Stupid accidents that got you to A&E!

[TPMB12]

Got one today.  Cut my finger on industrial bandsaw. I've never tested to anything so fast n I'm my life! Stopped  cutting, hand removed, glove off and finger in mouth with bandsaw powering off in about 1 or 2 seconds! Even before blood appeared it was in my mouth.

Not sure it's accepted first aid n practice to put a cut in your mouth but until 8 could get something to act as emergency dressing it worked,

Anyone been stoopid in a non lethal and everything OK in the end but boy do you feel stooped kind of way?

PS advice on dressings appreciated too as I don't like the double fabric condom dressing the urgent treatment centre used. Can't see if it's too tight and if does feel tight.

[ElyDave]

Similar to yours, brand new blade in a bowsaw, skipped and went straight  across my left index finger. As the claret started to flow, I locked up the shed, walked into the house, grabbed some kitchen roll and walked through the living room with a cheery "I'm just off to minor injuries"

Steristrips, and the same double fabric condom to stop me bending it.

And then there was the student, drunken trampoline incident resulting in someone else's broken nose, and my fractured knuckle. I think the hangover dulled the pain on the three hour drive back to Taunton

[Hot Flatus]

Didn't result in A&E, but I once stupidly decided to see if braking by pressing my foot against the rim of my front wheel would work.

As it happened, it did. I stopped instantly.

I don't think I'll tell you how old I was when I tried this.

[ian]

I have told the story of the time I printed off the requisite five copies of my PhD thesis. To take them to the binders, I put them in a box that reams of paper come in. It was a bit on the tall size, so for bus-transport practicality, I decided to cut the box down to size. Now what do I have as a cutting instrument? Hmm, a dissection kit, I spy. And a sharp scalpel.

Blood spewed everywhere horrorshow-style as I sliced right through the base of my thumb. I had to print another five copies. Of course, as a bloke, I duct-taped my hand back together and then taped a tea towel around that, and then sealed my everything up with a Somerfields carrier bag.

I have a lot of scars, that's not nearly the biggest. I would have done good in that scene in Jaws.

[Jaded]

Got 19,165 on Asteroids. Also had a few pints...

Cycled home and stopped quickly when someone walked onto the pedestrian crossing that was always there.

The good news was that the blood was still on the pedestrian crossing two weeks later.

[JellyLegs]

At about 8 years of age, I threw a right handed hay maker at some annoying kid in the school playground.  Being crap at fighting, it missed without him even needing to duck and my fist slammed into the corner of the wall behind him.  Queue a trip to A&E and a very painful broken knuckle to remind me not to be such a prat next time!

[TPMB12]

I also broke my knuckle, took the skin off my palm and put a cut across the knuckle. The resulting crush injuries made my hand swell up so the skin on the back of my hand beca very tight and the flesh within the wound stretched flat and exposed to its base.

The injury happened as I was scrambling up a rock face. The crux was at the top of the crawler and as I looked over the top to work out how to make the move I saw a boulderroll down the hill above it.  I saw it stop, rock then start moving again and layed back to take my head out of the way but the hand that held me up was where the boulder went. Friction took the skin off my palm and the rock split my hand and broke my knuckle.

I filled two large ambulance dressings with blood and at MRT base the replacement filled with blood before I got to A&E. Then the next 2 weeks the dead skin on my palm kept dropping out of my dressings like my hand was actively producing it!

That's not stoopid but it certainly had a big effect on me. I now believe your body actively gives you what you need to cope. By this I mean my hand didn't hurt and I was able to climb down despite it being broken and heavily broken skin. Add in the fact I read immune to local anaesthetic  when they put 5 stitches into my hand that made me start to be squeamish about needles. Never had any issues with needles before the stitches the doc put in made me turn away from looking at what he war doing.  I felt it all including thread pulling through and the sharp tug as he pulled the stitch tight.

My last stupid was slicing my finger tip off in the garden shredder when unblocking it!

[Wowbagger]

Not me, but both brothers have form with hand injuries from mechanical devices.

Older brother (died last year - not from blood loss) once decided to adjust the height of his rotary lawn mower without first switching off the engine. He drove himself to hospital where they put 35 stitches into his hand - from palm and along the index finger.

T'other brother did a Silly Thing with a hedge trimmer and all but lost the end joint of one of his fingers, which the hospital sellotaped back on, and he still has a full complement of fingers on each hand.

I do my best to avoid such contrivances, having no lawn of my own to mow, nor hedge to cut, but I regularly cut the lawns of my Dear Friend Penelope. She has a front and a back lawn, and there is always the opportunity for innuendo.

[Basil]

Not me, but my school chum. 
Determined to become the world's best ever batsman in year 6 at primary school (1960?), I decided to emulate an American baseball player I'd seen a clip of on the telly.
Bat held high, I heaved a massive swish at the ball, missed it completely, fell all over my stumps, but unfortunately made full force contact with the wicketkeeper's (my besty)  head.
Loss of consciousness only about 30 seconds, but he was taken away in an ambulance and didn't return to school for about 3 weeks.
After that I was only allowed bowling practice.  (Slow left arm on spin, since you ask.

[TPMB12]

As a kid in was having a strop about being made to have a bath.  Coming down to the ground floor bathroom with my PJs and dressing gown. I tripped on the belt of my dressing  gown at the top ,fell forward, hit the wall putting a head shaped dent into the load bearing wall,  that bounced me back where I hit the back of my head on the step which sent me towards unconsciousness. The last thing I remember was sliding down the rest of b the stairs with one leg behind my back under my body and everything being black as I felt my slide.

My parents heard the clatter, stopped to look at each other trying to, understand what had just happened before they arrived on the scene invert a minute later as i came round.

Overnight in the hospital and a full week off school.  When I got back the rumour was I stayed off because in was scared of this kid in my class. The day before I had my accident I'd been in a scrap with a kid in my class then I was off for a week.  He and his mates told everyone he'd battered me and I had Ti m treasure av week off to reviver.  I corrected that story which nobody believed at all because we were both useless fighters and it was not a fight to actually hurt anyone.  Still my stoopid meant he could claim the fight as a win. I should have asked for a repeat for that! 

[Basil]

When we lived out in the wilds before we bought this place, I cut my own firewood from huge felled tree trunks.  To split them I would first saw a slot and then insert my splitting axe and hit it with a lump hammer.
Once, couldn't be bothered to go to the shed to get my bow saw 'cos Mrs B's  pruning saw was right there.
Now, the thing about pruning saws is that they work the wrong way around.  In that they cut on the drag, not on the push.
Forgot that.  The saw juddered out and dragged across the first and second fingers of my right hand.  There was no immediate blood, and I remember being interested that bone is not white,  but in fact, yellow.

[T42]

21 years ago last week I was ~5k from home on our local cycle path, 160 km in and just one respectable climb left.  To get a bit of oomph for the hill  I opened one of those energy syrups and squirted it down, then as I brought my hand down again I saw one of the short posts that the council had planted in the cycle track to keep the farmers out go in under my handlebars.  It gave me a great whack on the thigh, the bike & I did a cartwheel over it, and I heard a hell of a crack as my helmet and then my shoulder hit the ground at around 30 kph.

I rolled over and sat up, then found that my right arm was very reluctant to fetch my phone out of my back pocket.  It turned out that I had a double fracture of the collar-bone. The A&E intern insisted that it was just a single and his boss backed him up even though I put a finger on the second fracture both on the X-ray and on the lump that was sticking up under my skin.  After two or three weeks of painful days and sleepless nights they agreed with me but "It's started to knit and we'd have to break it again" so I still have a lump there and a short clavicle.  I had also torn halfway through the main shoulder tendon and a few ligaments somewhere close to the spine, but it took an MRI to find this, around 10 years later.

I still have pain where the clavicle pulls my shoulder-blade too far forward or when I have to carry a load on my right side.  I can feel the shoulder-blade pressing into the chair back right now.

[rogerzilla]

Have only been to A&E twice, once for falling off roller skates and cracking (but not breaking, it turned out) my elbow, and more recently for ectopic heartbeats, which turn out to be nothing to worry about.  So not especially stupid.

However, I did put a spoke right through my middle finger and out of the other side after cutting the hub from an old wheel and then deciding to pull the computer magnet off one of the cut spokes.  As it came free, my hand was impaled on the opposite cut spokes.  Sharp jab, pulled my hand free (some resistance!) and found the entry and exit wounds.  I showed the neighbour, who was a nurse, and we decided that, as everything still seemed to work and my tetanus jabs were up to date, there was probably no need to do anything.  I took a photo, though.

[mrcharly-YHT]

Climbed a gate, tried to get over the top, fell and caught my head on the hook that held gate closed. Ripped open my scalp from forehead to halfway back.

Tripped, grabbed open oven door, which swung shut, trapping my fingers against roasting temp oven.

Ate entire bottle of 100 aspirin.

That was before I was 3 years old. I won't list the rest, I'd get RSI typing them all out. Still have a scar on my head and backs of my fingers.

[chrisbainbridge]

When I was mid-teens I was pretty good at swimming underwater able to do multiple lengths of the school pool.  On one evening training session after about 4 lengths on the bottom of the pool I rocketed from the deep end to the surface at the exact point that the water polo goal leg was suspended!  Large circular laceration on my forehead, multiple stitches and some concussion!

[rogerzilla]

Something I have apparently inherited from my mother is an unusually heavy skeleton (she had a surgeon remark on it after an X-ray).  Neither of us have ever broken a bone, despite some pretty serious attempts.  I have gone head over heels down an entire flight of stairs without touching any of them (ran and tripped at the top), had some real flying MTB crashes, and run my foot over when pushing the car out of the garage, several times 

[FifeingEejit]

A former colleague was cleaning his motorbike with the engine on as you do.
This was fine until it came to cleaning the chain coincided with accidentally knocking it into gear.
Finger tips lost.

the muppet

[matthew]

I was ~3 years old when I shared the bottle of cough syrup with my younger sister... I date it by the fact that Mum was expecting my youngest sister at the time, she likes to remind us that being left with two toddlers who had be given emetics was not a pleasant experience.

As a student I had converted my bike to clipless, but for utility rides such as to church etc. I had adaptors to make them platform pedals with toeclips and straps for using ordinary shoes. Well the toeclip snapped, near the strap, and I hadn't replaced it when a few weeks later it failed completely. Half a mile later I hit a pothole and bounced my right foot into the front wheel, breaking both my left elbow and right wrist in one accident was sub optimal. *ETA* Even less optimal was walking the bike home (bent forks) and then 6 hours later deciding I wasn't going to get to sleep and walking back to the accident scene and the rear entrance to the hospital to get to A&E.

[TPMB12]

One of the managers at my old company, who's now owner of my current company,  was sorting an issue out with a production line. He was the production manager so his job.

Anyway he was trying to hook up a stitching line while it was running when he mistimed his darting hand inserts into the line.  The line was a heavy duty stitching line with needles almost 1cm diameter with a vicious p pivoting barb that opens out when the needle pulls out. Can you guess what happened? Well the linesman hit emergency stop before it got the chance to pull out of his wrist where it had inserted missing every vital element within the wrist.

I believe they got the needle out of the line and pushed out all the way through thus not tearing his wrist up by pulling out. Apparently that was not an unusual accident at work.

At one point in time if you met someone in our town with a missing digit or similar then chances were they worked for or used to work for our company back then. Some lost 3 fingers! Things got better by the time I joined the company but that's not related.

[sizbut]

Dropping a heavy ceramic sink, which broke into a large heavy piece of ceramic with a sharp edge, on my foot. The truely stupid part being in bare feet.

The added extras were driving myself to hospital (it wasn't serious enough to warrant an ambulance but would need stitching - and as it turned out small bits of ceramic removal). And limping into X-ray to find my neighbour running the department that day. So no hiding a classic bank holiday DIY'ing accident.

[Wowbagger]

I suppose this counts: carrying my unconscious 10-year-old daughter into A & E after she'd gone into anaphylactic shock as a result of two bee stings. I had been taking some boxes of honey off a hive in my parents' garden at the time - that summer (1991) had been a bumper year. I took 60lb off that hive on 19th May (my mother's 80th birthday) and another 60lb exactly 2 weeks later. This was the second occasion.

I was very impressed how quickly she was seen - everyone else, in the crowded waiting room, was suddenly demoted to a lower priority. Within seconds, it seems (although probably a lot longer because I was in shock as well) they had injected her with piriton and hydrocortisone and she regained consciousness very quickly. They kept her in for a couple of days for observation.

[Tim Hall]

Years ago my now estranged wife and I were having a pointless row about something trivial. I stormed out of the front door and, to vent my annoyance, punched the house next door.

Stupid enough, you might think. However, I managed to land my knuckle on the nail part of a redundant cable clip. It went in Quite Deep and I went Quite Wobbly. Got driven to A&E for a tetanus jab and a dressing.

I'm much calmer these days.

[Wobbly John]

Anybody else manage a washing-up accident? 

I accidently pulled a big lump off a glass and sliced across the back of my thumb.

I told the doctor "It's quite deep - you can see the tendons going up & down when I move it!"

He replied "Oooo cool - If I hold it open, can you wiggle your thumb so I can see that" 

[Feanor]

The only two times I've ended up in A&E were both overseas, and as a result of being hellichoppered off mountains.

Not a great advert for my new Mountain Guiding business.

[Jaded]

I didn't bother going to A&E, but I hand washed a lab coat that happened to have a scalpel blade in the pocket. A funny tugging sensation, red washing water and the tip of the scalpel clean through my thumb nail were what alerted me.