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Stupidest injury ever

Must be some good contenders on here.  I think for me it's totally missing a piece of wood with a hatchet and sticking it in my hand.

I broke my finger tying a shoelace in the gym.  That and walking into a lamppost on the way to work one morning and having to take myself to A&E with a massive Wily Coyote style bump on the front of my head.

I tore my cruciate getting up off the sofa.

I've blown two discs in my lower back whilst picking up the phone charger.

I went fishing with some friends as a teen and ended up in A&E getting my braces and gums separated after getting accidentally smacked in the face with a hurley.

Only last Chrimbo after 'zzette was warning me about being careful with the new Santoku knife I was using to chop the veggies. I'd barely finished the sentence "It's the blunt knives which are most dangerous because they are more likely to slip" before I'd taken off a couple of mms off the top of my thumb and covered the veg with buzz claret.

Falling off a yacht in harbour but managing to arrest my fall by snagging the guard rail in my armpit. 85kg accelerating at 9.8m/s being stopped by a 4mm non-coated steel wire had a pretty predictable outcome.

I put a large oak round in a hydraulic splitter and the timber was damp on the outside but dry as a bine inside sfter 5 years of storage. First go the compressor closed the jaws and nothing happened. I reset the splitter. on the second go the wedge was making progress so I reversed it and tried a third time. It was close to splitting then paused and then BANG it fired two large chunks out at 45 degrees to each other, one taking the helmet and visor i was wearing off my head with an upper cut, and I fell backwards while taking evasive action and tripped on the wheel axle onto the gravel and as I lay there the other piece came down on my head. A piece of oak the size of a large cake, corner first, into my cranium. I suffered a fractured skull. This was Christmas before last. Am still the proud owner of a dent in my heid. 
Amazing I am not dead. 

I broke my new adult front tooth as a kid trying to pull down on the bathroom light cord with my teeth. Instead I bit the rigid plastic at the bottom of the cord which it turns out was tougher than my tooth.

I have also been bitten by a mole. They look so cute but they dont let go easily.

Report in the Times today of two women killed in a car crash when they were catapulted from a Mini convertible. They were not wearing seat belts because at the time of the accident they were twerking. 

I was on an exercise when in territorials years ago.  After a contact I sprinted up and threw myself down behind a pine tree, impaling myself eyeball first on a wee broken branch sticking out of the trunk.   Queue much panic.  Tore the eyelid but miraculously the eye itself was unscathed.  Received a forfeit at the end of ex for stupidest self-inflicted injury

Whilst chopping an avocado and observing to a friend that an absurd number of people sustain injuries while chopping avocado every year, I managed to stab myself directly in the palm, stigmata-style. Oof. 

Mutters' one sounds like it could have been that scene from The Hurt Locker.

Sails, the gash was about 3 inches long and required more than a few stitches.  My left armpit now looks like a particularly grim and quite angry looking full bush level hairy fanoir.

I broke my new adult front tooth as a kid trying to pull down on the bathroom light cord with my teeth. 

Of the list of things you really should never put in your mouth, that toilet cord is high up there... people don't wash their hands, sad but true

Tried to leapfrog over a bin aged 19, it was too wide for my legs so I got stuck on it, fell forward and landed mouth first on the pavement. Lost one tooth and had a seriously messed up mouth and gums for weeks.

the stupidest injury of all time though has to be Gary Hoy, a Toronto Lawyer who plunged 24 stories to his fatal injuries whilst demonstrating to some trainees how tough the windows were in the office.

I broke my nose as a kid trying (reasonably successfully) to ride a bike through a chain link fence at speed.  In my defence, I was coming down a steep hill intending to pull off a slide around the corner and the brake cable snapped, so I went straight on instead.

A mate and I were throwing a machete at a tree (also as a kid ftaod) and rather than it comedically bouncing off and impaling one of us, the wooden handle (it was used on their farm, so had been stored in a shed for years) disintegrated and one of the metal bindings that had been holding it together tore my little finger from knuckle to knuckle.  Fortunately more of a slice, than pulling the flesh off, so a nice scar, but nothing  more than a tight bandage (I said I'd caught it on barbed wire) and a tetanus shot.

Post banged my head when the banger came up too high off the post.  Crescent scar remains on my scalp.

Forgot that fluid is incompressible when bottling cider into demi johns, shattered glass severed ligaments in hand and fingers necessitating microsurgical repair, scars remain and one finger still not quite right 10 years on.

Constructed a very long, very fast zip wire without putting some buffering around the large turnbuckle at the low end.  On the first test run my forehead collided with the threaded part of the turnbuckle and for a week or two afterwards bore a perfect impression of an m20 thread.

Leapt from office junk to Hong Kong harbour side and slipped down into the harbour between junk and harbour wall.  Badly gashed leg, with scar remaining 35 years on.

Kissed a dog outside a shop over 50 years ago, it bit my lip and scar remains.

Many, many more other bumps, scrapes and cuts which have resulted in lots more scar tissue.

Mog - sod the scar - how did you survive an encounter with Hong Kong harbour (35 years ago) with an open wound?  Presumably required a full work up of shots and antibiotics!

my uncle banged his head severely on the corner of a cupboard, it caused a clot to form on his brain which required simple surgery to remove.  However, during the surgery, the surgeons got into an argument in which one of them dropped a scalpel, cutting my uncles carotid and they couldn't stop the bleeding.  So a simple everyday bang on the head killed him.

 

I managed what a friend described as the most middle class injury he had ever heard of. Was surfing in Sri Lanka (badly as my skills are questionable) and cut my heel on some coral. Cleaned it but it became a nasty infection. A couple of days later I had a read line progressing up my leg. Went to the doc and was prescribed oral antibiotics. That didn't cut it and a day later I wasn't so lucid and the infection progressed. Took a taxi to a big city hospital in Colombo who put me straight into surgery to remove an abscess from my ankle and stuck me on iv antibiotics. Spent the rest of the holiday in hospital and only release the night before my flight.

Herniated a disc taking a throw-in (football)

Twice-broken ankle, resulting in an ankle fusion at 28. First time, I got my foot stuck in the ground while trying to turn after stopping the ball going for, yes, a throw-in (football)

Mutters, your injury doesn't sound so much stupid as full-on insane Final-Destination-level shit. Did you recently dodge death as a result of an hysterical stranger's premonition of a plane crash/roller coaster disaster/NASCAR pile-up?

It was, as you suggest, far from amusant.

 

I had a woolly hat on inside the chainsawing helmet/visor affair. Following the CLONK moment I put my hand up to my head and took off my hat. There was a lump of scalp attached to the inside of the hat and within about, oh I don't know, one second, there was blood absolutely going everywhere.

 

It was not a convenient time to be injured. We had my mother in law in hospital. I came inside and rinsed my head under the tap. It seemed to stop bleeding. This was boxing day. I , entirely madly, decided not to go to hospital but instead to do a 1000 piece puzzle and see if my cognitive processes were in any way impaired and to check vision, headaches etc.

Two weeks later I was immensely fatigued and getting headaches. I went to the doctor, she sent me to  a neurosurgeon and he sent me for a scan statim.  He said you are a fooking idiot but a lucky one.  Because of the fracture there was minimal fluid pressure, (indeed, all the fluid was outside not held in). And thus I did not suffer an aneurism or haemorrhage or stroke or cardiac arrest etc. 

 

He said "most die in this situation".  I thanked God. 

I finished the puzzle.  

the detail of the wet outside and dry inside thing was that it was the wet bark which caused the malfunction.  The compressor was building HUGE pressure and the wedge couldn't split it. When it did so, the lubricated wet bark sides of the two split blocks caused them to fire upwards not out sideways as they slipped their moorings. 

 

I regret that whole affair

the fracture healed. But those who are lucky enough to be invited to run their beautiful fingers through my hair (not you three dux) can get a sense of where the impact zone was. It's like someone's just knocked a chisel across the top of my forehead.

A propos of your 14:36, Sails, yes she is blessed with much common sense. Very keen to impress this on me and to impede my progress in my voyages of discovery and invention. If the world was entirely populated by her kind rather than mine we would not be out of the caves yet. But we would be safe, with a full set of digits and limbs, but bored. There would be no cars, racing and fire. 

 

A neighbour was on his roof and needed to trim the ridge tile he was fitting so he rested it on his leg while he took the angle grinder to it and cut into his patella.

During the winter of '81 whilst at Uni went tobogganing with some mates, and trying to impress a potential  girlfriend, went far too fast and wasn't able to stop in time before I careered into some barbed wire fencing at the bottom of the slope. 

Hong Kong harbour was certainly filthy and smelly at that time.  As a coda to that story, after being fished out, I brushed away all offers of assistance, assuring my colleagues I was fine, and boosted my lots of San Mig, limped off to the MTR where I boarded for my journey home to Kowloon Bay.  After a while, I noticed that other passengers were looking at me and muttering to each other.  I glanced down and saw the gash which had somehow become much worse, my leg dripping with blood, my shorts sodden with harbour water.  And promptly vomited over myself and train. The episode later featured in the gweilo column in the Hong Kong Tatler.

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