Dumb Injuries

Other than a couple of minor broken bones as a kid, I've thankfully never had an injury that put me completely out of commission for any length of time. Have had some dumb ones, though:

1) When I was about 13, I was riding a really crappy bike while carrying a bunch of water guns to a friend's house. The chain slipped off, the bike started losing momentum, and before I could realize what was happening, it tipped over and I ate some pavement. I put my arm out to stop myself, but couldn't really brace because of the water guns. Ended up with a separated shoulder that hurt like hell for a couple of weeks.

2) A few years ago I was trying to pull a new hand saw out of its plastic packaging. It got stuck, and then came zooming out of the package once I put some muscle into it. It cut across my middle finger and left a nasty, bloody gash that looked like half my finger had been severed. At least, that's what it looked like. I screamed, ran some cold water over it and packed it with a paper towel, and drove myself to the ER. By the time I got there and they checked me out, it had stopped bleeding. They still put two or three stitches in it, though, which I later took out myself.
I was more pissed about the $800 bill for the ER than I was anything else.
And now I wear an oven mitt whenever I pull that saw out of the packaging.

3) One time I was climbing over my wife to get out of the bed and lost my balance when I put my feet on the floor. I stumbled backward, hit my ass on the arm of a chair, and was left with a dark purple bruise the size of a baseball on my butt cheek.

 

I went hiking in Huangshan over Christmas. Was sore as heck. Feet, legs and bag-carrying shoulder hurt like the dickens.

I'm in China, right? So I got a massage. Almost two months later, my shoulder still hurts -- not the bag-carrying shoulder. Somehow, she did some arm thing that absolutely killed me and it is incredibly painful to move my right arm a certain way. To move it, I pick it up with my left hand and do it that way. It's insane.

Finally got to a doctor this past week who said it's likely I partially tore the tendons in my rotator cuff. Might heal on its own, so I'm giving it until April. If it's still in pain then, it's med evac time.

 

A little more than a year ago, I was walking downstairs around 5 a.m. because my then 1-year-old had woken up crying. About 1/3 of the way down, my left foot slipped off the edge of the stair and out, jamming on the stair baluster, and then I slid all the way to the bottom. Broke the little toe and lost the nails on that one and the next one. We recently renovated our home, and one of the top things on our list was to replace the stairs with a longer tread (the original stairs no longer met code).

From way back, when I was probably eight or nine, there was a large tree in my backyard that we used to climb. After a hurricane one summer, there was a load of brush and fallen branches beneath that tree, and my friends and I used to jump out of the tree into the brush, which would break our fall pretty gently. One time, I jumped and, on the way down, a nearby branch caught me in the left nostril. As my friends tell it, I literally hung there for a half second by my nostril before the branch broke and I fell into the brush. Just got a bloody nose, but that hurt like hell.

 

Better a nostril than your scrotum.

 

My senior year in high school our yearbook was going to have two quarters embedded in the cover. The books came back from the printer with no quarters, just quarter-sized perforations which the staff had to carve out with X-acto knives. I wasn't on the yearbook staff, but I was on the newspaper staff which met in the same room so when I went down there before class one day I see the yearbook editor in chief and a couple others carving up yearbook covers. I stood around to BS with them for a bit until they guilt-trip me into helping them out.
I grab a stack and sit down. No problems for a while but when I get to the last book in my pile, one of the perforations just won't pop out of there. I grab the knife and try to use it like a lever while steadying the book with my left hand. The perforation gives way alright, and the knife zooms right into the base of my left thumb.
I stand up and start shaking my arm because of the sting of stabbing myself and look over at a friend of mine with an expression of "can't believe I just did that idiotic thing" but I notice that he is pale as a ghost, so I look down and see my entire lower arm drenched in blood.
Now, everyone in the class is freaking out. This was before digital photos so we had a darkroom and just outside the darkroom was a sink around which all the photogs gathered. I head over to the sink to run some water over my hand and photogs scatter everywhere as I approach.
I run some water in the sink, but I hear all the commotion of people freaking out, so I turn around and take a few steps back toward the middle of the room trying to calm everyone down. Unfortunately, my way of trying to calm them down was putting both my hands up in that "stop" gesture which only sent blood flying all over, thus making the collective freakout far worse.
Eventually, my editor-in-chief Mel grabs a stack of brown paper towels, shoves them into my hand and grabs my arm to drag me down the hall to the office. On the way, Mel pulls aside the towels and we see just how bad this whole thing is. Pretty bad. Needing stitches bad.
At the office, I explain that I cut myself with a knife. Now, it is absolutely my tendency to downplay every bad thing that has happened to me ever. I could have one of my limbs dangling by a thread and I would claim I was fine and it was really nothing because I never want people to worry about me. Still, this was pretty bad, so i fugred they'd call an ambulance, but I evidently downplayed it enough that without looking up, they tell me to have a seat and they call my mom who comes to get me and take me to the emergency room.
When I get there, I explain to the woman at the desk "I cut my hand with a small knife" and she, with an expression of total boredom, directed me to a seat in the waiting room. I sit down and the only other patient there is a man in his mid-30's, scruffy face, flannel shirt, work boots, nail sticking out of one of the boots and clearly lodged in the guy's foot.
"So, what are you in for," I ask him.
He explains his construction accident and I explain my yearbook accident and the receptionist overhears me and realizes "cut myself with a small knife" may have downplayed the situation slightly. She immediately rushes over and with a panicked look on her face she rushes me into an exam room and says a doctor will be with me shortly.
A nurse comes in first and takes a look at my hand and immediately gasps and looks like she's about to be sick. Another nurse comes in and has basically the same reaction. Finally a doctor comes in and tells me I came one millimeter away from slicing the tendon, may have done some nerve damage and was lucky I wasn't headed for surgery to repair it. Came away with eight stitches and the inability to use my thumb for the most part. It was three years before I could so much as tell hot and cold with it.
The next year when I was in college, I get a call from one of the people still on staff to tell me that I had become the centerpiece of the teacher's cautionary tale on safety with X-acto knives.

 

Wow Cat. I guess I won't tell my story of slicing my index finger with a razor blade while splicing audio tape.
I still have the scar 35 years later, but feel like a wimp after what you went through

 

My latest injury, and the one that taught me the most, was two years ago when I broke my collar bone.

One Saturday, I was riding my bike toward the end of a workout on paved trails in a park. I had a tailwind and was probably going faster then 25 mph when a pair of dogs on long leads ran across the path. I locked up the brakes to avoid hitting them or the leashes and fulcrumed on the wheel over the handlebars straight into the pavement. I was knocked senseless for a moment. My helmet was broken and I felt that "broken bone" pain in front of my left shoulder.

Then, the lessons began.

Someone else called the ambulance. I pulled off my bike shirt over my head because it's an expensive favorite, and I didn't want the EMTs to cut it off.

They wanted to transport me immediately, so I had to stall them until my wife could come pick up my bike. I had no way to lock it.

They chose which hospital I was going to because it was in their trauma rotation and they were far more worried about the superficial blood on my head than my more seriously injured shoulder.

The ER spent most of their focus on my head with extensive x-rays and CAT scans. Diagnosis on the collarbone? "Yeah, it's broken."

I left the hospital ER with a prescription for pain killers, a skimpy arm sling and the name of an orthopedic surgeon.

Sunday, I stayed mostly in bed because, when I would move the bone would shift and it hurt pretty bad, even through the pain killers.

Early Monday morning, I called my primary care physician's office to ask what I should do and they said they had the names of three bone doctors and that the guy the ER referred me to was on that list, so I made an appointment to see him Late Monday afternoon. It became fairly obvious that my appointment was just sort of tacked onto the end of the doctor's day because he didn't have new x-rays taken and didn't even examine me. He said that, from what he saw on the ER's x-rays, the break might heal with some distortion by itself, or he could do surgery to set it straight. I was to let him know. My wife and I thought that he was just blowing us off because his Monday should have already been over.

So, we drove over to the hospital where the ER is and got a digital file of the x-ray. A couple of my brothers are doctors and I emailed the image to them and they showed them to orthopedists in their groups. One brother said that I needed to see another surgeon as soon as possible because a bone fragment was fairly close to my lung and could cause trouble.

I did as much research online as I could and picked a a surgeon that billed himself as a sports doctor and dealt with athletic injuries.

By Wednesday, he has taken better x-rays that showed my collarbone broken in four major pieces with smaller fragments. Surgery was scheduled two days later and he put in a metal plate to hold everything in place.

The rest of the healing took months and I also went through physical therapy but that was pretty run-of-the-mill.

I didn't realize before I was injured how active a role I would have to take in finding a specialist that I could work with well. I had to be my own advocate most of the time. Before wrestling through the system, I had some naive idea that I would just be taken care of.

 

Damn, dude. That sounds awful! I was in a car accident where the seat belt broke my collarbone in two places. They let it heal on its own, so it's all jacked up. You can see the indentation.

I have to have surgery on my ankle tomorrow. Apparently one of my bones is pushing inward, which is not a good thing. Two plates and a couple screws. I've never had surgery before so I'm super bummed and worried. My wife seems pretty pissed in general -- at me, hockey, the doctors. She's taking good care of me but feeling the stress. Just a shitty situation.

 

Upset of the year is that none of these stories have begun with the poster saying, "Hey, watch this!"

 

Broke my leg when I was in 4th grade during a party at a roller skating rink. My skate hit the wall and somehow twisted and I suffered a spiral break on whatever bone is the one on the lower part of my leg. First thing I noticed when I hit the deck? That the water in my ear from that morning's shower had unclogged. Weird. My mom thought it was just a sprain, but I informed her that I heard the break and that she should probably get me to a hospital immediately. No surgery. Had a hard cast for a couple months. Out of school for a few weeks. Worst pain I've ever felt was when they had to set the bone in the ER. Pretty sure I peed a little when they did that. Maybe a lot.

Good luck, sostartled.

 

I hate reviving old threads, but it sounds like you guys have had some experience with pain, and therefore I imagine pain meds.

It's been a month since I had surgery on my ankle. I'm getting better, but the incisions are still tender, the plate they put in causes some discomfort, and my leg gets achy and my ankle swollen after walking (in my boot) for extended periods of time. I elevate and ice, but my question is whether I should still reasonably be on pain meds after a month. I started with a prescription for Oxycodone and Naproxen. I stopped the Naproxen after about 10 days, but I've been taking 4 or 5 oxys a day (2 around 8am, 1 around 4pm, and 2 around 10pm; the 4pm depends on how much I was on my feet during the day). I also, in consultation with my doctor, take Ibuprofen here and there, in the middle of the day when I'm at work (instead of taking an oxy at the office). Finally, at the direction of my doctor, I take 2 aspirin a day. The oxys in the morning and at night make me feel a lot better. When I don't take one, like I haven't today, there's a huge difference in my quality of life.

At some point should I just be dealing with the pain solely using OTC drugs, like Ibuprofen? I guess my main concern is that I'm not sure I know where the line is between dealing with pain and wanting to feel better. Does that make sense? Thanks very much.

Edit: I ended up with 2 plates and 15 screws. Two incisions on each side of my ankle about 5 inches a piece. They look pretty good, but the plate on the inside of my ankle is what's bothering me.

 

How many milligrams are the oxys? If you're taking 4-5 a day I assume it's probably a low dose, like 5 milligrams.
A month is a long time, you may want to consider cutting back. It's a short step from taking pain meds to deal with pain, to taking them to feel "good".