Terrifying Tales of Avoidable Injuries!

For some of us, it’s always the season of scares

Hi, friends. I thought it would be fun to revisit this piece from last year, since there’s a good chance you didn’t see it then. I hope you enjoy it. Happy Halloween!

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As I write this, I have a mouthful of blood. When I swallow or spit it out, more floods forth, like my jaw is the elevator from The Shining. It’s been like this for 15 minutes.

With Halloween just days away, it’s tempting to say that my wound is the result of something scary or sinister, like fighting off a horde of zombies, or gnawing through zip ties to escape my insane captor. But it isn’t.

What it is, is the latest in a long series of self-inflicted injuries resulting from shocking carelessness, horrendous judgment, and bone-chilling bad luck.

So, in this season of spooky stories, let’s take a tour through just a few of these macabre misadventures.

Frighteningly stupid falls

When I was nine, I set up a stepladder beneath the basketball hoop attached to our garage. I wasn’t restringing the net or retrieving a wedged ball. Under the misguided belief that I might be somewhat coordinated, I was preparing what was sure to be a world-class slam dunk.

Ball in hand, I sprung off the ladder, made contact with the rim, and—for reasons that still baffle me—held on. It was only when my body swung into a horizontal position that I let go, plummeting ten feet to the driveway onto my right hip.

I was in agony for over a week, and sprouted a ghastly bruise the size of a watermelon. And I didn’t even make the shot.

If we travel just around the corner from my hip we’ll land on my coccyx, which is exactly what I did about 25 years later.

One frigid Christmas Eve morning, I stepped out my back door onto the icy concrete porch, heading toward the icy concrete steps. You see where this is going. I wish I had.

Turns out there’s not much they can do for a broken tailbone, so it was not, in fact, a silent night.

The bright side? Upon liftoff, I reached an altitude typically only attained in conjunction with banana peels in cartoons. So that was something.

Bone-chilling bike crashes

Imagine you’re 11 years old. Your family moves to a different state. You start sixth grade knowing no one. A couple months in, you’re riding your bike—one hand on the handlebars, the other cradling a basketball—and your front tire catches a rock. You fly off and break your right arm.

You get the cast off just before Christmas. Three months later—on your birthday—you jump an enormous pile of mulch on your bike, because you’re a newly minted 12-year-old and dumb as said pile of mulch. You fly off and break your left arm.

Now, what lessons can we learn here? There are many, but here are the three most important ones:

1.) As an adolescent, breaking an arm is a great way to make friends. Everyone wants to know how it happened. Everyone wants to sign your cast. Maybe you get a cute girl to help you take notes. Totally worth it.

2.) Breaking two arms in the space of one school year muddies the waters. Now you’re just the weird, possibly cursed, kid who’s breaking his arms all the time. Your only saving grace is that you’ve run out of arms.

3.) Every time you hold a basketball a horrible accident befalls you. Stop holding basketballs.

The hedge from hell

There’s a long, tall hedge between my house and my neighbor’s. We take turns maintaining it. For obvious reasons, I try to be very cognizant of how I handle the electric trimmer.

This story also involves a stepladder, but this time I didn’t jump, I merely lost my footing. Fortunately, I wasn’t very high up. The problem came when, as I awkwardly stumbled to the ground, I realized I was losing hold of the trimmer and instinctively reached out to grab it. You know, to prevent it from digging its rapidly moving blades into my soft flesh.

Obviously, I grabbed at the wrong end. The blades went to town on my index finger. It could have been far worse, but if you’ve ever seen the SNL sketch where Dan Aykroyd played Julia Child, that’s more or less the geyser of blood I was dealing with. I wrapped my finger in a bounty of Bounty and held my hand above my heart as I drove to the hospital. A kind doctor stitched me up and sent me on my way with a well-intentioned but ultimately useless “Be careful!”

The next time it was my turn to get the hedge back in shape, I was ready. I was hyper-vigilant about keeping my arms away from my body, maintaining a respectful distance from my former assailant.

I made my way down the hedge, taking small steps to the right, eyes laser-focused on what I was doing. The thing is, when your eyes are so concentrated in front of you, they aren’t taking in anything below you. And what was below me was a small hole in the ground, just big enough for my foot.

I’ll cut to the chase—the trimmer cut through my leg. It missed the bone, but it did make its way through multiple layers that I’d previously only seen on posters in doctors’ offices.

Once again, paper towels, car, ER, be careful.

A freak snackcident

It should go without saying—should, but doesn’t—that the blood pooling in my mouth when we started this harrowing journey was not from another landscaping mishap.

No, I was undone by a fucking Wheat Thin.

I’d been enjoying a handful of the tasty crackers when somehow part of one ended up situated vertically beneath my tongue. Maybe I’d exceeded the recommended maximum chew rate, I can’t be sure—it’s all a blur. All I know is that when I bit down, the pressure caused this rogue snack to lacerate both the underside of my tongue and my inner bottom gum.

It may not have been a razor blade in a Snickers bar, but it sure did some damage. So please, the next time you’re faced with a lovely, seemingly harmless cheese platter, keep your wits about you.

As you enjoy this eerie time of year, you’ll naturally be on guard against the ghoulish and the gory. But if, like me, you’re horrifically clumsy, take these tales to heart and be warned: terror is always afoot.