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Monday Fun

Jill

So while we’re talking about gonorrhea of the eye and infected sebaceous cysts of the head, here’s a question for the peanut gallery: What was your worst/most interesting/grossest injury?

Mine: When my sister threw a piece of broken glass at me and it sliced my cornea. It hurt, and required lots of eyedrops. I even had to wear an eyepatch for a couple weeks. My dad tried to convince me that it was “cool” because I looked like a pirate. Unfortunately, this was far before pirates were cool.

98 thoughts on Monday Fun

  1. At least since school age, all of my injuries have been nickel-and-dime. But some have stories. Here’s one.

    I shot myself with a nail gun. A brad gun, actually. I was a professional carpenter, so I prided myself on not doing that sort of thing, but I was putting together a mantle with a bunch of molding and I was rushing, so I gripped the gun upside down with my left pinkey on the trigger to get at an awkward angle, shoved it into place and Pfft.

    I felt the sting in the heel of my right hand, on the pinkey side, just above the wrist. I saw the head sticking out and grabbed it with my fingertips, and pulled it out. It was bent a third of the way from the tip, where it had glanced off the bone. I tossed it to one side and tried to get back to work. Then I thought about the nail bouncing off the bone, and the lightheadedness washed over me. I decided that I needed to drink something with sugar in it and sit for five minutes, or I was going to fall down.

  2. One year at the beginning of summer, a bunch of us were horsing around in a friend’s pool. My brother threw a Nerf soccer ball that had been floating around in the pool at me. I put my hands out to catch it and managed to do it in just a way just wrong enough that I ended up with a greenstick fracture in both bones of the forearm. Of course I made him feel as guilty as possible for breaking my arm, but I also get to tell my cool “a Nerf ball broke my arm” story. I don’t mention the ten pounds of water in it right off.

    Another interesting/funny injury was the time a helicopter ran over my foot. I was helping my dad roll it out (you put little wheels on the skids for when it’s on the ground) from the hangar and wasn’t paying attention to my feet. He was upset that I didn’t tell him until after the helicopter ride around Austin, but it made perfect sense to me. If I’d said something when it happened we’d have gone to the emergency room, not on a helicopter flight.

    Worst and grossest was putting a .357 Magnum hollowpoint through the center of the palm of my left hand. I was depressed, dissociative, and probably psychotic. It was messy as hell, though I got lucky and didn’t sever either of the tendons to the middle two fingers. I even had vascular response in the fingernails when they got me to the hospital. Even luckier, the best hand surgeon on the west coast was the ortho on call that day, so I got really good repair work done on the shattered metacarpals. Eventually I regained nearly full range of motion and strength, but there’s still some lingering nerve damage. And those metacarpals are still about a centimeter short from lost tissue. The worst part of that was probably coming home from the hospital and having the mess to clean up. There were bits of me on the ceiling.

  3. When I was 13, I got my ears pierced. I was really excited about this, but was not as responsible as I needed to be about keeping them clean. No, they did not get infected; the skin grew over the ball of the earring.

    Result: I had to go to my doctor, get a shot of novicaine in my earlobe, and had the earring cut out with a razor.

    This has cemented my decision to not let me own daughters (should I have them) get their ears pierced until they’re old enough to use the alcohol wipes.

  4. Easy! I fell off a weight bench and got a weight clamp stuck in my head. It was wedged between my scalp and my skull. They had to shave a huge spot on my head to get it out and then they gave me stitches which they coated in vaseline and told me I couldn’t wash my hair until the stitches came out. Nice. It also earned me the nickname “boing boing”.
    A close second would be when I cut my hand on a mound of frozen dirt, which entitled me to seven stitches in the palm of my hand, the night before finals. The stitches grew into my hand and had to be removed, which was the most repulsive thing I’ve ever seen.

  5. For all the stupid stuff I did when I was a kid, I somehow managed to never break anything or need stitches.

    I got my most prolific wound on Easter Sunday when I was in the 5th grade. My sister was blowing bubbles in the backyard and I was running around popping them with a baseball bat instead of looking down at the stump I tripped over. I fell down, picked myself up, and looked at the blood pouring off my left hand from the broken glass that I hadn’t noticed. I sent my sister to go get my Dad, and he took me inside leaving a trail of blood through the backyard, up the steps, through the house, and into the bathroom to rinse it off. He called the doctor (no such thing as ER where I grew up) and drove me up the road to get patched up. Turns out I had two small cuts on my wrist and punctured the main artery in my thumb. The thumb was a clean but wide cut, so I got a nice butterfly bandage and a big wad of gauze wrapped around my thumb again*.

    * I inadvertently sliced open the base of my left thumb while trying to peel an apple with a paring knife when i was five.

  6. I cut the flesh at the end of my finger off twice.

    I was making something out of paper and made the error of cutting horizontally. I saw the knife start to cut, said “oh shit!” and pulled my hands apart, finishing the job.

    Then after a month of being unable to do anything with ym right hand, I did it AGAIN. Yes, I did the exact same thing, in the same way, to the same finger.

    Oh, and there was “Stand on heels on edge of seat that wasn’t bolted to a wall, only resting on a little ledge, seat flips, fracture thumb” – I was standing on the seat talking to my flatmate, and then within less than one second I was on the ground and she was helping me up.

  7. This has cemented my decision to not let me own daughters (should I have them) get their ears pierced until they’re old enough to use the alcohol wipes.

    Me own daughters? Arrrr! Avast ye lubbers!

    Your sons get to learn the hard way.

  9. I was snorkeling off the SE coast of the “big island” of Hawaii in a great little set of tide pools formed by lava floes. We couldn’t find our shoes, so we kept swimming over to a different pool, get to the other edge, push ourselves up and look around, and then move on. I pushed up, and I felt some sharp lava slice right through my palm between my right pinky and ring fingers. I knew right away it was deep, deep enough to need stitches. I also knew we had no cell phone reception where we were and were at least 1/2 hour from anything like medical care. I also knew we still didn’t have any idea where we’d left our shoes…or our car keys.

    Took about 10 minutes, and there was a spell of panic on my man unit’s part when, even getting our shoes, he couldn’t find the car keys and feared that they’d gotten lost in the water. Alas, we got our shit together and drove back to Hilo, where we found a hospital. Ended up with a dozen stitches in two parallel cuts about 1/4″ apart. Of course, it was our first full day there, and when they stitched me up the doc said that I’d not only have to stay out of the water, but also I should stay out of the sun, because the coral is so teeming with staph that they have to give people pretty full throttle antibiotics just in case. Way to start a vacation!

  10. Arrh me matey!

    Me brothers and I had some weird thing for scratched corneas, and we had ourselves a boatload of them!

  11. That’s just gnarly, Blackbeard Jill.

    Mine was a second-degree sunburn down both of my shins that blistered up but good and prevented my walking without pain for about a week— unfortunately, it was the week immediately preceding the start of law school, so I was limping around orientation.

    So kids: drink all the generic bourbon and smoke all the weed you want, but don’t then try to apply sunscreen to yourself in a haphazard way prior to a four-hour tube ride down the Guadalupe.

  12. Most interesting: I had the first sword wound the Touro Infirmary in New Orleans had seen since like 1889. Long story. Shorter summary: those waves on a kris’ blade? They make the sword go in deep with like NO effort. Who knew?

    Worst: This was my daughter’s. She got bit in the face by an Akita. Fucking Akitas. She was 4, and it came THIS close to taking off her whole face, or crushing her head.

  13. I’ve never been substantially injured *knocks on wood* but I know plenty of people who have been. My aunt once had her eyeball ripped out of its socket because she was teasing a dog while it was eating; according to my grandmother and my dad, it was dangling by just the optic nerve and it was nasty.

    Oh, and my brother once went street-surfing downhill — riding on rollerblades attached via a jump rope to a moving moped. He missed the sharp turn at the bottom of the hill, hit the curb, went flying through the air, bounced off of someone’s driveway, and landed in the grass of the-guy-who-lives-next-door-to-Ozzie-Smith’s-house.

  14. Let’s just say that you know the giant cyst on your forehead is bad when you go to the dermatologist and he recoils when he walks into the room and gets his first look at it.

    He recovered pretty well, but he was still astounded at this quarter-sized lump on my forehead. This is why I now spend over $100 a month on my skincare — I really don’t want to have to have a raging cyst nicked with a scalpel and squeezed out a second time.

  15. I fell down some stairs in a bar and sprained my ankle and broke a bone in my foot.

    Even worse, I lost my whiskey.

  16. evil fizz – The EXACT SAME thing happened to me. Only a bit delayed. For about a year or two I was really, really good about taking care of my ears. Then I got lazy, or I think I held the belief that once the holes were “healed” I didn’t have to take care of them anymore. (I wish that someone had told me otherwise!) But one day I went to take out my earrings for some reason, and I realized that the backs of my earrings *weren’t there* anymore. My ears had grown completely over them. And I also had to go to a doctor, completely mortified, and have the doctor cut out my earrings with a knife. I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but I was in elementary school when I got my ears pierced, and in junior high when I had to get the earrings removed.

    But by far the grossest thing that ever happened to me was when the toenail on my big toe died. I had to get the entire toenail surgically removed. For weeks I was limping around with my shoe full of bloody bandages, the surface of my big toe having been turned into an enormous gaping wound. Then a new toenail started growing in, albeit hideously deformed. The doctor told me to wait until the new toenail had “grown in” some more (and the original wound had healed a bit) before we could safely remove it. But then I switched jobs and moved overseas. I couldn’t – still can’t – find a doctor around here that I would feel comfortable asking for a complete toenail removal. And the new toenail is completely dead, all twisted and bloated. At this point, it’s also close to falling off on its own. I think I’ll just wait and let it do that.

  17. I was skateboarding down a steep hill and totally ate it. Hard. I broke my nose, scraped my face all up, and chipped my front tooth. I had just started high school. It was awful.I looked like Eric Stoltz in Mask.

  18. Ugh. I’ve had a couple of injuries that were on the gross side. I got hit in the mouth with a baseball once, and one of my teeth actually punched a hole completely through my top lip. That was nasty.

    Another time, I was babysitting some kids, and we were throwing a ball around (catching a pattern here? I can’t imagine why I’m not a sports nut), when I jumped to catch it. I caught it and slid a little ways through the grass. Unbeknownst to me, the folks had recently cut down a bush or a small tree, and hadn’t taken out the stump yet. I slid across it, and opened a pretty big gash right on my shin. The thing is, there’s not a lot of tissue there, and it doesn’t bleed much, so, instead, I had this oozing wound that I’m pretty sure was all the way to the bone. I limped around for several weeks, applying clean bandages and disinfecting it. Gross.

  19. Well, the worst injury in my family happened to my older son this January past. (Background: this kid broke his arm at age 2 by jumping off a Little Tykes slide shorter than he was; in the space of three weeks when he was six got six stitches in the back of his head from WATCHING shuffleboard and a concussion from falling off a chair. So it’s not like I’m not familiar with Austin ER’s. In fact, I’m writing the Michelin Guide to ’em.) Andy was playing on the kindergarten playscape at after-school care, and fell, pinning his upper arm between the rung of a ladder and one of the 4×4 supports, snapping his right humerus. If any of you remember when Joe Thiesmann broke his leg and ABC sports showed about 2 hours of tape of it? This was about the same. It didn’t break the skin, but his upper arm was hanging at a 45 degree angle. Three members of the ER staff looked at the X-ray and in the most misguided attempt to make me and my husband feel better in the history of trauma medicine told us “I wouldn’t be as calm as he is if I had a break that bad.”

    Oh, and the real fun? There are no painkillers approved for kids other than Motrin. The doctor gave us some Vicodin pills with instructions to cut ’em in half.

  20. When I was about 8 or 9, I fell off some bleachers at school, and landed chin first on a stone table.

    I didn’t break anything, but my tongue was between my teeth when I hit my face, and I nearly bit the tip straight off. Luckily enough, wounds in your mouth heal really quick, and I only had to suffer through not being able to eat, speak, or drink without effort and pain for about a week. Oh man, the taste of blood still makes me sick to my stomach 15 years later.

  21. Not gross, but weird – I punched myself out while trying to tighten a bolt on a vacuum flange. The wrench slipped and I cold-cocked myself. Next thing I knew I was lying on the floor, slowly regaining consciousness.

    I did have a badly infected vaccination site on my arm that turned into a puss volcano about three inches across. Still have the scar – looks like a bullet wound.

  22. I am ashamed to say that mine happened on the band bus… it was my sophomore year at UConn, I was on the flag squad, and we were in a convoy of charter buses stuck in stop and go traffic outside of Foxboro Stadium on our way for to perform at the halftime show. Our bus rearended the one in front. I was sound asleep, but woke up when my face slammed into the hard back of the seat in front of me. I was completely bewildered, couldn’t quite figure out what had happened. In a fog, I watched as the bus erupted into chaos… a few wanna-be-first-responders took charge of the situation and started assessing the damage… I was hurting but calm until the kid in the seat in front of me pointed at me and yelled (to someone) “this one has a hole in her face!!!”

    My bottom teeth had cut clear through the skin below my lower lip. You could literally pull it and see through to my mouth. And it was bloody. Yuck.

    This injury was not considered serious enough to pull the ambulance call away from their position as standby at the game… and in any case once we got the bleeding to stop, I was determined that the show would go on. I even did a cartwheel with my that hole in my mouth (part of the show). I probably should have gotten stitches but never did and it healed fine, although everyone always and forever made dribble jokes around the kegs after that….

    I still have the horizontal scar to show my kids whenever they balk at wearing their seatbelts.

  23. Oh, oh, I definitely get the most embarrassing, although it (thankfully) wasn’t permanent. I was in college, and had one of those tiny dorm ironing boards on the little 3-inch legs. We didn’t have a table large enough to use, so had to use the floor. I was sitting on the floor ironing and was clumsy enough to get the iron on my calf. Not glancing off the side, no, no, I had to put it down smack on my leg. I think I was turned around talking at the time. In any case, I had a burn mark about 3 inches long that was the perfect shape of the tip end of the iron, steam vents included, so there was absolutely no doubt as to what had made the burn. And it was high summer, so there was no way I could wear jeans to cover it. Darned thing took months to heal.

  24. I can’t remember how or why I was contorted in such a way, but while lifting a collapsible table during one of my summer jobs in college, I managed to knee myself under the chin and bite straight through the side of my tongue with my canines. Spat a lot of blood. Talked funny for days. I don’t recommend it.

  25. Hmm…i’d forgotten how easily i squick out. Thank you to this thread for reminding me.

    My story: I had just moved to a new house and neighborhood right before my 5th grade year started. Fortunately, there were several kids around my age, and a couple of them were over at my house one day cutting up our moving boxes so we could play in or with them somehow or another. Being young and stupid, i was not cutting away from myself, and i sliced my left forearm just below my wrist. The scar is still there, and every once in awhile i get to embarrassingly explain that, no, i didn’t try to kill myself (at least not that time), i’m just an idiot.

    Another good one, and the only injury that has required hospital time for me, happened when i was three years old. My parents were about to go on some sort of date, and while they were getting ready i was in their room, rolling a ball under the bed and then chasing after it. My mom apparently told me more than once to stop doing that, and at some point got exasperated enough to grab my legs and pull me out from under the bed. One of my ears got caught on the metal frame, and cut it badly enough to require stitches. She felt kind of bad about that.

    I also have a habit of chasing after balls or frisbees without looking where i’m going and hitting trees and other sturdy objects; fortunately, nothing worse than a bump on the head has come from that.

  26. A few years ago, one of my fillings fell out. I was working part-time, still living at home, so I couldn’t afford to get it fixed. It kept getting worse and worse, with little pieces of my tooth falling out all the time. I had let it go about six months when it became more than a minor annoyance. I was visiting friends in Spokane (I lived in Ohio at the time) for New Year’s. On New Year’s Day, I woke up in a drunken stupor and realized the left side of my face was horrifically swollen. The pain was pretty intense, so I had to go immediately to the dentist. When I got there, they told me the tooth had abscessed and that they had no choice but to pull it. I’ve had so much dental work done that I swear I am immune to normal doses of novacaine, so they gave me a few shots and started to pull, but I could still feel it, so I started screaming bloody murder. Eventually I convinced them to give me more shots and they got that stupid tooth out of there. The up-side? I got percocet, so the rest of my vacation was pretty great.

  27. When I was six years old, I lived in a house with an old wooden swingset with an attached slide in the backyard. One day I slid down the slide, and a piece of wood five inches long and maybe a quarter/half inch thick broke off, went through my sneakers and socks and into my foot. I had to get the shoe and the gigantic sliver surgically removed. My parents found another, longer piece of wood inside the lining of the shoe.

    When I was 2 I stepped on a piece of broken glass and needed 11 stitches. I still have a huge scar across the bottom of my left foot.

    And when I was maybe ten or eleven I tripped while roller-blading and fell into a short brick wall. My teeth ended up going through my bottom lip (on both sides!) so I have a half-inch barely-visible scar running just under my bottom lip.

    And my little brother was always getting eye injuries. There were at least three separate incidents that resulted in him having to wear an eyepatch for a few weeks, and one of them involved a young chicken that had followed him home pecking him in the eye. The other two involved cats. Funny thing is my brother liked talking about how this made him look like a pirate, but he was horrified by the thought of wearing the bandage to school.

  28. My mother tonight reminded me of my worst injury, at least as far as she’s concerned. When I was eleven, on the first day of sixth grade, I stepped on a broken bottle and required three stitches in the sole of my foot. The icky part was that because I went barefoot so much in the summer I had really tough feet. So tough that the nurse couldn’t get the Novacaine needle through the skin. Thus, the doctor sewed up my foot without anesthesia. And yes, I did feel something, although not that much. Mom and Dad, however, left the room.

  29. I have a weird burn story to add. When I was a sophomore in high school, I was sleeping over at a friend’s house and we decided to make popcorn. She had one of those old-school air popping machines, except that the top part of the lid was missing, so I was chosen to be the one to go in and hold a towel over the aperture.

    Of course a blazing-hot unpopped kernel of popcorn came flying out of the machine – you’d expect that. The really fun part was when the kernel landed right between the two smallest toes on my left foot, and was shaped just exactly right so as to get stuck there for the next 45 seconds while I hopped around the kitchen flailing wildly. I got two blisters right in between my toes, where I couldn’t put bandaids or neosporin on them.

    I also drew blood from my tongue once by stabbing myself with a toothbrush, but that’s not as funny.

  30. Nenena: But by far the grossest thing that ever happened to me was when the toenail on my big toe died. I had to get the entire toenail surgically removed…

    The same thing happened to me in the fifth grade. It’s one of my pleasantest memories, believe it or not. I had this hangnail and it got sore and sorer and sorer, but I didn’t think it was worth bothering my parents about until one day I woke up and saw red barber-stripes running up my leg – that’s inflamed lymph ducts, I think, and it means it’s time to go to the doctor and have him break out the industrial-strength antibiotics. But it was too late; a little while later when I was changing the bandage the whole toenail just came off. E-e-e-ew it was yucky underneath. All greenish and puffy, and sore as Hell too, especially when I’d accidentally stub my toe on something.

    What turned this to a pleasant memory is that I absolutely hated Phys. Ed. It disgusted me to do calisthenics and throw balls and junk around like some kind of brainless circus animal, not to mention I was attending school in Florida, where I never saw an air-conditioner in a classroom until I was a hi-skool junior, so Phys. Ed. meant you absolutely melted down in the God damn tropical heat.

    Well, after I showed up at school with the big ball of gauze around my foot, I managed to milk that inflamed toe into getting out of Phys. Ed. for the entire rest of the school year. I was perfectly healed for months but I’d always start limping a period or two before Phys. Ed. During Phys. Ed. class that year I must have read at least a hundred entertaining books, all cool, calm and un-sweaty in the shady bleachers, while my co-evals, seething under that cruel Florida sun, yowled and hooted and threw them stupid balls around like it meant something to them.

  31. WHAT is this house of pain I’ve just walked into?? Gah, can’t read past four reply posts. So much pain, blood, razors, broken bones ((cringe)) Good thing this isn’t a discussion on flickr.

    I just hope Jill’s sister’s at her eternal beck and call out of repentance over, oh, just slicing her CORNEA. That story beats my friend whose thigh got stabbed by her sister’s fork.

  32. I was doing an inward dive off the one meter board – that’s where you face away from the pool, jumping up and back from the board to complete the dive. As it turned out, I could handle the “up” part, but the “back” part was apparently beyond my mastery. I braced myself with my hands, but still smashed my mouth into the board, cracking one of my front teeth in half. The worst (or best) part of it was running my tongue over the jagged enamel. Ew.

  33. My best happened my junior year of college. I made tea every day to drink from my themos as I walked to class. That day, I poured a kettle of boiling water over my hand after I accidentally dropped my mug. Then, in a moment of extra-brilliance I turned my hand to cup the boiling water. I was wearing a sweater that covered my hand under a tight sleeved leather coat. I couldn’t get the damn coat off or push my sleeve back. My dorm room door was open and my floor-mates were treated to me laying on my floor screaming for my grandmother.
    I made my way to the health center where they cut off the sleeve of my sweater and peeled it out of my skin. I was told I had to wear a big boxing-glove looking thing for a couple weeks and come in for cleanings every morning. My hand atrophied and I got a blister the size of a 50-cent piece below my thumb. It sloshed! You could hear it! I can use my hand, but it’s really scarred.
    Best part? It totally smelled like hot dogs after I burnt it. Seriously, forget soylent green. Hot dogs are people.

  34. Here’s my family’s greatest hits collection. For me, it was 7th grade industrial arts class, using a small hand saw to cut some acrylic or wood. I was holding the object with my hand in addition to a vise, and sawed clear through the edge of my thumbnail, at least an eighth of an inch’s worth of it, maybe more.

    Or the time I was about 25 and certainly should have known better. I went to the Air and Water Show on the shore of Lake Michigan…with the water reflecting the sun’s rays…gazing upwards at airplanes…without sunscreen…with pale skin. My face sunburned so intensely, it blistered, seeped, and crusted over with yellow. I found out that adults riding the bus will not be subtle about their curiosity. No, they’ll STARE RIGHT AT YOUR FACE, wondering what the hell is wrong with you. And the people at work, they made fun of my foolishness.

    My sister, at age 6, had a chunk of her thigh eaten by a neighborhood cat who had managed to get out of the house. This cat did not like children. The de-chunked spot of thigh got infected and filled with pus. To this day, I do not trust cats. Even friends’ pet cats, who they love dearly–I do not trust them, do not like them.

    My husband’s most hilarious injury happened when he bent over in the bathroom naked, and burned his butt cheek on a hot radiator. It was about 15 years ago, and he’s still got the scar.

  35. I got my eye scratched by a flying toenail clipping (my own) when I was about 8. Painful, and embarrassingly klutzy.

    My husband once stabbed himself in the eye with junk mail and got a paper cut on his cornea. Try calling in sick to work with THAT and not be the office joke for a month!

  36. Nothing too crazy for me, and hopefully it stays that way. But there are a few random things I’ve done over the years:

    -Age 3, was sitting in a basket of laundry on Mom’s bed, goofing off while she was changing my little sister in the next room. I rocked back and forth, fell off the bed and hit my face on the corner of her dresser. Had to get stitches and still have a scar on the bridge of my nose.
    -Ages 15 and 16, cut a finger on the tomato slicer at work, two years in a row.
    -Age 17, split my lip with a cello.
    -Age 18, mild heat exhaustion. Which wouldn’t be interesting if it wasn’t the fact that it happened on a mountain in Wales in March.

    Then there are the numerous times I’ve been smacked or otherwise hit in the head and/or face by random things, including: a water polo ball, a soccer ball, a door (which I was opening), various walls (including one particularly spectacular fall during a dodgeball game two years ago, which hurt my ass more than my head), someone else’s head (rugby), someone else’s knee (also rugby, didn’t notice it had happened because I was too concerned with grounding the damn ball), a doorframe (which sadly happened when I was about eight, and in the process of running to my mom’s room after a nightmare), and that one time this asshole kid punched me in the face on the playground when I was sticking up for my little sister, who he was picking on. The dodgeball, the door, and the knee to the face all happened within a few months and I’m certain if they occurred any closer together I would’ve gotten a concussion.

  37. Nenena: But by far the grossest thing that ever happened to me was when the toenail on my big toe died. I had to get the entire toenail surgically removed…

    Wait wait, how does a toenail die?! I thought it was dead material to begin with! *quaking in mortal terror of her toenails dying*

  38. Two come to mind. The first was when I was in 2nd grade, playing on swings in a neighborhood playground. Me and my friend were having a contest to see who could jump farther off the swing. I spent a good couple minutes going as high as I could (to the point where my back was completely parallel to the ground, a good 10-12 feet up in the air), and, having a poor understanding of physics, I decided this was the best time to jump. Of course, my shirt got caught in the chain on the swing, and I fell straight down, placing my right arm out beneath me. When I hit the ground, my hand bent back until the top of it was touching my forearm, and there was a loud crack. No blood or skin pierced, just a clean break straight through my wrist. I rode my bike home, and when I went to the doctor, he told me it was sprained. I went without a cast for another two weeks.

    The second was when I was in college, riding my bike home from a bar at like 3 am. Needless to say I was a little drunk, and thought I heard a car coming up behind me. I turned behind to look, hit a pothole, lost control of the bike (spectacularly, apparently, my friend behind me says there was sparks when I hit the curb), and went completely up over my handlebars and into the sidewalk on my face. I wasn’t wearing a helmet. Luckily, I rolled when I went over, and took the brunt of it on my shoulder. Tore my shirt, bled all over it, scratched up my face. I knew I didn’t have any first aid stuff at home, so I had to ride to the 24 hour pharmacy in a not-so-fantastic part of town to buy supplies. Nobody batted an eye or said anything, despite the fact that I was leeding and obviously hurt. Good times. I had lots of fun explaining that to my boss.

  39. I fell going down some stairs and hit my shin against some sharp metal part sticking out from a step. My shin swelled up so large it rivaled the size of my calf. It looked like I had a reverse leg! With a small puncture wound in the middle.

    Also shaving in the shower and accidentally shaved off most of a fingernail.

  40. When I was about 9 years old I stepped on a needle. It broke off in my toe, and left no mark, so I couldn’t convince anybody that I really had a needle in my toe and wasn’t just being overdramatic. Even my mom didn’t believe me, until a couple of weeks went by, in which I limped and complained constantly. Finally a neighbor lady noticed a red line going up my leg and after asking me some questions decided to call my mom out for being a neglectful parent. Properly chastised, mom took me to the doctor. Doc took an x-ray and you could see, clear as day, the needle (including the eye) in my big toe.

    I got a lot of mileage out of that one. Mom couldn’t do enough for me for weeks.

  41. Oh, and a word of advice: it turns out that if you fall from a height of about two feet and land on the outside of your twisted knee, you’ll pop your ACL right out. (The ACL is one of the two ligaments that hold your knee together.) I had to have my first (and so far, only) surgery to get a new one put in.

    But at least it pushed me to finally become an organ donor. It seemed really lame of me to accept someone else’s ligament but refuse to let other people have mine once I’m done with them.

  42. Oh my Flying Spaghetti Monster. I thought I was the only one who’d done the thing with the earrings!! I’m so glad to know I’m not alone. Although with mine, I didn’t realize what had happened, I just knew my ear was infected and assumed the backing of the earring had fallen off. It wasn’t until a few months later, when I wanted to get my ear repierced for my grad ceremony, that I decided to go in to the doctor to get the “cyst” in my ear looked at. It wasn’t until he’d cut into my ear and pulled out the little piece of plastic that any of us knew what it was. Thank goodness it was a plastic backing, or I’d probably no longer have a left earlobe.

  43. I had one where my roomie and I were washing the cats – flea infestation, likely picked up by us patting the outdoor cats or something.  I would wash the cat in the tub, pick them up by holding their legs together (that’s hard to explain sans photos), then take them to the sink to rinse them off.  She’d towel-dry them and, if they were amenable, use her hairdryer, set to air, at a distance.

    Her two half-wild cats were fine.  My domesticated idiot decided to make a break for the curtain rod, which ended in me getting a lovely scalp wound, about an inch long.  Which stung a bit due to the soap (I’m guessing), but looked impressive.  I still have a photo somewhere, of blood streaming down my face, while I’m triumphantly holding my sodden cat in a towel.

    The only other one was when I was 5.  A friend convinced me not only that swinging on my stomach was fun, but that the only way to fly was to run for the swing, hit it with my stomach, and woosh!.  I’m sure it’s predictable at this point that I missed the swing and knocked out both of my front teeth.  Blessedly, they were baby teeth.

  44. What? No sex injuries? I have two..

    I was having sex with my girlfriend a while back, pretty vigorous sex, when the bed broke (the part on which the mattress rests) needless to say we did not stop immediately.

    When we were done, I rolled off, slipped and some how caught my finger between the bed and the bed frame and broke the pinky finger. It was really weired hearing it SNAP! When we got to hospital and explained what happened to the nurse she laughed so hard and told me to keep up working hard.

    The second one isn’t really an injury but I can say it was the most embarrassing thing I’ve been through. Again, I was having sex with my girlfriend about a year and a half after my pinky finger broke and this time right after my girlfriend said the two magic words I started getting a butt cramp (hmm.. a dilemma..). I barely managed to keep on it until my girlfriend was done. I immediately jumped off the bed howling and grabbed my ass. My left butt cheek had shrunk to the size of an apple. I have a high pain threshold but this was something on a new level for me. My girlfriend was looking at me as if I had gone insane. I some how managed between howls of pain and hopping about like a bunny, to communicate my predicament. Please don’t try to picture me naked with my right butt cheek perfectly healthy and my left butt cheek the size of a good red delicious, hopping about howling in pain. Haven’t pictured that? Good.

    After trying to stretch, to drink water with electrolytes for about an hour to no effect, we were on our way to the hospital. By the way Putting on pants while having a butt cramp is a nightmare, trust me.

    Believe it or not the same nurse was there. She of course recognized me. I was give some analgesic (my girlfriend insisted on stronger pain killers because I always take double the recommended dosage for when I have a migraine, I got a different set of pills five minutes later, I didn’t know what they were I just wanted the pain to end). The doctor had to examine my butt, so my pants went down and I had no boxers… standing still for a few seconds with a butt cramp is hell. The doctor had me lie on the bed and put my knee to my chest. A nurse ( to begin with, my girlfriend took over after a bit then another nurse) put all her weight my leg (stretching my butt). After an hour and a half in this position the pain had subsided. When the nurse saw that all was well, she started joking about it, she laughed till tears ran down her face when I told her my reason for not stopping early, when I felt the cramp coming on and she laughed even more when I went into great detail of what happened with a goofy smile, the painkillers remember. She called a fellow nurse and they had a good time.

    My girl friend is the best.

    So I was having sex and got a butt cramp that landed me in hospital with no boxers on and I ended up describing it to the nurse because I was drugged..=>Embarrassment Factor 10

  45. Lee, (comment 26) I’ve been there with the no money in the bank account and no insuarance therfore I had to ignore dental problems until I got an infection among others. 🙁 That wasn’t fun at all.

    I ended up spending a whole year in University, getting dental work done twice or thrice a week at the University with the dental students, it was about 1/3 the cost, but I had to use credit cards

  46. My grossest personal injury is really not gross enough to be worth talking about. The worst I’ve ever seen or heard colleagues discuss, though…Well, to start with, all doctors seem to have a story that ends “and then it (where “it” can be a toe, leg, nipple, penis, or other body part) fell off”. Most of them are pretty gross.

    But I think the absolute grossest injury I’ve ever seen has to be the chicken bone (drumstick) that some guy stuck up his urethra (the part of the penis that urine and sperm comes out of…which usually has a diameter of a few millimeters). I’m not entirely sure how he did it, although successive dilation was speculated, or why, although sexual enjoyment was speculated. Anyway, that’s not the gross part. The gross part is the reason he came to the ER: because the bone broke. Inside his urethra. Ick. Recommended treatment: urology consult and lots of painkillers.

  47. Here’s another one for the earring files: I got my ears pierced w/ really tiny studs, and woke up the next day to find they’d sunk into my earlobes. So I pushed ’em back through, and wound up w/ these huge holes halfway through my earlobes. Oh, and I was too stupidly stubborn to take the earrings out and start over again. I wound up w/ oozing earlobes for literally six months.

  48. Sara no H: Wait wait, how does a toenail die?! I thought it was dead material to begin with! *quaking in mortal terror of her toenails dying*

    Sorry, it was a figure of speech. Nails in their natural state are just dead skin cells packed together with protein; a “dead nail” is how a lot of people (including me, I guess) described an infected/deformed/crumbling/on-its-way-falling-off nail.

    This has been your random dose of interesting nail-related linguistics for the day.

  49. I was employed (by a very foolish and naive person) in a deli, and spent a lot of time cutting up meat with big machines.

    The grossest injury involved the hand-carved ham. 5kg of pig leg needed to be cut up using a knife, huge, extra-sharp knife so for safety we would support the thing on a pronged, spikey stand. Unfortunately one time I was carrying one of said legs it turned out someone had neglected to clean some spilled meat juices from the floor.

    I slipped. Hand and pig-leg land on spiked thing. Spike goes right through last knuckle of right middle finger.

    Then there was the time a customer harassed me as I was using the electric whirling salami slicer and I sliced the top of my right thumb off.

    And the time I missed when using the meat cleaver and almost severed my left thumb. That one left a scar.

    On reflection, I don’t think that was the job for me- I only worked there 6 months…

  50. Now that I think about it, I do have a gross injury story…One day when I was particularly tired I managed to slam my car door shut on my finger. Bad idea. Then I tried to pull the hand out without opening the door. Even worse idea. More bad news: the door was locked. Good news for the day: I hadn’t locked my keys in the car. Therefore, I could actually open the door and retrieve my hand, with, with one exception, only minor damage.

    The exception was the nail on the middle finger, which was severed half way through, leaving me with a bit of live nail, a bit of dead nail, then a small cresent of live nail just before the finger nail proper (that is, the part that’s supposed to be dead and hanging off the end of the finger) started. This was annoying, because the unnatural dead bit kept catching on things, pulling on the live bit, which was painful and annoying. So that’s when I had a REALLY bad idea, which was to rip the residual bit of nail off. Kids, don’t try this at home. There’s a reason that having your fingernails pulled off is a classic form of torture. Plus there are a lot of blood vessels in the nail bed so it bled all over the place. I never did get the blood stains out of the carpet. FSM knows what the next tenant thought had happened there.

    Follow up grossness: Having had a nail ripped off and having gone through labor, I can say with some authority that going through labor is MUCH more painful. In case anyone needs that info for the next time an anti-choicer tells you that pregnancy is no big deal.

  51. I accidentally got pepper sprayed at a family reunion from my cousin’s bear grade keychain. It went all over my face, in my eyes, in my mouth… she couldn’t have aimed it that perfectly if she’d been trying.

    I spent the next 4 hours blind with mayonnaise all over my face, constantly having to blow my nose, and all in all, the worst pain I’ve ever been in while trying to catch up with relatives that I still haven’t technically SEEN in upwards of ten years.

    And still, to this day I feel worse for my cousin. She felt so bad that she barely looked at me for months and hasn’t attended a reunion since simply to avoid having to talk about it. At least I got an “I’m from Kentucky and got maced at a family reunion” story.

  52. I have atopic skin that needs lotion every day or it starts to dry and itch. Often when I’m sleeping I scratch myself and then later find little scabs. But one time I managed to cause myself a two inch long wound on my left arm and then woke up because of the pain. It took forever to heal and I still have the scar – almost one year later!

  53. The earring thing happened to me too. When I was in grade school a friend gave me earrings and told me they were real gold. They were not. After about a week or so, my ears had grown into the little holes in the settings and I only discovered it when the lunch lady mentioned something to me. No doctor visit, instead I spent a painful afternoon with my head in my moms lap while she alternately numbed my earlobes with ice and worked the earrings loose. I was under strict rules never to wear non-gold earrings ever, ever again.

    Those original holes have still never closed completely and it’s never happened again even when I wear earrings for weeks at a time. I’m just careful to make sure of the metals in the earrings. Gold or silver only. Anything else makes my ears itch anyway. When I got a second set of piercings in my ears a few years later my mom traded out the cheap studs for her gold earrings and I didn’t have any problems. I did get a small cyst when I got the cartilage piercing a few years after that but antibacterial soap cleaning cleared that up after a while.

    I have also had the nail-falling-off thing happen to me too. A door was slammed on my thumb once. I had stuck my thumb into the little hole in the door jamb for the lock and someone slammed the door while it was in there. I got a huge blood blister/bruise under the nail bed and got to watch the nail slowly detach itself from my finger. It was kind of cool. The nail fell off one day in the pool without me even noticing. And then I got to watch it slowly grow back.

    I did crack my scalp open once when I was a kid and ended up with a partially shaved head and stitches but all I remember about that is the slowly-becoming-bloody towel I was holding to my head while my mom was trying to get the car started and I kept asking her why she was so upset.

    I never did the roller skate behind a moped thing but that was only because of the lack of moped. We used bicycles. I spent a summer or two with constantly scabby knees because of that one.

    Heh. I’ve also accidentally placed an iron on my hand while ironing and poured boiling hot water on my hand (same hand but many years apart). I was amazed at how much a split second of boiling hot water hurts for hours.

    I’ve got other stories but wow this is long.

  54. car; there is no shame in accidentally burning oneself with the iron, my friend was one of those who try to iron what she is wearing, She got one of those burn marks including the steam vent marks, on her chest. Just high enough it showed unless she wore a turtleneck, an item of clothing she doesn’t own.

    After reading this thread I have decided I will not be having my ears re-pierced. I had no idea. Ewww

    I also had my cornea sliced open as a child, with the patch & the eye drops, and the father trying to convince me of the pirate coolness factor of the patch. I had brothers, none were snatching that patch from me to play pirate so I knew it wasn’t cool.

    Weirdest injury? I had a miscarriage and broke my nose.

    Most embarrassing? Poison Ivy after outdoor sex. The most embarrassing part was it was not consensual sex.

  55. Ok, here’s mine (as the sebaceous cysts are the spouse’s). These aren’t particularly gross, but they’re the most entertaining of my long list of bodily injuries:

    1) a few years ago, we went out to dinner with friends, some distance from our house. I got food poisoning, and we had to stop at a ShopRite on the way home so i could fling myself into the restroom. Except there was a loose piece of trim on the car door, and it gouged out a 2″section of my right hand. So I staggered into the shoprite and hollered “WHERE’S THE BATHROOM?!?”, holding my bleeding hand and clamping down on all bodily orifices.

    The next day, I tripped and sprained my ankle. The doctor gave my copay back to me.

    2) This past spring, visiting friends out in CA, I tripped over a parking barrier and bounced my head off the parking lot and carved up my knee. Later that evening, my friends wanted to take me out to dinner (since I was feeling better) and I got my hand caught in a car door. Nothing broken, but I kinda mangled my middle finger (thereby interfering with my ability to communicate effectively) and spent the entire night in the emergency room waiting to be xrayed. ^^;;;

  56. When I was two or three, I dropped a can of mixed veggies on my feet, breaking three of my toes. One of the toes got so damaged, that to this day I do not have a toenail growing there.

    That’s right. I only have nine toenails.

  57. My senior year of college, I almost broke my toe.

    I was readjusting myself in my chair, with my right foot on the ground. All my weight was balanced on the chair, which for some reason, was designed with a rocking bottom.

    My weight shifted far enough forward that the chair slammed down *fast*.

    …onto my right foot.

    You can see the damage here:
    http://userpic.livejournal.com/7341711/448250

    Stunningly, the toe wasn’t broken. I just had severe tissue damage.

    Ow.

  58. Kat, a seatbelt saved my life.

    I was nineteen, and a teenager in my gaming group tried to impress me by driving as fast as another friend of ours who was a notorious leadfoot. I was in the middle back seat of an SUV, wearing only a lap belt, and two young women were in the front. She handed me a pack of lifesavers, and I took one and put the pack on the center console. The driver reached for the pack. We were on a narrow causeway over marshland, and she drifted to the right shoulder and panic-steered left: right into a parked Ryder truck at 67 mph. I saw the speedo as we hit.

    Next thing I remember, I felt the lifesaver in my mouth and it wasn’t melted, so I hadn’t been out for long. The pain in my hips was so bad that I started squeezing my hips to see if my pelvis was broken. Fortunately, I was in a town with one of the fastest volunteer EMT crews in the country, and by the time I realized that I wasn’t paralyzed and hadn’t shattered my pelvis, I guy I went to high school with was cutting the back seat out and strapping me to a board.

    At the ER, they determined that I had no serious internal injuries or broken bones. The two women up front were kept for observation overnight, but they released me that night. The ER doc said that he had seen lap-belt passengers paralyzed from accidents like that; but that I had core muscles like spring steel that had protected my spine. Working construction and doing Tae Kwon Do for years sure paid off. They brought wheelchair to get me to the car, but I wouldn’t use it. I took four inch steps all the way to the parking lot. There was a girdle of bruising around my hips so deep that new patterns began to surface a week later.

    I have never been in a moving vehicle without a seatbelt since. Not NYC cabs, not anything. I put on a seatbelt to rearrange the cars in my driveway.

    (Also, I spun my Subaru on a rainy highway at 80 mph, with my wife beside me in her first trimester. We bounced off the jersey dividers and totalled the car, but neither of us was even bruised and our son was born on time and unaffected. Go Subaru: I took the insurance check and got the same model.)

    Buckle up, folks.

  59. I did the earring thing, too. Fifteen years later, the holes still haven’t closed up completely, but I don’t wear earrings anymore.

    I once cut my toe with my own fingernail – kind of sliced it a bit. It was just after I’d quit biting my nails and I wasn’t used to having long nails yet. I think I didn’t know I could cut myself like that. But now I do!

    When I was 14 or so I was cleaning out stuff in my room and I stuck my hand into a box of stuff, I had no idea what was in it. It turns out that one of the things that was in it was broken glass, and I got small but deep cut near the nail of the middle finger on my right hand. It bled quite freely, and I remember yelling that I didn’t want stitches (I didn’t get them). It produced my only scar (so far), and it must have nicked a nerve because the feeling in that part of the finger hasn’t been quite right since then.

    And then a few years ago, I managed to get a nice, blistering sunburn on my shoulders that made it very painful to wear a bra. I was a receptionist at the time, and I certainly did not feel comfortable just going without my 40D bra while at work. That experience taught me to wear sunscreen even if you don’t think you’ll need it because the clouds will probably go away and then you’ll just kind of forget about the sunscreen later, and also that the only way I can ever tan is after a ridiculously bad sunburn has faded.

  60. Getting my nose pierced was pretty bad. This was way back in the day before piercing parlors were common, and in my small town, piercing anything but the ears was too weird for words and I doubt that even the lone tattoo parlor was set up for noses. My friend did it with a sharp piercing post. She stuck her finger up my nose for resistance. She couldn’t do it in one swell foop like they do with a gun; she had to go layer by layer, through the skin, then the cartilege, then the mucous membrane. The last one was the worst. I thought I was going to throw up.

    Hey – don’t you ear piercers know that you have to rotate the post in the hole daily?

  61. The most embarrassing part was it was not consensual sex.

    I’m so sorry you had to go through that. I hope the asshat raping you got it worse.

  62. Frumious, did you have to stick your nose in a cup of warm water with sea salt? That’s what I was told to do after getting mine pierced. It was weird. And hard to breathe.

  63. I can’t bring myself to read any of these! But I will tell you mine nevertheless – last week, don’t know how I did it, but stubbed my little toe so hard the nail came off.

  65. First time I had sex it tore my foreskin. It was a silly folly of youth and unprotected (we took her to the pharmacy for the morning after pill), and I didn’t really notice until things were finished and we were wondering who’s blood it was. Not a good conversation to be having.

    I drove her to work, then myself to the hospital. They gave me laughing gas and then the shot for local anesthetic. The gas didn’t work, but the freezing did. Which is good, as it usually doesn’t on me, and previous times I got stitches I felt everything.

    The stitches were supposed to disolve after two weeks, but they lasted 3 days. I still have the scar.

  67. Well, nothing was more disgusting than childbirth and it’s aftereffects.

    But the story behind this one is better. I used to have a double lip piercing until this one time during, well, let’s call it a night of amore, the particular jackass I was kissing thought it would be sexy to bite one of my lip rings and tug on it. Ouch. And of course it got all infected and swollen, and I had to take it out. And the other one looked kind of stupid by itself so I took that one out too. So now I have two small symmetrical scars instead of lip rings.

  68. I’ve had a lot injuries. espcially as an adolescent. I used to adverage 2-3 trips to he emergency room per year between 12-18. So here are my tops in the three categories (worst/most interesting/grossest).

    Worst – breaking my collarbone and several ribs in a bicycle accident. It happened the first week of June and was pretty bad. I was laid up for a few weeks; couldn’t even bathe myself and had recently broken up with a girlfriend. Very bad summer that year.

    Grossest – Went hiking up a 13,000 foot mountain in new boots. I lost the toenails on the big toes immediately after taking my boots off that night. The other three random toenails took a few days to fall off.

    Most Interesting – It’s a tough call, but I’m going to go with the “Home Surgery Club”. I was living in a 100+ year old dilapidated house with 3 roommates. We did not have insurance. I was in the living room, attemping to fix a broken window pane when the big floor-to-ceiling window fell down, sending shards of broken glass down on me. My right hand was cut in mutiple locations. Since I had no insurance, I went to the county hospital. Too many youths were shooting each other that day, so I never go to see doctor. After waiting 14 or 15 hours; I went home. (I might have gotten service if I hadn’t taken the time to bandage my hand as best I could). A week later, I noticed irritation under my skin. A piece of glass was caught under it and had migrated a few inches. My roommate performed minor surgery to remove the glass shard.

    A week weeks later a different window fell on that roommate and nearly severed a finger. We did not wait to bandage him, so he got stiches at the ER. He had skin that caused raised scars and it quickly started to grow over the stiches. This time I performed minor surgery on him to remove the stiches and cut away some extra skin.

  69. Oh, and the previous time I got stitches adn felt every last one of them was from a pillow fight. No, really.

    I was at a friend’s place. He’s a big guy, at the time was about as wide as he was tall. He hit me in the face with a pillow, and me being this scrawny little guy, was knocked on my ass. Not a big deal, except he had about five pictures with glass in the frame leaning against the wall. My elbow went through all of them.

    As I was cleaning up the glass with him, it kept feeling like there was something on my forearm. So I checked, saw blood. Looked at the elbow, saw something whitish under the sliced apart skin. Not sure if it was bone or tendon or what, but I passed out in his bathroom from shock a few minutes later.

    Oh, and I’ve got a massive scar on the back of my arm from falling out of bed. Weirdest thing: no blood from that one.

  70. At age ten, I slipped on a gym mat and fell backwards, breaking my left arm.

    I broke it badly enough that the hand part of my forearm was 2-3 inches displaced from the elbow part of my forearm, and the bones were poking through my muscle and skin. I’ve seen my own ulna and radius, and it’s something I never want to repeat.

  71. this will completely out me if anyone I know reads this, because these are the most random, and specific injuries ever-
    -I broke my nose mud wrestling in high school, and
    -discovered I was allergic to a certain brand of athletic tape in university when I took the tape off my ankle after a tennis match and watched it blow up like a balloon, turn red, then purple, turn burning hot to the touch, and then the swelling started to move up my leg. It was one of those where they bring all the residents in at the hospital because no one has ever seen anything like it before.
    -I would also like to concur with the pain and awfulness of toe surgery- I had to have my big toenail cut off, and it was just brutal.

  72. Here’s why you shouldn’t play tag indoors. We were at my grandmother’s house while our parents were at work, and it was me, my little brother, and our two cousins. My bro was IT and he was chasing my older cousin down the halllway. The hallway ends in a glass door and a turn to the right. My cousin turned; my bro did not. He ran right through the glass door with his hand outstretched, and sliced his wrist from the heel of his hand halfway down his arm. I came running when I heard him scream – there was a terrible amount of blood all over the floor and his arm was a mess.

    So my grandmother bundled him up and drove him straight to the Emergency Room herself (it wasn’t far), and I stayed behind and called my mother. I think I was pretty much incoherent – all I could get out was “accident”, “blood”, and “hospital”, over my crying. My poor mother rushes to the hospital with no clear idea what happened. She rushes into the emergency room and I’m pretty sure she just looked for his name rather than ask a nurse about it, because she ended up barging right in on the doctor sewing him up. Little Bro was actually pretty cheerful by this point, he thought the stitches were neat. He waved at Mom and showed her his still-mostly open gash.

    Mom took a few steps back and fainted dead away. Cut her chin open on the floor somehow. Fortunately the hospital, fearing liability I guess, had a plastic surgeon on hand who sewed her back up almost invisibly. But she ended up with more stitches in her chin than my brother had in his arm.

  73. I’ve had various yucky maladies, but one of the grossest looking was a side effect of taking that NSAID, Bexxtra (now off the market). Over a few weeks, I developed these huge round lesions on my hands (back and palm) and my shins, knees and ankles. It was painful and itchy, oozing and blistery. I had about 50% of my usual dexterity. I put cortisone cream on them, I tried tea tree oil. The neurologist who’d prescribed the Bexxtra didn’t warn me about possible skin problems; I finally figured it out on the internet. So I told the doc (he was a nice man, and mostly a good doc), who was horrified, and then I filed a complaint with the FDA, and told a few other people I knew who might be using Bexxtra, and then it got pulled off the market.

    Big old seeping, peeling welts, I’m talking about. With flat, smooth pink-white centers. They looked kind of like alien crop circles. I’m lucky I didn’t get some kind of staph infection. Took months for the scars to fade. And that is why I had to give up swimsuit modeling, and I’m still distraught, because I could totally have been a contendah.

    Part of the preceding has been a lie.

  74. First serious injury that I can remember is a gash from your classic nail-sticking-out-of-board setup, when I was very young, in the inside of my forearm. After I’d stopped bawling, and before they stitched it up, I was totally fascinated, because it was the first time that I could see inside myself.

    Worst was probably my ingrown toenail when I was thirteen; infection, minor surgery, etc. The silver lining to that cloud was that, once the treatment was complete, I had a decent-sized tube of Neosporin left, and Neosporin is basically Vaseline, and, well, I’m thirteen years old. I trust that I don’t have to draw a picture.

  75. My most painful injuries didn’t leave any marks, alas. I sprained my ankle very badly walking down some stairs. My foot rolled as I stepped down, and I lost my balance and stepped on the rolled foor with my other foot. It made the most horrible crackling popping sound – like 5 people all cracking their knuckles at once.

    Years later, I slipped on some icy concrete steps, and fell almost straight down on my ass, smashing the back of my pelvis on the steps. If I’d gone down straighter, I probably would have hit my tailbone. I couldn’t catch myself because my hands were full of the recycling bin. I didn’t want to do anything except lie there in the snow in agony, but I had to get back inside – to the upper floor, where my apartment was. I nearly passed out – and I did black out, and nearly lost sound, too – from the pain of walking up the stairs once I sat down again. I kind of hoped I’d have an amazing bruise to show for it, but no such luck!

    The grossest injury-related incident I know didn’t happen to me: On a trip in high school, I was hanging out with some of my friends in their room, and one of them was poking at this little dark lump on his heel. And we were all horrified when this thin little stick-like thing just . . . pushed its way out, like it was on a spring. It turns out he’d stepped on pencil years and years ago, and about an inch of the pencil lead had been driven into his foot. He hadn’t realized it until then.

  76. Nope, never heard of the salt water thing. Who pierced your nose? A pro or an amateur?

  77. It was an accident!!

    Yeah right Chrissy — you were exacting your revenge for the time I bit you on the forehead when you were an infant.

    [For the readers at home: commenter Christina is the glass-throwing sister]

  78. None for me- but when she was 17, my mom was swimming underwater at her family’s camp and her cousin was driving a motor boat. Neither knew where each other was- sure enough, Mom’s face made contact with the propellor.

    They had to reconnect her nose and opened-up cheek; she ended up with an 8+” scar that has faded very nicely over the past 50 years. She also has a 3″ scar on one shoulder near her neck (how she missed either decapitation or opening a major blood vessel is beyond us all) and another 2″ one underneath her hair.

    My dad saw her right after surgery- terrible black eyes, face a big puffy stitched-up mess- and still thought she was beautiful. Was just damned grateful she was alive! Her cousin, one of Dad’s best friends, has always felt awful about it.

  79. I’ve had pros recommend the soaking new piercings in warm salt water thing. The nice people at Obscurities sent me home with a bottle of Provon scrub and a packet of sea salt last time I had anything pierced. It’s been too long since I had anything done, but I can’t do anything facial. Might do upper ear stuff again, though.

  80. contact saline solution is a good way to go on piercings- that’s what they gave me for my nose.

  81. I find this all very amusing. And is it wrong that I’m kind of jealous? All my “injuries” come from stupid things like walking into a chair (severely bruised a toe), kicking my jerkface brother in the shin, while barefoot (broke a toe) or finding out the hard way that I am NOT a morning exerciser (whoops, didn’t see that car there until I jogged right into it.).

    There was one summer that two fingernails on my left hand just suddenly and mysteriously separated most of the way from the nail bed. I was forever getting stuff jammed up in them, and it stung like crazy.

    Oh, and I’ll just say a seriously bad place for a cyst is on the tailbone. Had a cluster of them for years, and they caused major, major, nasty grief until my parents finally took pity on me and allowed me to have them removed. Which was also not so much fun.

  82. I just hope Jill’s sister’s at her eternal beck and call out of repentance over, oh, just slicing her CORNEA.

    That would depend on what sort of injuries Jill has inflicted on her sister over the years. I’m thinking it’s a fairly long list.

  84. Ooh, Lolla Rosa, I totally sympathize with you on the getting things stuck up under the fingernails. I got a chip of dried paint under one back in elementary school, and the school nurse dug it out with a needle. With no anaesthetic. I wanted to scream and throw up and pass out, but after, I kind of wished the people who said I was a wimp could’ve seen it; maybe they’d have changed their minds a little.

  85. My sister got a misquito bite next to her eye and it swelled up like a balloon. It looked like she got socked in the face, and my Mom secretly called her cyclops.

  86. OMG, I almost forgot! When I was little, my grandparents used to rent a summer cottage at Fife Lake, near Traverse City, Michigan. There were many good things about Fife Lake, even getting all scratched up while picking blackberries. Mmmm, blackberries! And of course there were too many spiders, and while we could swim in Fife Lake, the nearby Pickerel Lake (where the holy exquisite blueberries grew) was all mossy and yucky and gross.

    And the time when my grandmother caught the huge six-foot long pike (it dragged our rowboat around the lake for hours before we hauled it in), and we scaled it, eviscerated it, cooked it, and had it for our fishbone-laden supper: well, I lost one of my baby-teeth amid the pike’s skeleton. It was creepy.

    But nothing compares to the day when I was wading in Fife Lake, away from the sandy-based dock, alongside a stone retaining wall, and I emerged with a half-dozen leeches burrowing into the tender girl-flesh of my skinny little legs. Grossity gross gross.

    I ran up to the cottage, horrified and tearful, and my father sprang into action. Everyone gathered round, my father lit one of his Benson-and-Hedges, and meticulously burned off each leech. And, of course, the skin to which the leech was attached. I cried, and was so ashamed of myself.

    Later we found out that while leeches don’t like burning tobacco stick embers, they also don’t like saltwater. Oops.

  87. Four of my back teeth are currently rotting in my mouth. One of them is infected, and every month or so a huge blood and pus filled abscess will pop up around it. Not only is it really gross, it hurts too if I don’t drain it, which I do. With those lancets diabetics use to to draw blood to test their blood sugar. I shine a bright light on my gums, locate the area that is more yellow with pus than red with blood, puncture with the lancet, apply a little pressure, and viola! The pus and blood oozes out of the hole in my gums and into my mouth. I wrap up the whole operation by gargling with mouth wash or peroxide.

  88. Oh, frankye, that is such a nightmare. Please don’t take this as condescending, but we’ve got to figure out a way for you to get treatment. Maybe you’ve exhausted your options already, but I don’t know, and I’m scared for you.

    Just in case there are some avenues you haven’t tried…any assistance for dental care is usually going to be found at the individual state level. I don’t know where you live, but here’s a list of state dental societies: ADA State Organizations list.

    I suspect that getting free or low-cost help is going to take vigorous self-advocacy, and vigor is hard to dredge up when you’re feeling unwell. If there’s any way I can help (phone calls, letters, whatever) let me know and we’ll figure out how to get in touch.

    And again, forgive me if I’m being intrusive or annoying. I honestly mean well.

  89. frankye, at the very least, have it pulled. Local dentists will sometimes do tooth extractions for free, and leaving an infected tooth in your head can kill you.

  90. Oh, the concern is sweet, not condescending. I’m just waiting for my dental benefits to kick in. I started my first “real” job last year, and my insurance had a twelve month waiting period before they would pay for any major work. I just have a few more weeks to go!

  91. Whew, frankye. ::(Sigh of relief):: It sounds like you’ve been doing the best possible job of keeping the infection from blowing up. Best of luck with the upcoming treatment.

    Oh, and I forgot to mention that your story should definitely make the Gross ‘n’ Yucky Top Ten.

  92. Two of my uncles sustained hideous workplace injuries within a year of each other not too long ago. The first one fell off a ladder at a worksite and sliced his neck open on a piece of sheet metal. He didn’t decapitate himself, but he severed some blood vessels and an ear nerve. Still can’t work because he’s hypersensitive to noise (gets terrible head pain from noise) and has a constant ringing in his ears. (He was managing the ringing with hearing-aid-like white noise devices, but he left them on the coffee table and his son’s chihuahua ate them.)

    The other uncle got his arm drawn into a machine that tried its best to smoosh that arm. He’s always done physical labor, but now he’s lucky to have healed enough to take more of a supervisory role at the worksite.

    And in about third or fourth grade, one of the other latchkey kids was wearing her housekey on a string around her neck (as was the style). She did a somersault or wiped out during a cartwheel in gym, and that key lodged itself in her head. (She was okay after an ER trip.)

    My work used to involve access to medical journals with their juicy case reports. Like the guy who was drunk and slipped on the ice while walking home, and impaled the roof of his mouth on a wrought iron fence spike. The ambulance crew had to cut off a sizeable section of fencing and transport the guy to the hospital with an iron fence on him. He was okay after surgery, but walking past fences when the sidewalk’s slippery makes me nervous.

  93. In terms of humiliating, I burned myself on the heater once. It was early, I was in the laundry room to try to find clothes, and I tripped on a spare mattress and landed squarely on the furnace; I’m a musician, so my first instinct was to protect my hands, but my left forearm and left breast hit the pipe pretty hard. I was running late for school, so I stuck my arm under the faucet for a couple of minutes and left, and I made it about halfway through first period before the shooting pains in my breast and arm sent me to the nurse’s office for some burn cream. (The time it took to heal was a barrel of laughs, too; it was unbelievably itchy and there wasn’t much I could do about my boob. Augh, the madness.)

    I also once got hit in the face with a football and ended up bleeding for three hours; about two of those I was just oozing big clotted messes. On the plus side, I used to get five-minute nosebleeds every day from kindergarten onwards and they stopped afterwards, so obviously something worked itself out.

  94. I managed to cripple myself stepping on the brake.

    I was attempting to avoid someone doing something Really Stupid in the car in front of me, which I hadn’t seen before thanks to the road having a bit of a dip in it, and managed to dislocate the bases of my footbones off my anklebones.

    Required one surgery in which they went in, realigned the bones, screwed them into place, and used external pins to fixate them while they healed.

    That wasn’t the horror. The horror was in discovering that I was casted from knee to toes for eight weeks, on very high doses of painkillers…and singleparenting an active two year old.

  95. Holy crap, Alexandra. I have never heard of someone getting their feet dislocated from their ankles, while everything still stays attached. Ow ow ow OMG. When did this happen? How’d you get through it? Has your little one forgiven you for being handcuffed to you for eight weeks? (I can’t imagine any other way, except of course for the happy vision of all your cheerful village neighbors stopping by to help out, entertain the toddler, change the diapers, buy the Cheerios, bring casseroles, clean your house, and do your laundry, while whistling happy tunes, and not even thinking about lifting a few of the super-strength party pain pills. Because that is what normally happens when people dislocate their feet. Isn’t it?)

    Umm, was there a satisfactory outcome to your insurance claim?

  96. My injury wasn’t initially bad. Partially seperated my big toenail by getting stepped on at a rugby practice. It was still attached near the root and at the outter edges so I decided to leave it on to protect the injured part. I had no idea what kind of grossness was going on under my bright pink toe nail polish till one day (naturally while I was calling home to assure my parents that I was alive and well) a maggot stuck his icky little head out from the home he’d made between the wound and the nail. So I’m talking to my Dad trying to remain calm and find an excuse to get off the phone NOW while not freaking him out by my massive freak out over a maggot living in my toe!

    UHG! Just thinking about those slimey little buggers still makes my skin crawl.

  97. It is totally gross and yucky. Believe me, were it not for anonymity of the internet, one would hear about it. I am too embarrassed to tell anyone I actually know.

  98. My kid sister fell of her bike onto her face. The image of her stumbling along the driveway like a semi-concsious horror movie extra is burned in my memory forever, especially as my mom had expressly told us not to ride our bikes in the street. My poor sister had to have several teeth removed. Also her upper lip is larger on one side than the other which people often mistake as genetic because my mom’s lip is the same. But my mom got hers from running into a tree when she was in boarding school because her parents did not believe that she needed glasses.

    All the teeth stories freak me out, espeically after reading about the little boy in NY who died when the infection in his mouth reached his brain. Frankye, you have my sympathies, I hope that you get that sorted out soon.

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