Let's take a break from craft talk. Let's talk about the stuff that goes behind the story.
Share your gnarliest accident. This could include injuries or just plain embarassing things that you'd never tell anyone except your closest group of internet writing community friends. You ever almost end up in jail? Should you have died that time you tried a certain drug? Did you throw up on your mom? Did your girlfriend throw up on your crotch?
Dredge up your dirty memories.
When I was eight I crawled up on the roof. I stepped on a skylight and fell through, through the attic space, into my mom's bathroom. I landed in the bathtub the way a human body shouldn't, the back of my neck hit the side of the tub, and amazingly I didn't even break anything; I just had a crazy asthma attack. No, there was no water in the tub.
Who's next?
When I was 5 we had just moved and my mom was 8 months pregnant with my brother. I was climbing the tree in the backyard and somehow fell in the perfect way to be hung by my elbows. My mom couldn't get me down and we didn't know anyone in town we could call.
I think my mom was the one who pulled me down but I honestly don't remember. I just remember hanging there. I'm lucky I didn't dislocate anything!
I once dropped an empty plastic kitchen bin on my foot and didn't think anything of it because it didn't hurt that much. Turns out that the way it landed on my big toe killed the nail and some two weeks later my toe got more and more painful (the nail didn't go black, just stayed normal color) until I finally went to the doctor who said they had to pull it out. Yeah, were talking thick rubber band tourniquets and pliers. And yeah they did stick a needle in it to numb it so I didn't feel it, but god it hurt after. I was limping for days and my toe was a mangled raw skinned mess. Still the nail grew back fine (they told me it might not) so it's all good. :)
@Renee: Oh man. Hung from the elbows! That's a good one. Were your elbows like caught in the tree? Between two branches? I wanna know how they got you down, haha.
@Em: That sounds insanely painful. A few months ago, well maybe half a year by now, I slammed my finger in the car door. It bled, but it didn't look too bad so I just went home, cleaned it and wrapped it in gauze. But it swelled up to the point where my fingertip was twice as big as it should've been, and I could see the dent in my finger where the metal frame shoved the shape of my finger out of place. When I went to the doctor to get it checked out, they were astonished the pain hadn't brought me in sooner. It wasn't broken, but on the X-Ray the bone was actually misshapen, kind of an S-shape like the door had jammed my finger bone to fit it, and there were tiny, invisible fractures. It swelled up enormous and the blood had nowhere to go under the nail. That bitch got all purple and yellow until the nail fell off. Still looks kinda funky but it grew back in. I remember when they stuck the needle in to drain it and nothing came out. It was so weird.
Em and Tramp: ewwwww! haha
I almost killed my friend when I was about 11 (and she was maybe 9). I persuaded her to walk with me through the woods, to a lake (where I used to go with my family), even if she kept saying her father would beat her up if he knew, but I kept saying it's very close, we're almost there (it wasn't close!). At the lake, I got in the water and started swimming and she got in shallow water, only up to her knees because she couldn't swim. There was a steep incline on the lake's floor (which was made of cement on that side of the lake). On the incline, I stood on my toes and said, see, it's shallow here too, it's no deeper than where you are. Come here! Don't ask me why I said that, because I really don't know. Then she came to me, trustingly, and slipped on the incline and next thing I know, all I could see was her hair in the water. I froze. By some intervention from the gods or lady Luck, there was a man on the shore who saw the whole thing and jumped in and grabbed my friend by her hair. She was not even mad at me! I, on the other hand, was mad at myself for years after that (but only when I finally realized the enormity of what I had almost done).
Woahhh. That's intense! That's such a scary feeling, like when you're at the beach, walking through the shallows, and the ground suddenly cuts out from under you. And it's scary because it's not a swimming pool. You know there's all kinds of who knows what under there.
I keep forgetting to post this little anecdote.
I work at an elementary school, and the other week I noticed this one kid--I'd probably seen him hundreds of times before then--that he was missing the top segment of his pointer finger. From the middle knuckle up, just nothing. I wanted to know what the heck had happened, but I didn't want to embarass him, so I asked a co-worker, and this is what he told me.
The kid had his bike, right, in the garage or wherever, turned upside down, resting on its seat like when you need to fix it, the wheels up, and he was spinning the pedals fast, faster, faster. And then he grabbed the chain. And it just buzzed right through. My coworker told me the kid told him that the bit of finger was just hanging on by a bit of flesh and they had to cut it off.
How insane is that?? The kid basically chainsawed his own finger off. Scared the crap out of me; I did dumb shit like this when I was a kid, and I couldn't help but think how lucky I am to have never done this.
I was working at a factory. I loaded the blanks, painted the finished products, and loaded them on plastic crates. One night the line went down. I tried to get what little time I had productively, so I went for paint thinner through a small walkway that few people could see. I turned sideways to squeeze past a stack that was leaning and bumped into a large plastic container that had a crack. It basically impaled me? Pierced? I'm not sure the right word, but I had the sharp piece of plastic that went in my chest muscle and came out my shoulder. I was terrified, and no one could hear me yelling over the noise from the machines. I was worried I'd bleed out if I pulled it out. I thought it out and I'd have several seconds to get someplace visible. When I pulled it out it was very anti-climatic. Almost no blood. I put a band-aid on it and went back to work. Barely a scare.
!!! What! How was there barely any blood? Did you hit some miracle spot? Man, that sounds terrifying. Working in a factory sounds terrifying. I'd be too afraid of losing a finger or something.
I have no idea how that worked, just what happened. Factory covers a ton of different jobs, the worst I think I had to worry about was some heavy bruising. I know other people who have lost fingers and hands in other jobs.
That's scary, man. What job do you work now, if you don't mind me asking?
Security guard.
Less risk of injury?
I don't think so.
How come?
Just best guess.
