For me, I think it was when I was playing in the yard, and saw one of my mom’s pots of dirt for her garden, and I thought “yeah this would be good to dump on my lap”
It was full of fire ants. Big, angry, north carolinian fire ants.
I was covered in red welts and all I remember is screaming at the top of my lungs while my mom sprayed me down with a hose
physically or emotionally?
Parents told me I’m the cause of all their problems.
1970s, uk, aged around 4 or 5, walking down the stairs carrying a glass when I tripped, Cut my right hand up pretty bad. My mum wrapped my hand in a towel and rushed me to a nearby army base where the medic did an effective but clumsy job of stitching me up - I still have a big scar but no movement damage.
I have no memory of it, but my father certainly does. When he came home from work to find the house with its doors wide open, blood everywhere, and nobody around, he kind of freaked out.
I was 11 or so, on holiday, went horseback riding wearing shorts and thin socks. They set up my stirrups too low and as I held on to the saddle for dear life, one stirrup kept bouncing on my ankle for the entire afternoon.
My thighs chafed pretty bad, and I got an open wound on my ankle about the size of those souvenir pressed oval coins. I don’t know what my dad was thinking, but he treated my wound with some cream and then wrapped my whole calf in plastic wrap every day for about a week.
The wound turned into an ulcer, I couldn’t walk without limping. I had all these little pockets of pus on the edges which my dad had me squeeze to try and make them smaller. It did nothing except be painful.
I eventually went home to my mom - a nurse - who took one look at my leg and rushed me to a doctor.
The doctor then proceeded to vigorously clean my wound before dressing it. It felt like hot barbed wire, that really sucked.
I still have the oval scar on my ankle.
Jesus, I’d be pretty mad at my dad for nearly causing my leg to be amputated.
As a kid our alley in back was where all the neighborhood kids played. We all decided it was race time. Most of us were on bikes but I happened to have my roller blades on.
Important detail is that there was a pretty steep slope from one end of the alley to the bottom before it leveled out halfway down. Of course we start at the top, everyone’s getting speed and I’m focused so I don’t get the wobbles. I’m actually ahead and it’s me a Jorge going neck and neck until I hit a rock at the bottom.
I tucked and rolled (apparently about 5 times) before I land on my back and slide for another 15 feet.
Maybe it was bad enough for the ER but in that day and with my family we treated it at home if it wasn’t a broken bone or head wound. So I laid belly down on the couch while my Pops picked gravel out of my back and blotted me with peroxide and anticeptic. Overall it wasn’t as bad as some of my brothers’ accidents but it looked pretty gnarly.
I could have won dammit
Slipped getting out of the bath when I was about 12. My foot hit one of the metal poles supporting the sink, with my little toe going one side and the rest of my foot the other. My foot tore on impact, leaving my little toe hanging off.
I bandaged it up, and kept changing the bandage when it was soaked through with blood and it eventually stopped bleeding. I have a scar on my foot, but other than that no lasting damage.
I accidentally slammed my picky toe into a corner once and I’m pretty sure I broke it. But I was scared to tell my parents, so I just wore socks around the house until it healed.
I don’t think it healed properly either. If I feel the edges of my picky toes, I can feel a difference between my right and left. Using standard anatomical terms of location for clarity, the toe that got injured has a pointier joint on the medial edge, with the distal bone of the pinky turning slightly more laterally than the uninjured toe bone does. It doesn’t hurt today and doesn’t cause me any issues, as far as I can tell.
It still sucks that I’m not the only one who felt the need to hide an injury as a child.
Tried to stop a garage door of close up and broke my arm.
I placed my entire hand on a hot iron. For more than a few seconds - super dumb and ignorant.
Ended up having my entire hand wrapped in bamdages.
Take your pick:
3 years old I took a corner to fast at Mervins and almost took out my right eye on a glass shelf, 2 stitches.
6 years old I tried to do a backwards wheelie on my bike by jamming my foot in the front fork… while going down hill and carrying a load of oranges in my shirt. Went right over the handlebars, came to a stop on my chin. 13 stitches.
[…] I really wanted a broken arm, so people could sign my cast, but I never quite managed to break anything.
Around primary school, I got two scars on my chin, on the same place, because I did not have the reflex to put my hands in front of me when falling on my face. Both times I fell face-first on a stone floor.
And I once fell over backwards and broke my arm, because I was laughing so hard.
As a teenager I also broke my nose in 38 pieces because of that lack of basic reflexes + causing a traffic accident due to being reckless and stupid.
Kids, don’t go over red lights, even if you think there is no car coming. Especially not when it is getting dark and you got headphones with music on.
I went camping with my family, was probably seven or eight years old. There was a sign right next to our camping spot to notify people about something not to do, who knows what the message was in reality but I like to imagine it as “do not bend this sign backwards to use it to catapult rocks you find laying around nearby”.
Anyway, while my parents were preoccupied with setting up our tent, my makeshift catapult hit me right by the eye. Thankfully it did not actually injure my eye itself, just huge cuts both above and below the eye, but I had a pretty good talent for screaming at that age regardless of which part of my body was hurting. I remember after an hour or something my parents kept pushing that all the other campers were going to think I was being abused, and then we packed up and left our week-long camping trip a couple hours after arriving.
Went sailing for a day without any shirt on. Worst sunburn ever. Luckily we had to practice for a musical at school where we would put our arms around eachother at some point, i skipped that part for a bit.
This is also mine. All day at a pool with no sunscreen. The burn had almost a purple hue to it and my parents did nothing about it so I lay in my room on my belly for days until eventually my parents dropped me off at my aunt and uncles and my uncle cotton saw my now cracking skin said “Boy get some aqua vera on that thing good god!” And after that it started to heal
As someone who’s white ass just got very sunburned on a boat ride, I can relate
Oof, this happened when my family went tubing down the Delaware River. It was the first time in my life that I was grateful women’s bathing suits include a top, as I got burnt horribly, but I didn’t end up with as much burn as the guys in my party all did. My poor, Canadian boyfriend looked like a tomato at the end.
The worst was probably splintering my tailbone. Apparently I have oddly dense bones, so they don’t like to full out break, but just splinter.
I was snowboarding and trying to keep up with my mom. At the very very end of the run, I snagged my back edge and got slapped so hard to the ground, I’m pretty sure I blacked out for a few seconds (wear a helmet, kids). We rode the rest of the day and I don’t remember much about it all except my butt hurt so bad. I couldn’t sit down normally for over a year. I sat on my knees or in a snow tube in the living room because I couldn’t stand to sit on the couch or in a chair at all.
A separate incident that might also tie for worst, but I think I fractured my skull when I was around 8? It could just be one of the growth plates, but I have a scar in my skin, and then a serious dent in my forehead in the skull which is attached to a long crack that goes down to my eyebrow before I’m not able to feel it anymore. We didn’t go to the hospital or anything, I just dealt with the swelling and the small split. I did dent the corner beam in our house though. Thick skull I guess?
I dented my forehead as a kid on a coffee table at my grandma’s house.
I was jumping on the couch from cushion to cushion and slipped head first into the edge of the table. Don’t remember much afterwards except for no hospital. My dad told me years later “yeah, that probably needed stitches, but I didn’t want you to be scared…”
That’s the one benefit of today’s IKEA furniture: it disintegrates on heavy contact; furniture from the 70’s was made from steel reinforced hardwood – that table could have held up a truck.
Let’s see…
- Accidentally stapled my thumb before school. Had to remove it before I left.
- Twisted my ankle from jumping off the swings and not landing correctly.
- Braked too hard on a wet, wooden surface on my bike and flew off it (I do mean flew, it was quite a few feet horizontally, and about 2 feet vertically in the air.)
- Playing catch with my father and got hit about an inch from my testicles. Thankfully no damage to them, but it hurt about as bad as you can imagine.
Surprisingly, no bones were broken, and I wasn’t an outdoorsy kid either.
Built a treehut between three trees close to our backyard without realising one of the trees were rotten.
It started as a platform maybe 1.5 meters up when started on the walls.
As I stood on one of the edges, the rotten tree opposite me, that corner of the platform broke off.
I was pivoted straight into the ground where a plank with a nail stuck halway into it was laying.
I fell directly onto the nail which penetrated my right arm at the tricep, maybe 3/4 of the way through the entire arm.I’m just really happy it didn’t hit my head, as that would have been really bad
