What Have We Done To Ourselves?
Hello Deadsplinterklutzers. Let’s talk things we’ve done to ourselves!
A couple of days ago I was scoring a piece of plexiglass with a utility knife, I hadn’t been careful enough about putting down guides to keep the knife on track, the knife slipped, and I cut a nice groove in my thumb.
Dripping blood, I quickly wrapped it in gauze, then in tape. And remarkably after a couple of days, it seems to have closed up nicely and the incision looks pretty decent. I’m not being circled by carrion flies, that’s for sure.
So tell us, Deadsplinterslippers, of any mishaps you’ve had, preferably nothing too gruesome. Definitely no Fargo/wood chipper stories, please. Slipped on a banana peel? Nasty paper cut? Dropped a can of soup on your toe?
Or for that matter, have you inflicted some kind of accidental harm on something that’s purely cosmetic? Have you dinged your car door on a parking garage post? Spilled paint on your floor? Chipped a favorite coffee mug? Do you still laugh about the time ten years ago you stepped in what you thought was a shallow puddle, only to find your new shoes sunk up to the laces in mud?
What’s a self inflicted mess you can look back on now and shrug about? Share, and may the future never see a repeat.
Does going to grad school count?
Yes. Absolutely.
I hit my head on a joist yesterday working under a deck. I shattered a ceramic sink demoing a bathroom a few weeks ago & cut my shin pretty bad. I also hit my thumb hard with an impact driver & the mail turned black & is about to fall off. My building partner hit his head so hard on the same deck he had double vision yesterday.
I’m a huge klutz and often hurt myself doing everyday things. Once in the late 80s I broke my ankle stepping off my front step which was maybe only an inch high. I didn’t turn my foot or trip. Just stepped and crack. I have no idea how it happened. My orthopedist was former pro baseball player Doc Medich. He was really nice, a good doctor I thought. I was sorry when he was convicted of drug offenses later. I think he may have lost his medical license but I’m not sure.
My stepdaughter had multiple compound fractures in her tibia and foot and dislocated her ankle a couple of weeks ago just stepping down from a foot high retaining wall. Required surgery to fix and she’s his six months of PT in her future.
It’s so weird how something like that happens. Damn bodies are poised to turn on us at a moment’s notice.
Doc Medich! He was a good pitcher.
Last year, while building the tomato condos for the garden, I had to do it on my own because Mrs Butcher decided she didn’t want to help me this time. The problem is that I need someone to hold the posts so they stay in one place while I sledgehammer them into the ground. So I’m holding the post with one hand and the hammer with the other (all the way up by the head so I could control it) when one of my downstrokes misses the post and the tip of my index finger gets caught between the handle and the top of the post. I shattered it into three pieces and got a nice dose of compartment syndrome which required me to have a doctor punch a hole in my fingernail to let all the blood and pressure out. It took six months for my fingertip to heal and to this day it still doesn’t feel right.
Needless to say I told Mrs Butcher this year that she was damned well helping me build the condos this time. Went off without a hitch.
Does she hold the posts after that? If so, brave woman. Or is she smart and makes you hold the posts and she gets to swing the hammer?
She holds the posts because if she swing the hammer I’d have a cracked skull to go with my shattered fingertip.
My only tattoo (25 years old) is because I was playing around with Calligraphy pens & India ink😂🤣
I liked doing fine linework better than broad lines, but I spilled the ink, and needed to wash my hands…
Put the pen & nib on the back of the sink, annnnnd as I turned on the water, the pen somehow rolled & slipped. The nib went airborne, and managed to stab me in the back of my middlefinger, at the *top* left-side of the top knuckle.
It’s only a tiny dot, about 1/16″ wide, but it’s deep enough, that it *will* still be there, someday, when I’m old & dead😉😆😂🤣
Because it’s been 25 yeeeears, and it’s just *barely* lighter than it was when it was new!
I’d LOVE to get a real tattoo, buuuuut after seeing what happened to the staples after my distal pancreatectomy, and knowing that plenty of the colors in tattoo ink tend to have metals in them, it’s not really worth the risk of wrecking the art at best, and scarring/never actually healing, at worst, to take a chance…
If I ever *do* attempt one, I’m going to have to see if I can find an artist who’s willing to do a small color /”patch test”, to see if I can tolerate the colors without my body rejecting/eating ’em.
Eta–it’s not the old-school “Heavy Metals” I’m so worried about, it’s the *basic* metals like Iron, Copper, & possibly Aluminum–because I’m allergic to/or my skin eats pretty much *everything* that isn’t 10K or above yellow gold, or Sterling Silver–those are the only two metals I don’t react to… I’ve eaten through the posts of 10K White Gold earrings, down to the base metal, in less than a month, so I can’t even do white gold🙃
For years I had a pencil lead in my foot from the time when I stepped on one.
I used to surf a spot with lots of sea urchins. When you climbed up on the rocks to get out you would get them under your nails or in your heal. Super painful & they just shatter when you try to take them out. Edit: the spines break off in your heals or fingers. They dissolve over time but hurts
There was some kind of desert plant spine I got in my hand once that was the worst. About as thin as a hair, fragile, curved, but it hurt like hell and drove deep in my skin and broke into pieces that you couldn’t fish out.
There was some other thorny beach plant that seemed to leave shrapnel in my socks that I kept finding for an hour.
I get why nature creates giant spikes you can see from a mile away, but I’m not so clear on the function of the sneakier stuff.
The other day I made it home from lunch to start work by the skin of my teeth once again. This time I decided to sign in from on the work computer instead of through the app on my phone because some of my recent punches had been fucked (i.e., I was signed back in from “lunch” one day when I’d still had yet to sign out for it). But when I booted it up, the first thing that came up was that bullshit prompt from Windows to finish updating the device — which I’ve now had for three years, without Administrator privileges. When I made my way the three and half feet from my other desk to exit out of the screen, though, I tripped and fell, skinning my left knee on the carpet, bruising my right upper arm from trying to break the fall and being still not all the way there when I finally managed to sign in. And it took so fucking long to have the punch registered that I was technically a minute late for work.
But I sure as hell used the justification above as my last request this week to have a punch changed. And you know what? They did it, too!
I’ve been trying to remember dumbass things I’ve done that didn’t actually result in real injuries.
And then I remembered the time I went ass over teakettle at the Miami airport. It was on the people mover flat conveyer belt things and the big suitcase didn’t go over the edge fast enough as we were dismounting and I tripped into/over it!
Bruised a few spots but only injury was to my pride.
I’m surprised I don’t see luggage, sandals, etc. getting caught in those all the time. A lot of people in airports are jet lagged, transferring from long flights, and otherwise out of it, and I’d think it would be easy to lose track of what’s where.
It was so stupid I wiped out. I had one of the big roller hardshell suitcases. I could have just walked normally with it.
Never had an issue when traveling using a backpack!
That reminds me of the time I was holding my nephew going down on an escalator. I didn’t realize that his weight was enough to make my ankle length dress touch the floor. My dress got caught between the teeth of the steps where they flattened right before you’re supposed to get off. I practically threw my nephew at my sister then loudly ordered her to press the big red button. Lucky for me she didn’t hesitate. I managed to salvage the dress without injury but it could have ended really badly. The escalator stopped so suddenly that it almost caused an avalanche of people. Always hold the handrail folks!
I’ll be making my way through that same airport in a couple of months, so I’ll try to heed caution on your behalf.
I cut and scrape myself so often here on the farm that I finally got my tetanus booster after nearly 20 years. You got to watch yourself.
That TDaP booster hurts like hell! I’m due in about 6 years.
It wasn’t as painful as the HPV vaccine, that one hands down was the 3 most painful shots I’ve ever gotten.
I made my kids get that. I feel bad now (but it’s long over, so…).
3 painful shots is less pain and suffering than cervical cancer or the other ones it protects against!
I felt their pain for every shot. But no question, polio and TB and all the rest are bad news and ice cream soothes a lot of the pain.
Wait until you get the shingles vaccine.
Done and done. I got all my shots.
Mentioned before, I was 13 and reading a book… while riding a bike.
Went head first into the trunk of a parked Ford. I was lucky the car was a beater.
My sister was injured worse because she fell off her bike laughing at me.
Then there’s the career self inflicted wounds. Sigh. One thing I’m pretty sure I don’t regret was telling off/making fools of certain assholes who made my current work place a living hell. I enjoyed that.
What happened to her?
I suffered a bruised ego and some small bruises on my legs, but sis got a scraped elbow and two nasty bruises on her knees.
i managed to tear a ligament in my shoulder trying to put the bin out….fell off the step down out of my garden….which probably wouldnt have caused much injury if i’d just taken the face plant…but reflex said straight armed palm first was the best aproach to landing…after that failed miserably the bin i was pulling landed on me and spilled its shit everywhere….coz of course it did
also broken both my big toes trying to climb stairs too quickly on separate occasions
and theres a laundry list of injuries from failing to ride a bike