The “Water Cooler” is a feature on Claycord.com where we ask you a question or provide a topic, and you talk about it.
The “Water Cooler” will be up Monday-Friday at noon.
Today’s question:
QUESTION: What’s the funniest/strangest way you’ve been injured?
Talk about it….
50 comments
Riding my bicycle as a kid. I had a loose chain and reached down to check the slack. Only problem was I forgot to stop peddling. My finger went right in between the sprocket and chain. I was very fortunate that my finger actually fit between the teeth. I had to get off the bike and roll my hand all the way around the sprocket to get my finger out. More embarrassing than anything else. Had one hell of a blood blister. First and last time I ever did that.
Simonpure-
That sounds painful but it could have been
worse. When I was a kid one of my pals was
adjusting the chain on his bike. He had the
bike upside down and was cranking the pedals
by hand. His hand slipped off and went through
the sprocket. The chain cut off one of his fingers.
Consider yourself lucky.
Simonpure~
VERY LUCKY!
I was knocked down by a huge eighth grader coming out of PE when they were serving pizza at El Dorado. He stepped on my hand and broke a finger. At least it was left hand.
When I was in my teens my car had a dead battery, so I pushed it down a slight hill, thinking I would hop in and pop the clutch to get it started. The car picked up momentum and I couldn’t keep up. Needless to say, I lost my grip and skidded on the pavement tearing my shirt to shreds. The car didn’t survive, it crashed. and that’s too bad because it was a nice 1941 Chevy.
Another time when I was about 16, I was leaning into the open back door of a car saying good by to the passenger when the driver took off without realizing I was holding on. The door closed and broke two of my fingers.
its only funny now cause I was okay, but when I was about 9 years old, I was bucked off of my horse, she was spooked by a car, I went off the back of her, when I stood up, I spooked her again and she reared back and kicked me square in the forehead. I have no idea how long I was out for, but when I came to, I felt the blood on my face, and felt it all over my hands. I freaked out and ran to the house screaming, running towards the back of the house to our rear sliding glass door that had just been cleaned and looked like it was open, I ran square into the sliding glass door and laid myself out again. My mother heard the screams and the bang on the door, came and found me with blood on the slider and me with what looked like a bullet hole in my head. {turns out the shoes needed to be changed and one of the nails had backed out a little and most likely what hit me in the head when the horse kicked me} 20 something stitches later and a interesting story now.
@claycordcreekmike
Holy cow!
@claycordcreekmike~
I bet your Mother almost has a heart attack
You win Mike. Your post reads like a Farrely Brothers script.
It is absolutely amazing how some of us survived.
When I was young I was playing right field in Pony League Baseball. A pop up fly was hit towards me and I had my eye on that ball, my glove up ready to catch it. I knew I was going to catch that ball and was all set for it. Well the ball skimmed over the top of my glove, smacked me right in the nose with blood all over the place. It also broke my nose and I was tapped up for several weeks. That was over 54 years ago and I think and laugh about every now and then. I thought for sure I was going to catch that damn ball.
I didn’t think I was going to enjoy the comments to this one….but it’s been fun….
When I was a kid we had a little clubhouse in a
garden shed. To lock it up one person would climb
up through a small trapdoor in the roof and then jump
down. It was my turn to lockup. When I jumped down
I landed on a board with a nail in it. It went far into my
foot and I could not pull it out. Now I had a board nailed
to my foot. I had to hop home with the board attached.
My dad couldn’t remove it. The hospital was able to get
the nail out and then it was time for a tetanus shot.
Wow. I bet that must’ve hurt.
In 6th grade I was riding my bike. I did not see this curb in front of me. I did a complete flip in the air over the handlebars. I was very embarrassed because I was wearing my dress. I was worried people could see my panties and slip. So the only thing that was injured was my pride. That was in the San Miguel shopping center in the Eichlor Tract across from Heather Farm. Jack LaLane
was doing a book signing there then. That was a long long time ago. I remember like it was yesterday.
King’s don’t get injured.
I was four years old and the family went camping near Banff, Canada. There was a pasture next to the campground where a few horses were wandering around. One was a really cute foal that my little sister and I desperately wanted to pet.
The problem was that the horses would not come over to the fence. We called to them, my sister sang to them, and we tried to entice them with long stalks of fresh grass. No luck. So we decided to climb through the barbed wire.
We walked up to the horses and proceeded to pet the foal. Everything was great….until Mom Horse walked up behind me and chomped the crap out of my shoulder. It hurt like hell! We screamed and ran away while Mom ran out of the trailer to see what was going on. Then she hustled me into the bathroom to clean out the wound.
No major lasting damage. I remember the worst part being the nasty horse slime all over my neck and shoulder. The other really weird thing about all this was that when Mom was cleaning me up in the bathroom, some naked old lady kept running out of her shower stall to get soap, shampoo, a towel, etc. She must have run in and out of the shower 5 or 6 times.
I witnessed a strange accident that didn’t involve me but was quite memorable. We were at the Oakland Coliseum for a day on the green concert and while walking to the front gates through the parking lot a car with two guys on the hood took off fast. Both the riders slid backwards and to the side. One fell off the car on the passenger side and was scraped up but otherwise ok. The other one slid onto a broken side view mirror post on the driver’s side and impaled himself right through the back of his shorts and into his you know what. Never heard screaming like that before and hope I never do again. Concert was good though!
@MoJo, who did you see at the concert?
It was this one: Day On The Green #5: Ted Nugent, Blue Öyster Cult, Journey, AC/DC, Cheap Trick (September 2, 1978)
A pretty long time ago, my oldest brother was a Senior at Las Lomas high school. Late in the school year was time to have fun putting toilet paper in the trees. This was pretty accepted when the house was one of your friends. A practice known as TP’ing.
So one morning on Lilac Drive we were awakened to a bunch of toilet paper festooning the trees in front of the house. So we kids were dispatched to knock it down. As big brother slumbered on. We were using some brooms to knock down the TP with limited success. I grabbed a push broom and threw it up into the tree. It worked once but on the second try it didn’t come down. As I was standing under the tree wondering what do do I felt a hit on my head. Slam! I was staggered and put my hand up to see what had happened. Came down with a hand covered with blood.
I held my hand there and soon enough I was in the Kaiser emergency department, right down the street. I don’t remember too much except the part where the Doc asked what had happened. As I told my story I could hear the staff breaking out in laughter behind him. Memory has stuck to me until now. A scar is still right there on top of my head.
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I forgot I had left my hammer on top of the ladder when I came down to get more siding nails. Then before climbing up again, I decided to move the ladder. ..Bad move.
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Kapow! Right on my collar bone and I fell the ground like a bag of cement. Thank goodness it didn’t break my collarbone because I would have been laid up for weeks.
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February 14th, 2019……. Had slipped on my algae-coated front walk at home and broken my right fibula. At John Muir Walnut Creek Campus, the hospitalist asked the X-ray technicians to get pictures of my knee and pelvic girdle as well (“just to make sure”).
Too late, up on the 4-foot (or so) tall X-ray table, I realized that the technician….. when trying to remove the X-ray plate ….. was tilting it up at way too steep an angle as she pulled it toward herself. Simultaneously with registering that, I realized that there was no safety bar and no second technician guarding the other side of the table. So the ambulance’s transport air mattress and I slid off, causing me to hit the floor hard enough to break 3 ribs and to put a lump on the back right of my head.
Two and a half months later (because of the pinning surgery making me completely “non weight-bearing” and because the broken ribs led to pneumonia and to another 5-day stay in the hospital), I finally got out of a short-term care facility and went home to have 24/7 care there.
Happy Valentine’s day, Sweetheart !!!
Stepping over a barbed wire fence while cross country skiing. Barb caught in my pants, I fell and it tore a gash in my leg. It was cold enough that I did not feel it. Skied home. Pant leg contained red ice. Turned out to be superficial as the bleeding had stopped by then.
Then there was that time I was helping move some shelving and the guy at the other end picked up his end before I did and a shelving bracket punched into my scalp. I was sewed up by an obstetrician as he was the only surgeon around. No anesthetic.
Was in Jr. High at the time. Was doing cart-wheels,….then, the last one I did, got caught in a hand-stand and my arms were tired, and I fell and broke my collar bone. Hurt real bad for 3 days till a visiting Aunt noticed, and yelled at my Father to take me to the doctor. Took 8 weeks to heel with a brace. Just blessed I didn’t break my neck. Haven’t done a cart-wheel since,…LOL!
My first year in college, I got a torn ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) trying on a bikini that was too small at Rhodes in Concord. I was determined to get the bottom on because the top fit okay. I was tugging on it, trying to get it over my knees when suddenly my right knee popped out of place and went sideways … and then popped right back in place. I saw the whole thing in the mirror, and it was gruesome. It hurt so much I sat down half dressed and looked in the mirror … my face was ashen white. I felt nauseous like I was going to throw up or faint. Part of it was the pain, but part of it was seeing my knee go so unnaturally sideways like that. I didn’t think it was humanly possible.
I sat there for several minutes trying to compose myself, and waiting for the pain to subside, then I stood up and tried to walk. I could barely put any weight on that leg, so I sat there a while longer wondering what I was going to do. I had to get out of there and back to the car. I must have sat there for 45 minutes. The clerk came and asked if I needed any sizes, and I just said, “No.” I was “trying to decide.” I gingerly took the suit off, returned it to the hanger, left it in the dressing room, and limped out of the store … very quietly, trying not to attract any attention. I had a very hard time explaining the injury to everyone. Football players with this injury get lots and lots of physical therapy — sometimes it is a career-ending injury and I can see why. I limped around for a month or so until I could walk, again. Was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done and it was my own fault.
A friend had to do something for PE in college and chose ice skating. Decided the best way to learn was to teach me. Since I didn’t fall the first time out I let him practice his skating while teaching me. I learned how to glide with one leg up behind me. I think he called a swan pose or something. As I started around the curved end of the rink my skate leg slowly gave out from under me. I gracefully landed on my tummy with my hands stretch out and equally gracefully plowed into the wall. Broken fingers meant I couldn’t type well at work for a while.
Saw a spider on the ceiling climbed up on my bed to kill it, as i did i tore my calve muscle. I did kill the spider but it cost me
When I was young and foolish, I mistakenly thought I should do whatever my boss told me to do. So, I attempted to refuel a pump while it was still running. The pump went up in flames, seriously burning my left arm. Fortunately, my doctor had recently returned from Vietnam, treating napalm victims. I was scheduled for surgery three times, but thanks to my treatment, I never needed surgery. I recovered, and after a dozen years or so, I couldn’t even tell where I had been burned.
As a very dim child, I once got a very close look at a light bulb, and touched my forehead to it. Nice little burn mark (not terribly bad, but blatantly obvious, particularly for the school picture a couple days later). That is just one of a long long list of dumb things I have done that led to injury.
Jeff-
Like I once heard someone say (and I agree)-
“It wasn’t the dumbest thing I’ve ever done,
but it was in the top 50”.
Once as a kid on the last day of school we had
a class party. The teacher had strung up balloons.
I got the not so bright idea to roll up a sheet of
paper to make a blow gun tube to shoot and pop
the balloons. I took a long pin and put it in the tube
ready to fire away. As I inhaled to shoot I sucked
the pin down my throat. It was gone and I never
again tried that stupid stunt. As I said- Not the
dumbest thing I ever did, but in the top 50.
Shoulda~Gonna show my age here. That totally reminds me of Bushy Hare in a Bugs Bunny episode when he went to shoot Bugs with a dart and Bugs blew the other end right down Bushy’s throat.
One time I put two Pop-Tarts into the microwave. I heated them up and took them out. Then I broke one open and prepared to eat it. The filling had liquefied and dripped out onto my hand. It was so hot and it began burning me. because of the sugar inside it was literally like napalm. I tried to wash it off but it wouldn’t come off It just kept burning. I wound up with a second degree burn. This was at work so it was a recordable injury on their OSHA log.
When I was 8 or 9, my next door neighbor (a year older than me) and I were playing darts in the backyard. He said “watch, I’ll hit the fence.” I assumed he meant the fence beyond our target. However, he meant the one behind me and I was supposed to duck. He spun around and threw the dart. I saw this horrified look on his face and glanced up to see the dart sticking in my head. I never felt it and it didn’t bleed. An inch lower and it would have hit me in the eye, an inch or so higher and it would have missed me. We tried, but couldn’t pull it out. My parents rushed me to the hospital, where they did x-rays. It hit near the top of my head and went about 2/3 of the way through my skull, but didn’t penetrate into my brain, so there was no harm done. They put me on a surgical table and one person held me down while another used a pair of surgical pliers to pull it out. The only thing that hurt was the tetanus shot. My friend was the best man in my wedding several years later.
Was playing Evel Knievel on my stingray. On the last jump I landed in front on a girl driving with her learner’s permit…and her mom. Bounced off the hood and then flopped around on the street holding my 9 yr old knee. Poor girl is probably not driving to this day.
1st story, new girlfriend was having a party (11th grade), it was a Sunday BBQ party with parents and friends. I walked full speed into the sliding glass door, suprised I didn’t bleed! I had actually forgot about it because it was so embarrassing, until I ran into someone who was at that party 25 years ago and reminded me.
2nd, I was house sitting for the summer in Bixby Oklahoma…..this was approximately a 10 acre property with a three bed/three bed house. There was a certain area where they wanted the grass (weeds) cut, this took about a day and a half every two weeks. Before going through on the riding mower/mulcher I would have to pick up all of the branches from the Oak trees, you would always see copperheads near the tree trunks.
The branches were all collected and thrown into a burn pile. I used gasoline to wet down the pile for a good fire, when I lit the match I apparently was not far enough away and POOF…..hair singed off of my arm and eyebrows, I didn’t know how bad the burns were as I made my way to the garden hose. Nothing was really visible, didn’t even look as bad as a sunburn….but the tingling was so bad that I couldn’t sleep. I finally got creative and got some Vitamin E capsules, broke them open and rubbed the oil all over the burn. The next day the pain was gone.
Second knuckle on my right index finger was smashed while hitching up a water buffalo.
When I was a kid, I was riding my bike and I went off a small jump. When I landed, I sat back on my seat but my seat was loose and flipped up. I landed on the rear knobby tire and got my testicles stuck between the frame and the tire. I had to go to the hospital to get surgery. I was embarrassed and didn’t show my dad until a week later, but by that time my left testicle was the size of a baseball, with purple veins going through it. It was reminiscent of an alien’s head on Star Trek. Thankfully they were able to save it.
OMG! I guess you’re familiar with excruciating pain. Geez, this story isn’t at all funny, either.
I ain’t gonna lie, that hurt to read.
One time that comes to mind was the day I met my horse. It turned out that he was a retired barrel racer, but the current owner hadn’t had him long, or known much about his history. I found out later on that he’d been famous in his prime, I met people sometimes while we were out and about who’d recognize him and they knew him by name. All I knew he was the cutest little shaggy buckskin mustang I’d ever seen. His owner told me he was for sale, and she offered to let me ride him. It was pure happenstance, she only had a rope halter and a short rope lead with her, but she said he’d be easy to manage with just that for a little test drive because he normally wore only a hackamore bridle (with no bit in the mouth), and he was just a large teddy bear. She put the loose rope end over his neck and tied it onto the halter to function as “reins”, and the friend I’d come with to visit her horse helped me up on to his bare back. I was meant to wait as my friend mounted up and we would go for a little ride, but no sooner than I sat upright on him and picked up the rope, he stretched out his neck and for no reason at all he took off at a full gallop, made a turn and ran straight into an old orchard next to the pasture. He headed directly for a tree with the lowest gnarly horizontal branch, lowering his head to gallop under it! When I realized where the crazy thing was headed and I could see the branch coming quickly upon us, I was not even sure the horse had the necessary clearance to pass underneath, and I knew I didn’t, not sitting upright anyway. As quickly as I could I laid down on his back and withers, and made myself as flat as possible. I exhaled all of the air in my chest and turned my head sideways, but I was at least halfway certain I was going to be scraped off. I was pleasantly surprised when we both made it under, but there really couldn’t have been an extra inch between that branch and my back. I didn’t have long to enjoy that moment either, when he zigged and never breaking his stride he hurtled towards the lowest horizontal branch of another tree, and charged under it. Again I had only a moment to forcefully exhale while spreading myself out as flat as I consciously could. He continued zigging and zagging through that orchard, I watched him each time as he looked for, spotted, and then aimed purposely for the lowest branch of the next tree he’d selected to gallop under. It happened too many times for it to be a fluke that he aimed for the lowest point of each gnarled branch. After five attempts at my life he seemed to tire or get bored with it, and he came to a stop. He allowed me to “guide” him back to where we started, where the small group of people with very big eyes and open mouths stood by helplessly. He following my directions like the old overgrown teddy bear I had been promised he would be. It was really weird because I was young (nearing my thirteenth year) and had very little experience to be making this kind of judgement, but I thought it felt like he had a very different attitude about me from our first few minutes together. It seemed I sensed he was impressed, like I had passed a sort of a test, but I had only determined to stay on him because I was more afraid of falling off!😆 That was such an intelligent animal, he had some brilliant tricks up his sleeve that I’d learn about later. Luckily, though he had fire in his heart, he never behaved like that again. I wasn’t injured, but it wasn’t for lack of trying, and it was pretty funny afterwards. Anyway, I see some stories with injuries, that I’m failing to see the humor in, so…
@Silva I had a horse do the same thing to me but there were no trees involved…. Damned animal threw me through (not into… THROUGH a fence and into a hedge of rose bushes. One of the fence nails ripped me right across my thigh… a little more to the left & I would have lost my privates. Lotsa blood, but I wasn’t hurt too bad.
@Silva Amazing. I guess we know now why you dislike Donald Trump so much. You’re just like him. “Dtable genius” outsmarts cleaver horse and returns to the barn unscathed, the hero of the story.
When I was like 9 I tried to climb up a tree to save some cat and the branch I was climbing on snapped and I landed on my back and somehow pulled my groin. Had to walk with crutch’s for a while I don’t remember how long but it hurt a lot. I remember driving everyone nuts saying repeatedly “I PULLED ME GROIN!!”
Now that I look back at it how dumb I was because I’m sure that cat could get down just fine on its own and even if I did manage to get up to it and try to grab the cat it would have probably scratched the heck out of me lol.
Neighbors took me with them on vacation to Disneyland. I was 8 years old. Went down the slide at the pool backwards got scared and grabbed onto the under sides of the fiber glass slide. Sliced open all my fingers. Every finger had to be stitched up.
I got hit in the head with a discus at a track meet in high school.
When I was little my family took us to a park with a playground. I was up in a crow’s nest dropping sand on my little sister who was playing below me. When she looked up I ducked down. My butt hit the center pole and bounced me forward into the outside wall. I hit my nose. Still not wanting my sister to see me, I climbed down. When I got down I was sneaking away holding my nose. When I pulled my hand away it was covered with blood. That’s when I started crying. That’s also when I first met Karma!
Ive done this too! No blood though.
Not funny very strange and it REALLY HURTS.
Walking down a brick stairwell, holding onto the railing and my pinky fingernail got caught in between 2 bricks for a split second, and when I went to go down to the next step, it ripped my entire pinky nail off.
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