

    So here's a story that's incredibly stupid instead. In high school I was a bit of a lunchroom clown. One day it was chili for lunch, and they always served cinnamon rolls with chili. I decided I was going to eat my roll whole. Without chewing. It was too big for that so I started by mashing it down by hand into as small of a ball as I could manage. You know how you can press bread down and it kind of becomes dough again? That's exactly what I did. It was still large, but I popped it in my mouth and swallowed.

    For the next thirty seconds everyone, including me, thought I was about to die. As it passed down my throat, it pressed my windpipe closed and I couldn't breathe. It then traveled painfully and slowly down my esophagus, and I was acutely aware of its precise location the entire time. After about half a minute, it reached the cardiac sphincter at the start of my stomach. I am one of those rare few who can say I've actually felt sensation in that sphincter before because my esophagus had to try rather hard to shove the cinnamon roll through it and into my stomach. I'm sure if one were to X-Ray this as it happened, it would have looked like something out of Looney Tunes.

    I obviously survived the ordeal but it was actually one of the most painful (but thankfully short) experiences of my life. My esophagus was in mild pain for the next day after that, and I vowed to never again eat large chunks of food whole and unchewed.


  • :belt_onion:

    I leaned against my soldering iron while I was trying to get my stuff positioned for soldering. I remember thinking, what's that sizzling sound.... OW SHIT that's ME. But the soldering iron was tiny, it just took an inch or so long parallelogram of skin off of my arm.

    My sister got hit in the arm by a weed-whacker that had the metal blade on when she was about 3. It took chunk out of her arm down to the bone. Looked like half of her arm had been ripped out. Miraculously it managed to hit in a way that it didn't destroy anything important, partly because she was so little it was mostly just baby fat I guess, and there was little permanent effect from the damage aside from the scar.


  • FoxDev

    @darkmatter said:

    I remember thinking, what's that sizzling sound.... OW SHIT that's ME

    similar to me then. i don't remember hearing anything special, but i do remember smelling bacon, but it wasn't bacon. it was me.


  • :belt_onion:

    I could smell the burning too, but I don't recall any food smell to it. Possible because of the hairs on my arm getting burned off, that smells pretty bad.



  • In the third grade my best friend stabbed me in the wrist with a mechanical pencil.

    IIRC, we had to write an essay on why we didn't win one of those old Scholastic Pizza Hut pizza parties. Needless to say I "called out" Quincy in the essay. When he said, "What did you write?" I said, "What does it matter?"(or something similar) and thus got stabbed.

    I have a permanent mark from where he "shanked" me.

    I was pissed at him for two days. Then the fuck-it took over.



  • @RaceProUK said:

    It's surprising how quickly accidents happen

    QFT

    i fell off a bicycle and couldn't put my hands. all i remember it's the asphalt coming really fast to my face, an then being laying on the street. no scars or other damage besides my face hurting a lot.

    i do have a scar in the same place harry potter has one from running to a school bus, falling and hittin the last step of it's ladder

    got up, and walked to where my mother was leaving a trail of blood behind me. I said something along the lines of "mom, i think i injured my head.
    the injure was a hole of about 1cm in my forehead.


    Filed Under: I'm Bobbin. Are you my mother?


  • @Jarry said:

    i fell off a bicycle and couldn't put my hands.

    My kids (maybe 5-ish at the time) and I were riding bikes in the parking lot/play area of the school across the street from our house. I was coasting at maybe 1 MPH, when my son suddenly zigged in front of me. I slammed on the brakes and stopped almost instantly, but I couldn't unclip in time and just flopped straight over sideways. No scrapes to speak of, but a badly sprained ankle.

    Thinking about that brought to mind what may be my worst-ever injury. I was in college, and a good friend was just graduating from college. (I had gone through the graduation ceremony, too, expecting to finish my senior project and graduate at the end of Summer. We won't talk about how long it actually took me to finish my project.) This is relevant because the on-campus health center was already closed for the summer, and as an broke student with no insurance, I couldn't afford to go elsewhere, so it never got real medical treatment.

    One of the pieces furniture that we were loading onto a U-Haul trailer was a 1970's (or maybe 60's) vintage all-in-one entertainment center (TV, radio, and turntable, all vacuum tubes mounted to steel chassis, in a solid wood cabinet the size of a sofa) that weighed at least 200 pounds. As we were loading it, the people at the other end needed help. There was already some stuff on the trailer, so there wasn't much room to move around, and in my hurry to get to the other end, I banged my knee against the corner. Hard. Chondromalacia patella. That knee bothered me for years. (Years later, I injured the other knee skiing.)

    The only (possibly) broken bone I've ever had was a toe. I was walking through the bedroom barefoot. I don't remember why I didn't see it ā€” maybe I was carrying laundry, or something ā€” but there was a shoe in the middle of the floor, and I kicked it hard enough to send it flying across the room. The radiologist couldn't see a break on the X-ray, and said it was just a bad sprain, but I don't know; that toe was purple for a couple of months. The kicker was that my then-wife and I were supposed to dance in the Christmas musical at church in about a week.



  • When I was about 7 or 8, I was playing cricket barefoot in the back yard (as you do). While running to get the ball, trod on a piece of glass without realising it at first. By the time my family members had convinced me to stop running and sit down, it had cut more than halfway through the bone. Lots of stitches, a nice stay in hospital and a cast and crutches for several weeks afterward. I had a scar running across one side of the top of my foot, around the side and underneath, and a very sensitive and slightly protruding area on the right side. The scar faded on the sole of my foot after a few years, but it didn't fade from the top until about 20 years. The protruding bit grew gradually less sensitive over time, so now I just have a slightly misshapen foot to show for it.

    On a later occasion I found myself falling out of a neighbour's tree, with only enough time to decide which way to fall - onto a small child, or in the vicinity of a spiky railing. Chose the better option and got a spike at the base of my finger. Only needed a few stitches for that though, and apart from not being able to bend that finger quite as easily as the others there's no sign of it now.

    The only other memorable one for me was when my brothers and I were trying to retrieve a stuck ball from a very tall tree by throwing other things at it - one of the thrown things knocked off one of the other ones, which was a chunk of mortar; it fell down and hit me right on the bridge of the nose, just missing my eyes.

    Now if we're talking about my brothers, I could add a few more stories :) Probably the most off-putting is the one where one of my brothers was running through the house; at the time we had lever type doorknobs which came to a point at the end of the handle (a fairly blunt point, of course). He had obviously been running with his mouth open, because he managed to get the handle to go through his cheek from the inside.

    At one point my mother was known by sight to some of the children's hospital emergency staff :)



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    40+ years later, there is still a visible residue of graphite

    @MathNerdCNU said:

    In the third grade my best friend stabbed me in the wrist with a mechanical pencil.

    It seems a lot of people have the "jabbed with pencil and it left a very long-lasting mark" story. I jabbed myself in the thumb in 2nd grade, and it's still very visible, if faded a bit.


  • BINNED

    @HardwareGeek said:

    I still have the scar on my forehead

    I have the similar. As a child (3? 4?) I was doing my civic duty of destroying my parents' bed by using it as a trampoline. Lost balance, hit the corner of a cupboard. Luckily, it was some ornate, rounded thing, so it wasn't that bad. No stitches. I still have a distinct V shaped scar just over the root of my nose.

    @HardwareGeek said:

    The only (possibly) broken bone I've ever had was a toe. I was walking through the bedroom barefoot.

    Funnily enough, that's the only broken bone I have too: the little toe on my left foot. I actually didn't even know, probably for years. While still in primary school I was training Tae-Kwon-Do. While executing a particularly vigorous roundhouse kick I underestimated the amount of energy I actually put into it, span faster then expected and landed on my left foot wrong, twisting the ankle. Other than some swelling no damage was done. However, on the X-Ray I had "just in case" you can clearly see a bit of my toe bone separated from the rest of it, just "floating" there. I'll see if I can find and scan it, because I found it rather amusing.

    Other than that, I guess I've been lucky and have pretty good reflexes. I was falling and tumbling just as any kid, but never broke a bone due to it. The only victims of falling off a motorcycle were my pants and pride. So yeah, I'm a lucky bastard I guess.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    I jabbed a few other people in the course of my life...



  • @Scarlet_Manuka said:

    At one point my mother was known by sight to some of the children's hospital emergency staff

    That's nothing. The hospital used to just treat my uncle and then call my grandmother to come pick him up, he was in so often.



  • @Onyx said:

    @HardwareGeek said:
    toe

    toe

    I didn't break my little toe, but one time I was running down a corridor to my bedroom in barefeet, and I caught my toe on the edge of the door frame. I remember this very vividly to this day, it split the skin from just under the nail down to the base of the toeā€”it looked like one of those little cherry tomatoes if you drop one and it splits.

    Not quite as bad as this, it's just the only thing anywhere close I can find on GIS:

    Wasn't actually as painful as you'd think, and healed pretty quickly too (oh, to be 15 again...)



  • @EvanED said:

    It seems a lot of people have the "jabbed with pencil and it left a very long-lasting mark" story. I jabbed myself in the thumb in 2nd grade, and it's still very visible, if faded a bit.

    I have that too, in my right palm. I don't recall the story other than some kid in junior high school thought it would be funny to stab my hand with a pencil.



  • One time, when I was at my parents' house, I was walking down the stairs. The stairs were carpeted, and I had socks on. Out of nowhere, I slip, land on my ass, and slide right into the wall, knee first. My knee punched a hole through 3/4" dry wall and bruised the tendons around my patella. I ended up on crutches for 6 weeks. But hey, I got a disabled permit for 3 months!



  • Another broken bone story and another cycling story here.

    I was 7 years old, our back yard contained a four-sided steel climbing frame with a ladder up each corner, and it occurred to me that it would be a wonderful idea to rest Dad's painter's plank diagonally across the inside of that, three rungs up from the ground, and then sit on it. So I did. But the plank wasn't very comfortable, so obviously I needed to rest our deck chair on top of the plank and get in it. And I did.

    But planks are much narrower than deck chairs (who knew?), so the chair went over sideways. As I tumbled the three feet to the ground, my right arm swung out and smashed against one of the climbing frame uprights. For the longest two seconds of my life, I stared at my arm trying to figure out why it suddenly had two wrists in it. Then it was all pain and screaming.

    Radius and ulna fully snapped. Five months in an elbow cast.

    I was 30-something when the bike thing happened. Pedaling home from a friend's place late on a wet night I came to grief on tram tracks, went over sideways and landed hard on my left hip, right on top of this huge bunch of keys (complete with souvenir boat-mooring ring) I kept in my left pants pocket. Hurt like a bastard.

    Picked up the bike, staggered off the road and waited a bit for the pain to die down. It didn't; slowly got worse instead. Fuck it, thinks I, I'll just have to get home before it gets too bad to ride with. So off I went again.

    By this stage I was shitscared of wet tram tracks. However, my route home pretty much unavoidably involved veering to the right across another set of them, so I resolved to start that manoeuvre early and carefully and hop over one set, into the centre of the road, before reaching the intersection. Only after doing that did I remember to my horror that the road I was veering onto also had trams up the middle, which meant that I was now riding between rails that were converging to a crossing faster than I could stop.

    And of course I slipped on them and went over sideways again, and landed on the exact same spot on my hip on top of the same bunch of keys which were still in the same pocket.

    Finished the ride home in some pretty incredible pain and went to bed.

    Couldn't walk the next morning. There was a huge bulge on my leg around the impact zone; bigger than this one, sticking out sideways just below the left hip. Took a week before I could walk at all. Took a month before I could walk without pain. Spectacular colors. And I still have this weird little dent right there, I guess where all the layers of me just got mashed together.


  • kills Dumbledore

    I have a weird scar on my knee from a motorbike accident. I was coming out of a corner and starting to straighten out when I suddenly went into a tankslapper. It may or may not have been something to do with the fact that I'd just replaced the front brake disc and pads, either way I've left brake work to professional mechanics ever since.

    After a brief attempt to control it, I realised I was going down. My speed was probably about 35-40 MPH. I was thrown away from the bike and rolled a few times. My shoulder was dislocated backwards (most dislocations, the shoulder comes out of the socket towards the front. Mine went out the back) and while sliding on my front, my thermal, non armoured trousers wore straight through at the knee, as did the suit trousers underneath.

    The friction melted a decent amount of the nylon into my knee There's a big round scar on my right knee, that kind of freaks people out on the rare occasions I get my legs out



  • When I was maybe a junior or a senior in high school, I had one of these all day gigs on a Saturday with an orchestra out of town from where I lived. It was maybe a 2.5 hour drive. It was a Christmas pops concert thing--just one day. Rehearsal from 10-noon, 1-3, 4-6, 7pm concert. Those things are goddamn exhausting. Especially with Christmas music.

    So I get done with this thing, drive home, get home after midnight, and I've been on the road since 7am. I'm friggin tired as hell.

    I get home and my older brother and his girlfriend are wasted on everclear (WTF?!!!) and decided to play around with my fencing gear. And they broke a bunch of shit. Namely a glass lampshade from my ceiling fan. No big deal. Whatever. I clean it up. We'll have a talk in the morning because I'm going to bed . . . just as soon as I check my email (this was almost 20 years ago--1996 or so.) So I sit down to crank up earthlink, and stand up very quickly. Scorpion? (We lived on a sheep farm and scorpions were pretty common.) Nope. Scorpions don't hurt like that. I reach back to my left butt cheek and feel something solid where it shouldn't be. Run over to the bathroom mirror and sort of do this awkward twisty bendy overy thingy that you do when you're trying to get a good look at your own ass.

    And there's a large piece of glass lodged in my ass.

    So I get some pliers out of my computer toolbox and pull the glass out. That was a huge mistake. Hurt like hell, and now I'm bleeding a lot. So I try to bandage it up, but that's not working, so time to go to the hospital.

    I get there and by this time it hurts quite a lot, so I'm limping a little and the check-in nurse asks me what the problem is and I tell her, "I have a very bad cut in my butt." And she just dies laughing. Laughing so hard she can't even deal with me, so she goes and gets another nurse.

    So 22 stitches later . . . good times. The worst part of it was afterward. I'm a fairly hairy guy, and they wrapped tape up all around every which way when they bandaged it up. Getting that thing off to change the bandage was awful. And then there were the next several weeks with the stitches in. Those things itch. I was constantly having to excuse myself from class to go scratch the hell out of my ass. So embarrassing.

    And no. No pics of the scar, which is to this day quite visible.



  • šŸ˜†

    Trying very hard not to LOL.



  • It's okay now. It's funny now. Wasn't so funny at the time, but today it's goddam hilarious. :)



  • That's not why I'm avoiding the LOLs. I'm still at work.



  • Oh right. Yeah. I totally know that.

    (whooooosh)



  • @flabdablet said:

    By this stage I was shitscared of wet tram tracks. However, my route home pretty much unavoidably involved veering to the right across another set of them

    Two words are applicable to anything involving bikes and tram tracks, train tracks or anything of the sort: right angle (or as close to a right angle as you can manage). You do not want your wheel to get stuck in the space that the tram/train wheel flange runs in.



  • One time when I was in school, I was standing against a wall with a row of glass windows. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my friend outside. Being too lazy to turn fully round, I 'tapped' the window with my elbow, causing it to instantly shatter (oops). So, I did the responsible thing and found a teacher, and during my being reprimanded for damage to school property, people started to notice that there was some blood dripping from my fingers. It turned out I'd cut myself just above my elbow through two layers of clothing, so I had to go off to hospital for stitches (only about 5 or 6, I think). Conveniently for me, due to my need for semi-urgent medical care, everyone sort of forgot that I was supposed to be in trouble for smashing the window (which, in fairness to me was accidental...)

    So that's the scar above my left elbow, which is annoying for me to see without a mirror.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @Onyx said:

    I have the similar. As a child (3? 4?) I was doing my civic duty of destroying my parents' bed by using it as a trampoline. Lost balance, hit the corner of a cupboard. Luckily, it was some ornate, rounded thing, so it wasn't that bad. No stitches. I still have a distinct V shaped scar just over the root of my nose.

    I have a similar story, except my trampoline adventure ended with me flying off the bed backwards into a glass front entertainment center and a shard of it cutting a gash in the back of my head. To this day, when I get a haircut you can see the scar. It grows in quickly though.

    Just a bit lower on my head and I would not have been so lucky as it would have been spinal cord and not skull. -shudder-



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    right angle

    Exactly. And had my brain not already been fried by the pain I was in from the first fall, I would not have ended up in a position where achieving that was essentially impossible.



  • @abarker said:

    I was recovering from a broken collarbone at the age of 2.

    That reminds me of an amusing story about my grandfather. He was quite the adventurous lad. He broke his collarbone falling out of a tree, but not discouraged by such a trifle, he climbed the tree again. It will probably not surprise you to learn that he fell out of the tree again, breaking the other collarbone.

    It so happened that William McKinley, then Governor of Ohio, was campaigning for President at the time. Through circumstances that were never very clear to me, Mrs. McKinley visited my grandfather's family in the course of travelling around the state of Ohio during the campaign.

    Here I must digress a moment to note that these events transpired at a time when Little Lord Fauntleroy was the height of fashion for young boys:

    I must also point out, for those who may not already be aware of this, that broken collarbones cannot be put in a cast. The standard treatment was, and still is, to the best of my knowledge, to immobilize the shoulder by strapping the entire arm across the chest. These facts are necessary to understand the following exchange between Mrs. McKinley and my grandfather's older brother.

    Therefore, both of my grandfather's arms were strapped across his chest and hidden under his clothing. Mrs. McKinley, seeing him with his long, curly hair, fancy hat, cape, lace collar, etc., mistook him for a girl. Noting the absence of any visible arms, she asked his brother, "Doesn't your sister have any arms?"

    The brother, naturally wishing to avoid any embarrassment to Mrs. McKinley by correcting her error, replied, "No, she doesn't."



  • @HardwareGeek said:

    Through circumstances that were never very clear to me, Mrs. McKinley visited my grandfather's family in the course of travelling around the state of Ohio during the campaign.

    Reading more about McKinley, the McKinleys lived in the city my grandfather was born in, and they may well have attended the same church as my grandfather's family. They were members of the same denomination to which my grandfather belonged later in life, but I don't know enough detail about my grandfather's early life to know whether his family were members at that time.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    ~10 years ago I was working at a construction company where the owner loved to put me in difficult situations just to put the pressure on me. One of the first was right after he hired me so that they could get in to infrastructure (storm sewer, water main, force main and sanitary sewer) and set me up with a crew that was so green it needed mowing. Complete rookies, which is just about the worst situation to be in. I had to train everyone from scratch. The owner tried to sell it to me as, "They won't have any bad habits learned from other people." Yeah right, they had no habits at all...

    The only experienced person on the crew was the excavator operator, who was also quite a character. He was a farmer and had made quite a name for himself raising show pigs (yes, that is a thing. Like dog shows, but smellier.) and was known as one of the most best selective breeders around and was apparently a pro at AI. All of this becomes important later.

    One evening we were stacking out manholes and all of the heavy iron castings were in total disarray. Jammed together, just waiting to fall. As the two laborers that should have been doing all of the heavy lifting were not the brightest of fellows, I told them to stand back while I got the castings out that we needed. Keep in mind these castings weigh 50-125lbs each and they were stacked 5-6' high on pallets. I was pulling one free when one of the nincompoops decides to "help" and pulls on another casting, causing not one but two 100+lb iron castings to come down square on my middle finger of my left hand gashing it to the bone. Shock set in, and it did not immediately hurt but blood was running everywhere. It was just as gruesome as you are imagining.

    I have never been the type to go to the doctor, there have to be bones exposed before I will willingly go. I go to the water cooler and start running ice water over my hand. There is a steady stream of blood running off my elbow. Through the water irrigation I can see bone. I suture it up with some butterfly bandages from the first aid kit. The farmer comes over with an insulated shipping envelope and some cool packs to numb the pain for my drive home. To make matters worse, my company vehicle had a manual transmission. Thankfully it was also a diesel so I could take off in 3rd and keep shifting to a minimum.

    After I get home, I fill the insulated envelope with ice and sit down on the couch with a drink and then it hits me...why the hell did he have an insulated shipping envelope and cool packs so handy? The next day I ask him...they use them to ship semen for AI. Thankfully he was kind enough to give me a brand new one...

    The worst part of it was, as I was training everyone I had chosen a position on the crew that allowed me a lot of free time, I was running the cleanup dozer, a D6M with fingertip controls.

    Those two little tabs that stick up in front of the palm rest are what controls the steering clutches and brakes. You steer it with your middle and ring finger of your left hand. I had just smashed my middle finger to pieces. Not the type to give up, I figured I could just use my index and ring finger if I contorted my hand a little. That is all well and good until you need to react to something and muscle memory kicks in and you try to use a finger that is everything but broken. Those first few days of that hurt worse than the injury itself.



  • Some years ago I turned my foot over, and fractured my tibia mid-shaft.

    I learned a few things from the whole experience, including:

    • Most modern cultures have come to regard shoes as necessary for running about. This is for a reason.
    • Speed bumps are evil.
    • A large bone snaps with a quite audible sound, but it's not the sharp crack that you'd expect. It's a sort of click and a crunch at the same time.
    • If you break a major bone, you know about it. You won't do anything like testing whether you can put weight on it or seeing if it bends in the middle (although if someone else does that, it doesn't hurt nearly as much as you'd expect in the first minutes. It's only after the tissue around the break swells that any movement is agony). It's immediately obvious, not necessarily that you've broken something, but that something is badly wrong with that limb and it doesn't work properly any more and you should just keep it very very still.
    • It's better to break both bones in your lower leg than just the tibia. This is because the fibula, the thin bone, is longer and so if it's intact it pushes the broken ends of the tibia apart. For me, this delayed healing by a month even though I had a spiral fracture which should heal very easily as the ends of the bone are in a lot more contact than a clean break. Note: this does not apply to breaking the fibula only. That's the least bad option. If you hear about people finishing a race on a broken leg, or not realising they broke their leg until the next day, or similar, they probably did the fibula.

    I also currently have burns on my face from splashing hot oil over myself while cooking yesterday.


    If we're doing yucky pictures,
    <img width="350px" src=http://thecommentsection.org/download/file.php?id=1272">
    [url="http://thecommentsection.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=1611#p39145"]If anyone wants context for that injury[/url]. Lizards thrown in for free. Fun fact: turned out the blade actually went through the fingernail below the cuticle, so when it grew out a little way I had this flap of nail that would lift up...



  • I just remembered a bike accident I had in middle school. I was riding home with a couple friends one day when I hit a pot-hole just wrong. I got knocked off balance, but I managed to recover just in time to crash into a parked car. I was fortunate that I only walked away with an eight-inch abrasion on my thigh and a mild concussion.

    My friends were not so lucky. My first friend stopped when he saw me hit the car. My second friend was watching me to see if I was alright. Unfortunately for both of them, he was directly behind my first friend. They both went down. My first friend ended up with a broken wrist and my second friend had a severely sprained ankle. All because I hit a pot-hole wrong.



  • I think I'm going to be sick...

    ...but I can't stop reading...


  • :belt_onion:

    @CarrieVS said:

    If you break a major bone, you know about it. You won't do anything like testing whether you can put weight on it or seeing if it bends in the middle

    Not necessarily true, I have personally witnessed 2 people snapping their arms/legs in sports scenarios and then attempting to push off it/stand back up again only to have it buckle in half in some grotesque manner before realizing what happened. Usually followed by blood-curdling shrieks.

    If you break it and it bends/displaces enough... then possibly true.

    @CarrieVS said:

    It's immediately obvious, not necessarily that you've broken something, but that something is badly wrong with that limb and it doesn't work properly any more and you should just keep it very very still.

    It's a bizarre feeling. When I broke my collar bone, it didn't even really hurt, but was immediately obvious to my body somehow that it was broken because my arm just didn't seem to want to do what I was telling it to. Broken fingers/toes... no such luck. I can never tell whether I broke it, or if it is just a simple jammed finger.


  • :belt_onion:

    @darkmatter said:

    I can never tell whether I broke it, or if it is just a simple jammed finger.

    On that note....

    I suffered a complete rupture of the ulnar collateral ligament with a complete avulsion fracture at the bone insertion site (aka, ripped out the ligament that holds your thumb to the rest of your hand) while simultaneously trying to slide and pick up a rolling baseball to throw out the baserunner. As I was sliding, I reached in front of me to grab the ball. The ground was soft from rain, and my thumb stuck down into the field and I rolled over the top of it. There was an audible pop as it happened. I was unfortunately unable to complete the play and the runner made it safely, and I had to be pulled from the game because I could no longer grip the ball (I was the pitcher in that game). However, I didn't realize how bad the injury was and just thought it was a sprain or jammed.

    It happened during the end of season tournaments time my senior year as shortstop, so damned if I was going to miss a game. There were 3 days until the next game. The first day we had off, which was good because I could barely hold onto a baseball, much less throw it. I didn't tell the coaches a thing about it, just went on as if it was no big deal. The 2nd day I used athletic tape to try to keep it from moving and was able to throw, albeit with great pain, and I could still barely make the necessary throw from shortstop to 1st base. On the 3rd (and game) day, I ended up supplementing my athletic tape support with duct tape, and basically formed my thumb + base of my hand into an immobile funnel into which I could put the baseball to throw. I had to control my throws completely with my index and middle finger. When batting, my thumb stuck straight out, because I couldn't have bent it under all the tape even if it was uninjured.

    We faced one of the regional powerhouses and lost that next game, ending my season. It was another 2 weeks before I saw the doctor about my thumb because the swelling and pain had not reduced at all. I was referred to a specialist, who diagnosed it via a fairly gruesome looking x-ray (he grabbed my thumb and tugged it until it pointed sideways, then x-rayed) and basically told me on the spot that if I wanted to be able to use that thumb again, I needed to have surgery immediately.

    This is where the story actually gets worse. To fix it, they sliced about a 1 inch hole in my hand and removed the piece(s) of bone that had broken off the ligament insertion site, then use a surgical screw to re-attach the ligament to the bone. Then they insert about a 2 inch steel rod just past the second knuckle, connecting the third thumb bone to the base of your hand to immobilize the joint. Then they add a cast that you're stuck in for 6 weeks. Once the cast comes off and you're "healed", the real fun happens... the doctor holds your hand down and grips the end of that steel rod (which is hooked, for gripping), and pulls the motherfucking steel rod out of your thumb. It was a real grunter, took him a couple of efforts at it. It wasn't so much painful as it was simply an unpleasant feeling. Apparently I turned a strange shade of green.

    The surgery was a success, I did actually end up playing baseball in college, though I couldn't throw a ball with any force for over 6 months after, and I had to alter my grip to alleviate the downward force on my thumb for the remainder of my career. But t hurt like hell if anything happened to my thumb for several years after. It took over 5 years before I could shake someone's hand with my right hand without pain - in a handshake they basically are digging their hand straight into the ligament that was ripped out. Even now, the people that love to do deathgrip firm handshakers hurt it, so I offer my left hand.

    One plus came of it though, it led to a most hilarious x-ray reading when I later visited a different doctor that had no medical history for me. I needed an x-ray for a possibly broken wrist, and he came back in the room with this grave look on his face... "Did you know you've got a piece of metal lodged into the bone on your thumb?" he asks.

    NORLY!? (to his credit, with the neighborhood that this hospital was in it was probably more conceivable that I had actually been shot in the hand and let it heal over than that I had a surgical screw inserted to hold my thumb together).

    (also fyi, if you put an <hr>, you can't make any fucking links in your posts (at least they don't work in the preview). Guess I'll remove it. Thanks dicsourse.



  • @darkmatter said:

    Not necessarily true, I have personally witnessed 2 people snapping their arms/legs in sports scenarios and then attempting to push off it/stand back up again only to have it buckle in half in some grotesque manner before realizing what happened. Usually followed by blood-curdling shrieks.

    If you break it and it bends/displaces enough... then possibly true.
    ...
    When I broke my collar bone, it didn't even really hurt, but was immediately obvious to my body somehow that it was broken


    Curious. In my experience, it wasn't much displaced, and I had no idea what I had done. It didn't even hurt that much at first, I know pain fades in memories but I don't remember it being a whole lot more painful than than when you get a really sharp knock on a joint, on the end of a bone (not that this was on the end). After a little while everything swelled up and then it was rather hellish, but in the first few minutes, not so bad.
    I didn't try and move it at all, just lay still and held my leg still with my hands. I had no prior experience of breaking bones and I didn't know that I'd done that, and it wasn't a conscious thought process, just a purely instinctive reaction.



  • How the hell do you people get so badly mangled?

    While I probably spent most of my life in front of a PC, which doesn't exactly let you get too hurt, I did do other things too - but somehow I never had anything worse than a slight bruise and/or papercut.


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