ʃ Discoveries ʅ
I face this chronic dilemma:
Horn #1: my body parts tend to stay safe as long as I’m paying attention to them; but
Horn #2: they get jealous of one another.
In fact, one prime cause of infirmity (such as cavities, nausea, flux, hysteria, ague, and so on) is that the afflicted body part has been self-destructively vying with the others for attention. Just turn your back on your elbow for a fraction of a second and your funnybone will vigorously dowse for intrusive objects. Or if you ignore your toes, within three steps you’ll find a doorjamb. If I didn’t have to actually look out of my eyes I’d probably forget them and instantly find a tree branch.
And body parts strongly tend to have a favorite type of damage: collarbones are for breaking, eyes are for poking, knees are for skinning, and crotches are for compressing. You don’t hear nearly as many stories about some kid who managed a strained clavicle, skinned teeth, or a greenstick fracture of the bollocks.
In light of this theory, if I analyze the matrix of injuries that I myself have collected and avoided over the years, I can conclude with some confidence that I must pay a substantial amount of attention to my nuts, because that’s the least damaged area that I’ve got. (Knock wood... delicately.) Clearly, there’s something nice to be said for the squeaky axle getting the grease.
This chapter, then, doesn’t revolve around a single specific story, but rather it just collects childhood injury anecdotes that are loosely classified by body part (or more rarely classified by loose body part). I’ve placed this material here because the book as a whole is arranged in a somewhat chronological order, and a lot (but nowhere near all) of this happened when I was a kid. If you’re empathetically sensitive about injuries then you might be happier (and far less queasy) just skipping ahead, or maybe just reading the section introductions.
Toes are so fragile that they’re just asking for trouble. These piggy little appendages have one of the worst flesh-to-bone ratios in the body, meaning that the padding is low compared to the breakable elements. They’re also too far away from any part of the body that could warn them about imminent danger, and they’re too close to dangerous stuff, like the ground, or tight shoes.
One of the main problems is that people know that it’s stupid to walk around barefoot, but they do it anyway. You know by instinct that groundcover such as shag carpet or sand or long grass is nothing more than a clever way to hide carpet tacks, broken glass, and dog shit.
And I don’t know which of those is worse to step on, I mean, your foot will heal from being torn by some sharp and germ-infested shred of metal, but the psychological trauma of feeling dog shit squirge between your toes involves a life-long commitment to squeamishness. Do this just once and you will never want to see so much as a slideshow of any place that has a name like “Dog Beach.”
If you believe in Creation, then who knows why the Spirit made us fear the direction down. If you have some belief in Evolution, then maybe it appeals to you to understand humans as being derived from tree-dwellers whose natural enemies could run them to ground in seconds flat (or in seconds torn to juicy tidbits), so their only safety was upwards. In any case, humans are well aware of the vulnerability of their feet and toes, especially when they are dangling down into enemy territory. It’s easy to bring people to feel uneasy by making it so they can’t see their feet very well.
That’s one of the reasons that people hate being out in the ocean (shark factor), or wading through a swamp (leech factor), and it’s why people hate hanging their feet over the edge of the bed at night (boogieperson factor).
If you want to really scare someone, you can follow Jeff’s lead. You hide under their car at night and when they walk up, do three things nearly all at the same time: 1) growl, 2) grab their feet, and 3) try not to hit your head on the muffler when you laugh. One of the drawbacks is that you have to get out from under the car before they get back from the house with the shotgun. Of course, they often have to take the time to change their shorts (after they land).
The stories in this section all illustrate these points to perfection, and their general moral is, “Don’t go barefoot.”
My friend’s sister was walking around the house barefoot on a shag carpet when all of a sudden she jammed the end of her big toe onto a needle so hard that it got shoved clear into the bone. (See, I told you it gets squeamy. You can still skip over this part, and no one will blame you.) It went in so far that none of the needle even stuck out. Her mom and her sister had to hold her leg still while her dad tried to move the skin down around the end of the needle so he could get hold of it with some pliers and yank it out. It was stuck too hard, and he accidentally broke off some of the needle, so she had to go to the doctor and get it sliced out.
You see? Barefoot + shag carpet = “I wish that I had been wearing shoes.”
“A one in a million chance,” you say? How about this story:
Jeff’s friend was doing the same thing, walking around in the house barefoot, when she painfully stubbed her toe. It seemed like no big deal, but she couldn’t see what she had stubbed her toe on. She couldn’t bend her toe, so she figured it must be broken. She went to the hospital and they told her to use crutches because they couldn’t find any evidence of physical damage. Days later, she was in a great deal of pain, so she went back to the doctor, who then decided to do an x-ray, and there was a needle embedded through her big toe straight into the joint, immobilizing it so she had to have surgery to remove it.
The needle, not the toe.
These types of stories are closely related to others which deal with sewing accidents in general, as well as those which cover the stapling of fingers and the like.
Toes are not merely prone to invasion by foreign objects, but they actually have parts which you don’t miss until they’re gone.
Once I was riding my Schwinn bicycle, one of those that you have to backpedal to brake. Anyway, I was barefoot, and when I leaned over too far to turn a sharp corner my foot was aimed straight down at the street, so when I pedaled my toenail got plucked off like you were scratching your nails on a blackboard: plink! Tore right off down into the skin. I still hate the thought of that. At first, the skin underneath looked all pale and crinkled, like some sort of fleshy insect that had lost its shell (no duh), but as the days wore on it just looked all plastic coated and dull.
Thank goodness for my toenail protecting my toe; and yet people say that there shouldn’t be a helmet law. (Imagine getting your headnail torn off.)
My brother managed to tear off his toenail just the other day. He was wearing open-toed sandals (of a type that rhymes with “Smirkenstocks”) while standing on a narrow landing and pulling open a steel-framed door over his foot.
Speaking of nails…
Stories of kids getting their feet impaled by nails are so common that it’s a wonder that there are any stray nails left anywhere. It would save everyone a lot of trouble if nails were pretreated with tetanus serum: you would only have to be punctured once.
This is one of those cases where wearing shoes often does little or no good. Once when I was walking straight home from school through a housing construction site where we used to play, I stepped on a nail that went in at a shallow angle through my tennis shoe. I didn’t even notice that I was bleeding until I was almost all the way home. I left a trail the whole way. (At least that made it easy to find my way back.)
Just as thrillseeking children have a need to rummage through people’s current possessions, they are fascinated by the thought that they might find some sort of treasure that some foolhardy soul has been blind enough to pitch into the trash. Dumpsters are, therefore, absolutely irresistible as places to search for buried loot, especially because it pays off every now and again.
Amongst the ill-gotten booty that I have retrieved from dumpsters is a snakeskin wallet full of Korean money, a stroller, some huge capacitors (which are great for making explosive blue-white flashes and for lighting fluorescent tubes), and a fabulous length of telephone cable filled with copper wire arrayed in a rainbow of plastic insulation.
Unfortunately, a lot of what gets thrown into the dumpster is, in fact, trash (oddly enough), and it is usually broken, jagged, ripe, and germ-laden trash at that. All in all, I’d have to say that it’s definitely worth the risk.
The story here is that Jeff and some of his elementary school friends were looking through a dumpster one day, and an overeager novice trash-sifter jumped right into the middle of the bin and got a frog spear shoved up behind his knee cap. Of course, he was taken to the hospital and given shots, stitches, and scoldings, and I’m sure that the frog fork got thrown right back out into the trash. (What a waste.)
If this were to be a horror story, then this same frog fork would keep getting thrown away over and over again, repeatedly calling children to jump into the dumpster to get impaled, only to have the continuous bathing in sacrificial blood increase its power until one day it could call for the first person who threw it away, the very individual who tossed it in the trash with such callous disregard for the feelings of inanimate objects, as if it were only so much, well, trash. That adult would be irresistibly drawn to the dumpster where he or she would be sucked into its depths by a length of discarded telephone cable, only to be suffocated by Korean money up his or her nose, and generally ravaged by a variety of rubbish, and finally dispatched by the frog fork, which would transform into some piece of cursed jewelry and... the end.
Other than femurs broken while skiing, I’ve heard very few stories about thigh injuries. Maybe the data simply doesn’t represent the trend. And I’m only dismissive about the femur-skiing thing because it is so common. (Honest, it happens so often that there are research papers devoted to these injuries in specific.) Plus, many of the folks who have experienced this event end up blogging about it anyway, so I don’t need to chime in.
There are loads of instances in my life where a woman has complained about just bruising her thigh on something without really injuring it, but that sort of story won’t tend to get retold unless it is one heck of a bruise, on the thigh or otherwise. (For example, a neighbor once fell between a sailboat and the dock, bruising herself all up one side of her body. Or there was that weird transparent bruise on my foot that I’ll talk about in just a bit. And so on.) I point out the women in this case only because (a) I am not thigh-bruise prone, and (b) I personally have not collected any similar near-the-moment complaints about thigh bruises from men. That latter disparity is almost certainly only because my dataset is skewed.
[redacted]
In seventh grade a few of us would play bench tag. There were three big trees in the courtyard, each surrounded in a square of heavy wooden benches painted an odd sort of pinkish-brown color. The point was to stay off the ground and, of course, not get tagged. I fell short of a jump and racked my right shin squarely on the edge of the bench, cutting way in. What’s odd is that the numb area has moved over the years so it’s now just below and to the right of my kneecap. It makes me wonder how innervation migrates as you grow.
I was in the sixth grade, playing some version of people-knocking-each-other-down (football or soccer or whatever) out on the school field at recess, running along and not watching where I was going (a foolproof thrillseeking tactic), when my leg plunged into a knee-depth hole that a sprinkler head used to be in. My body, except for my lower right leg, flipped forward, and I extravagantly stretched my Achilles tendon and generally made it burn like hell. If only I had eyes in the front of my head.
Much to my embarrassment, my teacher insisted that he was going to carry me to the office. I was on crutches for weeks, limped for a good long while after that, and then healed up by swimming a lot during the summer. I can just hear the parental voice saying, “watch where you’re going, watch where you’re going!” I guess that’s as good a moral as any.
Of course, if this had happened today, the school would have had to cough up a load of dough and I’d never have had to work again, right?
Up until this accident, I had never really given much consideration to the status of my armpits as body parts. If I had, I would have thought that they were more like something that wasn’t there. But all you have to do is use crutches the wrong way for a couple of days to realize that your armpits must be something that’s there, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to swell up to twice their normal size.
I was working site patrol at the University of the Pacific just as I started college there. My patrol partner and I were ordered to chase the rabbits away from a field that was right next to the yard where the heavy equipment was stored for the night. We were told that the rabbits were enticing summer students to wander around where they shouldn’t be, making it more difficult to discern which miscreants were planning to hop the chain-link fence and siphon gas (i.e., ill-intended student hoppers, not rabbit ones). Well, I was running along after a not-too-terribly-rascally rabbit over broken ground with a flashlight when the instep of my right foot landed on a big rock and bent my ankle over. I could feel a sickening pull when it happened. It immediately burned and ached, resulting in a kind of a purplish bruise that was strange in that it gave the impression of being transparent, creating the illusion of being able to look into my foot. That took a long time to go away.
I had just started learning to drive in earnest when my mom loaned me the car so that I could go downtown to a dental appointment. She didn’t mention that there wasn’t enough gas to get there and back, and it hadn’t occurred to me to check; after all, why would my mom want to strand me like that? In any case, the car coasted to the bottom of the freeway ramp, and I managed to wrangle it into a nearby gas station, only to have this big truck run over my foot as I stepped off of the service island. Shoes were not a big help in this case. Furthermore, I do not recommend driving with broken toes as a meditative technique, despite its ability to focus your attention.
A four-poster bed is a really nice piece of furniture, but they tend to be raised, and there seems to be all sorts of extra bedleg that begs to catch your toes. Most people can avoid such a hazard during the day, but few people are awake enough to put on shoes when they get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. Gentlemen (of whichever/whatever sex), here’s a challenge for you: try to maintain adequate aim while clasping the recently broken toes of one foot in the opposite-side hand, while using the remaining hand to grasp your opposite-side gland, all while rhythmically bleating what sounds like a Babylonian sea shanty.
My advice is to get rid of any furniture which is for all intents and purposes a huge rock. I had an old green army footlocker which had taken its toll in toes over the years. I think that the term “hope chest” is simply short for, “It’s dark, I have to pee, and I hope I don’t break any more toes on that chest.”
In general, any furniture so Victorian that it still hides its legs under a skirt is insidious, especially those really long couches that have an extra leg in the front middle, precisely where you would least expect it, that is to say, exactly where you would least expect to kick the shit out of an extraordinarily stationary block of wood and break a couple of toes.
I was taking a nap on a couch that was at just the perfect height to break some of my toes as I lashed out with my foot in my sleep. You’d think that the first couple of times would have taught me not to sleep barefoot there. I just kept thinking that it couldn’t possibly happen again. This dynamic explains a great deal of what you see on daytime talk shows.
I was running around (after) school barefoot (high school era), and I had just darted past the blind corner of a building only to peripherally see a bike bearing down on me, so (naturally) I ground my toes into the asphalt to bring myself to a stop, jammed my left foot under the front wheel of the bike, and I put my left hand up to push against the forehead of the cyclist as he went rotating over the front wheel of his bike. I pushed back hard, his back wheel fell to earth, the bike bounced, and as I tried to walk I found that I had grunched almost every toe in my body.
When I was much older (forties), we were on a long driving trip and stopped in to visit one of my mom’s childhood friends. They had a coffee table in their living room made out of some sort of heavy wood-and-iron sled topped with a very thick piece of glass. No, we weren’t wearing shoes in the house. So, can you guess how many inches the sled moved when I kicked it determinedly in the iron runner with the two smallest toes of my right foot? If you guessed “zero” or less, you are correct. It made further driving a special treat.
Fingers seem to take different types of damage than toes because hands hold the tools that are used to cause such spectacular kinds of injury, so whereas toes tend to get whacked against things, fingers tend to get things whacked against them. This is related to the fact that a body pretty much has to follow its feet, thus making it difficult for the feet to lag after the trail blazed by the body, but the hands almost insist on straying away from the body when that very body is trying to get through some sort of portal, thereby demanding to be crushed in passage.
Once again, this is a case of feet being hurt while in motion, and hands being hurt because they are not moving; that is to say, they are either not moving where they are supposed to, or they are not moving at all.
I suppose that one of the other reasons that hands get hurt in this fashion is because of the fact that when a tool is experimented with, it is easier to use it on the hands since at least one of them is already holding the tool, and because the hands are significantly closer to the face than the feet, thereby making observation of the damage that much more detailed, not to mention that it also makes it easier to transfer some of the damage to the face itself.
And human stupidity enters the picture in full force when it comes to damaging the hands. You would think that after all these years it would finally occur to people working with bandsaws that yes, indeed, it can happen to them, and that eventually a finger is going to get sawn off if you use the soft, fleshy little hand to shove boards past a sharp, metal blade in any sort of a secure fashion.
Furthermore, why do people always look away from their hands when they are using tools?
Chris: “Hi Pat.”
Pat: “Hi Chris, I’ll be with you in a second, I’ve just got to finish driving a nail into this board that I’m holding down with my hand... by the way, that hat looks fabulous on you and OWWAAYAHAAA&%$#@*!!!!!” (and other generic choruses of dismay)
Of course, you would never do something like this; after all, what are the odds that something would happen to go wrong just as you were looking someplace that wasn’t even remotely related to the place where your fingers and tools were going to get together?
Humans get this weird sense of immunity from a system of pseudological reasoning that says: (a) since nothing bad happens when I’m being careful, then (b) nothing bad will happen if I stop being careful for a moment, just so long as (c) I have the intention of being careful again real soon. The notion is that bad things are too oblivious to catch you off your guard, and you’ll be much too quick to get caught. The moral of the following stories tends to be, “Hands are stupider than tools.”
Interestingly enough, physicists are now suggesting that subatomic particles break the laws of thermodynamics in just this fashion, and that they get away with it just as long as they break them only for a moment.
Maybe thrillseekers are just those people who are way too attuned to their subatomic particles, so they suffer from a false sense of security.
This tale was briefly noted earlier, and is included as a piece of friendly advice to potential storytellers. It cautions against using bodily motions to illustrate a particularly painful story if there is any chance that you might recreate the actual wound along with the event.
The simple story here is that when my dad was but a tyke, he sliced his knuckles open in a rather graceful arc with the sharp and cylindrical end of a bug sprayer (like a bike pump, not like a spray bottle) while trying to explain to his grandmother how his cousin Jerry had sliced his own hand open with the bug sprayer. This was so hilarious to a family with a peasant Italian (but fiendish) sense of humor that everyone had to see it, with predictably gory results. The family passed around the story so widely that it was years before my brother and I stopped wondering why we hadn’t inherited the genetic trait of a semicircular scar across the knuckles of the right hand.
Another piece of friendly advice is that a little exaggeration never hurt anyone; in fact, there has never ever been even the remotest hint of a case which even mildly threatened to suggest that anyone might have ever been even a little bit hurt by anything even vaguely resembling exaggeration, unless you consider the passengers on the U.S.S. Titanic, but no one ever does, so just forget I mentioned them.
I’ve heard a number of stories involving people, all women actually, who really get ripping along on a sewing machine, shoving cloth into it in a feeding frenzy, when all of a sudden the selfsame feeding fingers go a little bit too far and get sewn right into the work at hand, so to speak.
The stereotypical man’s analog to this injury would have to be the digit lopped or torn off by the aforementioned bandsaw, or perhaps smashed by a hammer.
To heck with equal pay for equal work (as a signifier, that is), the true sign that there is equality between the various sexes will be signaled when women start losing fingers to bandsaws, and men start running their digits through sewing machines.
Maybe I’ll just pull out that old Singer and... nah.
Fingers get stapled way too often for people to be ignorant of how this sort of accident occurs, but there you have it. When you try to figure out how the heck you actually got your fat finger into a slot originally engineered only to accommodate paper in the first place, all you can do is take the opportunity to practice looking bemused and feeling stupid.
Actually, feeling bemused and looking stupid is generally held to be a perfectly acceptable substitute, and I have employed both postures to wonderful effect.
The worst time (out of at least three) that I ever stapled my finger was when I was about five, and I remember sitting at the breakfast table quite calmly telling my mom that I had a staple in my finger. I can picture her now as she slowly backed into the kitchen holding a big frying pan in one hand, while she responded with a quizzical look and a hearty, “That’s nice.” My brother and I just traded shrugs and went back to eating.
It wasn’t until later that my mom got up enough courage to admit that she wanted to know if I really meant to say that I had a table on my finger, at which point I just waved the little bugger under her nose. (I’m talking about the stapled finger, you barbarian.) She pounced on it like a cat, pinning my hand in hers, grabbing the staple between two fingers, and saying, “Well why didn’t you pull it out?” while giving a nice strong tug.
I guess that it didn’t occur to her that I had tried to get it out, and that it was only still there because it just must be stuuuuck!
Now that’s an adrenaline rush.
After two or three painfully enthusiastic but wholly worthless pulls, we went to the doctor, where he used doctor-type pliers to yank the sucker out of the bone, and then had to have a couple of nurses pin me down while giving me a shot in the butt (since I was so hysterical by that time from fear and wooziness).
A tetanus shot is the definitive insult added to injury. I was able to calculate that as much as 35% of my blood by volume is tetanus serum. That’s what happens when your parents shuffle you from doctor to doctor in a vain attempt to keep them from thinking that it must be child abuse.
There is a safety guide on a guillotine-type paper trimmer for a reason. Do I fully respect it? Not always, such as when I need to execute a particularly precise slice that requires me to hold the paper firmly against the stationary part of the cutter (i.e., the “steel”). Could I use some sort of holder other than my hand? Yes, I could (and maybe it’s high time that the manufacturer included that modification in their product), but that would take extra time, of which I typically have none. Is this honestly a risky approach? Well, I can say that I have successfully performed this maneuver dozens of times (at home, not at work), plus I have what my eldest child refers to as “mad eyeballing skillz,” so my aim is ruthlessly accurate. But does it always work? Yes, of course it does, all except for that one time that I got distracted and clove the knife deeply into the corner of my thumb. (Thank you thumbnail.)
Allowing your hands to wander around on their own without at least some level of adult supervision is just asking for trouble.
Have you ever seen those nature shows about penguins? They all stand in a crowd at one end of an ice floe, and they all want to go for a swim, but they’re afraid that there’s a leopard seal cruising around looking for something black and white and red all over.
Quite a dilemma, wouldn’t you think?
What happens is that all of the penguins pretend to discuss their problem while shuffling slowly over to the edge of the ice, where some poor dimwit starts to say, “Hey, we’re getting kind of close to the edge here! Let’s talk about this over there! Whoa, I’m slipping! Quick, grab my flipper!"
…splash…
If the unlucky chum formerly on the edge gets eaten, then the rest of them wait half an hour before trying to go into the pool. (That’s where the saying comes from.) But if the wet one is safe, then they all jump in and act like it was an accident. They claim to have shied away from pulling his flipper because they were afraid of being gassed. (It’s a plausible excuse, given the rank fishiness of penguin farts.)
So, what’s the point?
The point is that fingers are the penguins of the body. Your fingers as a group are always ganging up on the isolated “dimwit digit,” trying to get it to take chances. Your dimwit digit is almost always the index finger of your dominant hand.
Here’s a case in point.
A cousin of mine was sitting in a big ol’ padded chair that rocked on some kind of a wooden sling frame, just sort of relaxing and talking. Her hands, being bored, decided to explore the structure of the chair, and the dimwit digit was subtly herded by all the rest into a curious hole drilled horizontally through the base of the wooden frame.
They just wanted to know if it was safe to go in.
All of a sudden there’s this ear-splitting scream as her head figures out that the other side of the hole opens out into a place where two other pieces of the frame rock together, thus crushing the exploratory appendage.
So, if you find your fingers persuading one of their number into such a precarious position, such as trying to find out if there’s really current in that socket, then you’d probably be well advised to stop them. Make them go to their rooms until they stop pestering each other, that’s my advice. (Okay, so I borrowed that advice from someone else.)
I was striding to a work meeting when I grabbed onto a doorjamb to help with a high-speed turn, only to get yanked off my feet when my wedding ring caught on the rounded corner of the brass strike plate. The ring cut into the top of my finger, which did not swell up much at all.
In contrast, Jeff and I were working at a community college (the one from “A Process of Elimination”), once again in a hurry, and his ring got caught on an open-ended, right-angled door handle. His cut was much worse than mine, his finger started to swell badly, and we had to cut the ring off (after he laid down on a bench and let the shock wear off a bit). Fortunately, our jobs gave us access to tools, albeit not the ideal one for this kind of accident, namely a special device called a “ring cutter.” It looks like an old-fashioned can opener that has been given a ninety-degree twist, with a protective channel that slips between the ring and the finger. I don’t know why a lot of these seem to be made in France, so I encourage you to speculate wildly. The trick here is not to burn the finger with the cutting friction.
It’s easy to understand how one person can get their fingers industrially pinched (nearly off, sometimes) when someone else is closing a door; in fact, this is a fairly common story. The hinge side tends to inflict a much nastier injury than the strike side, and of course metal car doors (particularly the sliding guillotines on a van) are more dangerous than typical household doors.
What’s harder to figure out is how someone manages to do this to their own fingers. One likely suggestion is that they are acting as if they are two people, with one of them in charge of the door, and the other in charge of the fingers.
One scenario that does not tend to pop so readily to mind (and yet actually happens) is where a person is just too lazy to take the single additional step needed to close the door by grasping the special safety knob that’s built right into it, but instead tries to pivot the slab by putting their fingers through the hinge side and pushing on the edge. That’s like trying to close scissors by reaching through from the inside. I mean, seriously:
Kara: “Brain and brain. What is brain!” (Star Trek, “Spock’s Brain,” 1968)
It seems that humans should have derived a really simple principle by now, namely that when a soft thing and a hard thing collide, the soft thing loses. That they have not, in fact, worked this out is shown by how often people will use their hands to hit hard objects. The hands, being soft, lose.
These hard things include bony items (skulls), house parts (walls, doors, windows), trees, boulders, vehicles, and so on. As a last caution, it should be pointed out that while most drywall is marginally fragile enough to not break the hand that crunches into it, the studs behind the wall are unforgiving, and the point of drywall is to hide the studs as well as possible. The likelihood of randomly finding a stud in this way turns out to be much higher than the one-in-ten chance that you might expect.
So if you must punch a wall, at least go upstairs: it not only gives you a moment to cool off, but the studs are usually spaced farther apart.
Jeff was working under one of our cars when a jack stand collapsed, lacerating his hand badly enough that we went to get him stitched up.
Here are some tips for the Emergency Room. While you’re waiting to be seen, you can constructively pass the time by turning some kinds of deep cuts into puppets, as in, “Hi, I’m your sliced hand, you dumbshit. What were you thinking? Hey, let’s see if we can make your brother pass out... om nom nom nom.” If you don’t want to wait as long, there are a few ways to move up the triage list, namely by some creative combination of: be bleeding, be having a heart attack, be unconscious, be not breathing, or be friends with the head of Emergency (all other patients being otherwise equal). And here’s a hint for hospital admins: when you give your folks training in something like the Emergency Severity Index, please make sure that they don’t misread “pulseless” as “pubeless.”
What can one say about injuries to the head? (Let’s find out.)
The head is actually pretty well protected, and it can absorb a fair amount of trauma before giving in. Just in case you’re curious, it doesn’t often work like you see in the movies. It’s pretty hard to gauge a blow just perfectly, where the victim gets knocked out for precisely an hour rather than staggering about in pain, keeling over dead, or getting up in a couple of furious seconds. Hit someone with a sap (as in “birdshot-filled leather bag,” not “doofus”) and you’re just as likely to kill them as make them really angry. (Okay, I admit it: hitting them with a doofus might also kill them, but it’s not what I originally had in mind.)
Despite the reality of the situation, a blow to the head (including the trite punch in the jaw) is more likely to be portrayed in stories as rendering a person conveniently incapacitated than any other kind of injury, other than perhaps a solid kick to the groin. (“Go Nads!”)
A friend of mine was clutching a pencil (point up) in her fist (which was probably a relatively chubby little fist since she was in fourth grade), when she started laughing at something. Well, that fist was resting on her desk, and as she brought her head down while laughing at whatever it was, she impaled her forehead and broke off the lead.
Although the lead eventually worked its way out, not all such foreign matter manages to make it back out of the body. There are people walking around out there with all manner of foreign stuff swimming about in them.
Glass and metal and all sorts of other material seems to be well tolerated by the body once you get past the point of it possibly infecting the hell out of you. Encystment is a marvelous thing.
When I was about five, we lived in a house that had a detached garage (both physically and emotionally). My little brother and I were out there one day playing with hammers, nails, and boards, and I decided to use my hammer to tap Jeff on a blue plastic toy helmet he was wearing. It was really just that, the merest tap, but in retaliation, Jeff whipped his own hammer backward in a two-fisted swing up over his head and buried the tips of the clawed end in my skull, after which he raced into the house in such a blur that I don’t think he really bothered to inhabit the intermediate space. I just remember hearing the hammer hitting the cement after gravity was kind enough to come along and lever it out of my head, followed by the click of the front door lock, which was followed in turn by Jeff yelling to my mom that I’d hit him (which was against the rules).
When I got to the door I had to knock to get in, at which point the door flew open and my mom smacked me across the face for hitting the baby. In all fairness to my mom, I don’t think she saw the blood all over my head and coat until after I had been punished on the basis of the unilateral testimony of a three-year-old. (Might as well go for revenge and sympathy while I’m at it, right? Let Jeff write his own book.)
My only other memories of that incident involve sitting in a reddish-brown high chair with my head wrapped in a white dishtowel.
Considering the damage that hammers do to adults on a regular basis...
Wait, just wait a minute here. Hammers do not damage anybody. People damage themselves with these tools because they are idiots who don’t pay attention to what they’re doing. There. Much better. Now, back to our regularly scheduled sarcasm...
Considering how much damage your average oblivious adult is likely to be able to wreak upon their fragile flesh with a steel tool designed for smashing and ripping, it’s probably not a good idea to let a little kid swing one of these suckers to and fro, at least not when there’s another little kid hanging around presenting such a tempting target.
This is a set of stories about the various things by which my head has been concussed, split open, or otherwise banged up.
To start off with, there was the time that I was roller skating around the patio and caught the corner of a metal window frame in the scalp. The window had been rolled out just far enough to drive a metal wedge into the bone and knock me off my feet, after which I hit the back of my head on the edge of the concrete step when I fell.
This is similar to my taking a stairwell at college by jumping down from landing to landing, skipping the intermediate steps (after all, they are called “flights”), only to learn in mid-soar that the ceiling above the final jump was not a smooth downward slope like the upper flights, but rather it made an abrupt vertical drop (or “wall” as it is known in the trade), so I slammed my forehead into that and fell backwards onto the stairs, which did additional damage just about everywhere (particularly Calcutta). I actually left a dent in the wall.
Oh yes, let’s not forget the time that I was dumping a couple bags of groceries into my parents’ Oldsmobile without knowing that the trunk lid had a habit of creeping downward. I pegged my head so hard on the sharp corner of the trunk near the license plate that I slammed my teeth together and chipped off a portion of one of my front teeth. I’m tall enough that I’ve learned not to set bags of groceries down on the counter in the kitchen without first making sure that there’s no cabinetry waiting to nail me.
In fact, cabinet edges and corners in general are a family favorite for hitting your head upon, so much so that my grandmother used to hang red flowers on anything that even vaguely resembled a corner so that my grandfather would stop taking head wounds. In fact, he’d absorbed so much damage over the course of a lifetime that my meager few accidents pale in comparison. My mom once compiled a two-page list of his injuries (on legal-sized paper), and that was just the memorable stuff, where World War I shell shock and a career in structural steel figured prominently. Based on that history, they decided that Alzheimer’s might not be to blame for all of the changes in his behavior.
As the main repository of your sensors, the face is just chock full of very fragile apparatus. Your eyes, nose, ears, tongue, all of these things are just incredibly delicate and they’re all sitting in one place. I suppose that this lessens the distance between the various sensory organs and the brain, thus cutting down reaction time, but it still seems an awful lot like putting all of your eggs in one basket.
Of course, there have been times when I would much rather have had my eggs on top of my head than within the reach of a soccer player’s foot, but that’s another story.
What this all comes down to is that tales of damage to the face seem to be rare compared to the number of stories which focus on wounds to specific parts of the face. (There, you see? That’s something you might never have known if you hadn’t read this book.)
The parts of the face each deserve special attention because the kinds of damage that can be done to them is different in interesting ways; for example, the eyes are schematic concavities, and they tend to get hurt when something enters them, whereas the nose, being a relative convexity or protuberance, tends to get crushed. (There, that’s something else.)
Like all the men in my family, my dad has eight a.m. shadow. My brother and I learned at an early age that whiskers are weaponry. Add a Pendleton shirt, and you’re walking sandpaper.
Speaking of sandpaper, loads of stories about facial injuries are speed related. While a helmet can provide some protection, if you fly off a motorcycle and skid on your chin you’re going to erode your face away. (In a long enough slide, the helmet just wears away first.)
I’ve seen quite a number of people (on video and in person) obliviously walk (or even run) into glass doors and windows. The reverberant “dung” tends to be distinctive. Most of the time these people are looking to the side instead of where they are going, so we’ll classify these injuries under ‘The Face’ instead of like a mustache (i.e., under ‘The Nose’).
The nose is the toes of the face. (You know, if I weren’t already writing that down, I’d write that down somewhere. Maybe I’ll put it on a t-shirt.) That’s probably why the words rhyme. It’s this fleshy, cartilaginous thing just sticking out there asking to be broken. It’s not just a primary olfactory organ, it’s the face’s first line of defense against damage. It’s like those big fluorescent yellow garbage cans full of sand on the freeway, or those stacks of metal plates. The idea is that when a car hits those, they collapse in a controlled fashion and disperse the energy of the crash before the car gets to the cement, which will not give at all. (Remember, the soft thing loses.)
So, the idea is as follows: if a car is going to run into your face, make sure it hits your nose first. Same thing goes for your friend’s elbow during basketball, the back of someone’s head while river rafting, or a Frisbee caroming up off the floor.
Relatedly, and I have personally witnessed this half a dozen times (albeit not experienced it myself), if a cat is getting all friendly and rubbing all over your face, and then its tail starts twitching, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re going to get your nose bitten.
I was standing across from the older brother of a friend of mine (I was about five), and he was sawing away at a 2×4 with a handsaw so fast that you just knew that he really wished he had an electric saw. Try manually sawing through a bunch of lumber, and you’ll know what I mean. In any case, the saw bound up in the stud, he leaned forward to put weight on it to force it through, and I suppose that I either leaned forward in sympathy and anticipation, or the release thrust lengthened the saw, but the net result was that the saw teeth tore forward through both the wood and my flesh, specifically the bridge of my nose. I ran out of their garage (hmmm, a propensity for head injuries in the garage?) intending to go straight home, but was stopped along the way by a neighborhood mom. She wouldn’t do anything about my nose, but she also wouldn’t let me go home until I’d told her what happened.
Here’s a simple story. My brother put a dime up each of his nostrils and then couldn’t get them out.
I know a kid who put a little cylindrical LEGO up his nose and likewise it became a semi-permanent addition. (This practice is so common that these cylinders are deliberately designed as tubes to allow for breathing.) On occasion, parents don’t know that something has gotten lodged up there (particularly foams, fabrics, and foods) until the smell tips them off.
I’ve heard other stories that involve items ranging from orange seeds to grapes to candy, but I’m waiting for an official release before I give any details. The thing is, why are all these kids doing this? My suspicion is that children have a heavy propensity for pack-ratting (not to be confused with pat-racking), or for storing food in their cheek pouches, but they have been heavily indoctrinated against putting filthy things into their mouth, so they stick them up their nose instead. I guess that we should be lucky that the nose is the most convenient of the other optional orifices.
Jeff was riding some sort of minibike around some hills in a construction site and managed to get a line twanged across the bridge of his nose; fortunately, it was the line that snapped rather than his head.
There’s a reason that this sort of thing is called “clotheslining,” and, unfortunately, it can be deadly. Don’t ever think that a string or rope or something like that will give way just because you’re going fast. It won’t. You will.
Never allow dandruff shampoo to get up your nose. Don’t even let a drip of water which has had the slightest amount of contact with the shampoo get anywhere near your nostrils. Don’t even wave the bottle in the vaguest general direction of your face. Am I speaking from personal experience here? Of course.
I managed to get some very very very dilute shampoo solution up my nose, and I thought that I had melted the flesh out of my sinuses. Just look at the ingredients. There’s a reason for the “pyr-” in “zinc pyrithione,” as in “funeral pyre.” In fact, it was an almost precisely identical experience which inspired Jim Morrison to write that particular song.
Damage to the eyes is usually by foreign invasion, such as getting poked by sticks, stones, knives, fingers, and all of that good stuff, but there are also those extraordinarily creative individuals who do manage to put their eyes into something and get them hurt.
This same kid who got the LEGO up his nose was cutting towards himself and slipped and poked his eye with a Swiss Army knife.
Never, ever, cut towards yourself. I know, it feels like it’s easier and everything, and of course you feel like this could never happen to you, but I’ve got news for you: every one of these skewered people thought that it would never happen to them. No one cuts towards themselves and says, “Hey, I bet that I can manage to stab myself if I keep this up.” (Yes, I am a parent.)
The danger does not go away by merely repeating the litany, “Yes, but I’ll be careful.” Careful what? Careful not to bleed on the carpet? You cannot be careful while carving toward yourself. That’s like trying to be careful while driving with your eyes closed.
Another time, this same kid was looking through the hole in the basin of an ice cream scoop, one of those that has the spring-loaded wiper that zips back and forth across the curve to get the ice cream ball out, and he put his eye too close to the hole and that little wiper zipped across and scythed right into his eyeball. As I said, some people are extraordinarily creative about this sort of thing.
When Jeff was a kid he went out to the lake with some folks and as he was standing around watching people fish, he felt a tug at his eyeball. Someone was using one of those little folding fishing rods and as he flipped the cast backwards, he hooked Jeff’s eye. They managed to get the hook out and his eye seems to be fine. I guess that fishing just isn’t a spectator sport.
Jeff volunteered to be a victim in a disaster preparedness program run by some local paramedics. When he was being gored-up by the make-up, they managed to get some latex in his eye, which is just about as pleasant as getting zinc pyrithione up your nose.
I thought that Jeff was hiding in this strange little cubbyhole in the wall of my parent’s bedroom, and in order to find him I poked around with this old car antenna. I found out that at least his eye was in the closet, as well as his mouth.
If you see some sort of sheet (like a napkin, paper towel, or whatever) sticking out over the edge of something that’s above your line of sight, do not pull on it. The scissors resting on top of the sheet will be pulled over the lip and poke you in the eye as they fall.
If you use the excuse that you got the black eye from dropping a wrench on your face while working under the car, consider the fact that someone might ask you how you managed to do that, given that you always wear glasses. My Dad said that put him in the awkward position of having to remember what actually happened the night before.
Lips split quicker than a gymnast, and teeth make a truly interesting crushing noise when the mouth gets hurt. Actually, if any external body part truly deserves punishment, it’s got to be the mouth, considering that it is the most frequent troublemaker.
My grandfather used to work in structural steel, and as he was walking along the yard one day he crossed the path of a hammer being swung to someone else on the end of a rope. It took out some horrendous number of teeth and knocked him out cold. I think that I have heard of this man being knocked out more often than any other person I’ve ever known.
What I’d like to know is, whose idea was this? Who was it who was hanging around and said, “Hey, I’ll just tie this piece of iron onto a line and swing it through a crowd of people.” I would be willing to bet that this same person would think it was a really stupid idea if he were risking his own teeth, but it seems like a good idea if it saves him some effort.
An amazing number of injuries occur in the rush to save effort. Hernias are probably the best example of this, especially because it shows that people would rather make one trip and carry way too much than walk twice and carry a little less each time. That’s logic for you: you end up making an extra trip to carry your hernia inside anyway.
My grandfather told me about another time-saving strategy on a construction site, namely riding a hook down from an upper floor. My understanding is that when the hook came by, if there was no load, you’d just step onto it while grabbing the cable and the crane operator would set you down on the ground. An ancillary benefit was impressing the secretaries watching from the offices across the street. This plan went awry with a guy who stepped onto a hook that turned out to be connected to nothing more than a cable coiled on the floor above. It was fortunate (in some sense of that word) that he only fell three stories onto a pile of sand, breaking only two of his legs.
I was at the Raptor Rehab Center in the saw-whet owl cage (adorable little devils that they are) effecting a repair of some sort, and I needed to shorten a lath but was in too much of a hurry to go all the way back to the workshop to look for a saw. I held one end of a lath in my hand, placed the other against a supporting surface, and brought a hammer down where I wanted to break it. I knew enough not to create a lath-spring that would jack the hammer back into my face, but when the lath broke, the far end came up and smacked me in the mouth, cutting and swelling my lip. In the next chapter I’ll talk about the right-tool rule.
Tongue injuries include such classics as: (a) stuck to a cold surface (don’t pull it, just try to warm it with your breath, or wait for someone with warm water... or I guess that fresh urine would work in what I hesitate to call a pinch); (b) cut when licking food off of a sharp kitchen implement (where the act of licking moving beaters is an uncommon-but-actual variation on this theme); and (c) cut when licking an envelope flap (where licking an envelope is kind of gross anyway, when you think about it... you’re mailing someone your spit).
There are also some hard candies and suckers (particularly the glassy-looking ones) that can become razor sharp as you suck on them, and you don’t even realize that you’ve been cut (sometimes more than once) until you taste the blood.
If you twirl a piece of dried spaghetti on your tongue (not like a baton, which would be quite a trick, but rather on its long axis like a lollipop stick), it creates a miniature spear that you can drive through your palate if you bump into anything. Just in general, it turns out to be risky business to walk around with a stick (even a dull one) aiming at the back of your throat.
Ears are well-known to be a device designed to keep kids from getting away with sticking their head into things. If they get caught early on, then they are less likely to get their head guillotined later on in life, especially if they are humiliated by the morass of creative lubricants with which a child’s head can be doused by an anxious parent.
I waffled over the inclusion of stories about amateur ear piercing and the like. For one thing, it’s a deliberate injury in a class similar to other relatively intentional body modifications, such as elective tongue splitting and faith-based (i.e., culturally non-mutilative) circumcision. For another, I don’t happen to have any stories about ear piercing at home with an ice cube and a potato gone horribly wrong. (The piercing, not the potato... although that said, I would strongly advise against using a potato with green under the skin. Or for that matter an ear likewise.) Yes, it can hurt, but it’s not like the needle-wielder missed and drove the needle through your eardrum or something. And if I include ear piercing, then what about the nose, eyebrows, lips, and... so on? So I decided to leave them all out because it’s a can of worms deserving of its own books written by other people.
That said, a number of people have told me about having an earring ripped out (by the likes of a child, monkey, branch, sweater snag, cockatoo, and even a wildly gesticulated pencil), and it sounds like no fun at all.
To be accurate, kids usually get their heads caught in the rails of the balustrade, not the bannister. The problem is that ears are one-way. Period. They fold back nicely when you want to go forward, and then spring out to prevent release.
This very action provided the ancient inspiration behind the invention of the toggle bolt, when Jomper Toggle got his head caught between the bars of his prison cell. (Okay, so I made up this story, but the actual origin of the toggle bolt is sexual in nature, and although its inclusion could be justified on the basis of historical accuracy, its adult nature makes it inappropriate for inclusion in a family-oriented volume such as this.)
A good combination is petroleum jelly, peanut butter, and vegetable oil. It hardly damages paint at all.
And yes, you could just use a couple of thin sheets of plastic to hold the ears flat (like flexible binder covers, or cheap cutting mats), but where’s the lesson (or fun) in that?
Did you know that if you hit a person in the ear with a water balloon, you can pop their eardrum?
Well, now you do.
The Front includes the following non-back above-the-waist non-extremities, namely: the chest, throat (outsides), collarbone, pectorals/breasts, nipples (unless they’re phenomenally long, I suppose, then they might be extremities), ribs, and belly.
Considering how much of your overall body target is made up of your front, I think it’s odd that I’ve heard so few stories about frontal injuries. For example (or for lack of any), no one likes to get glucked in the throat, but I have no specific tales about these incidents.
One of the most maligned bones in the body, the clavicle is lauded for its contribution to keeping our ties from becoming belts: it is the bone without which we would have no collar. Your shoulders would just stick out of your hips somewhere. Anyway, it gets snapped on an unreasonably regular basis.
It is with a feeling akin to blessed relief that I can say with some confidence that I have no nipple stories to tell you (aside from having heard of “purple nurples” and piercings, of course), which is definitely not the same thing as having no-nipple stories to tell you. (Let us not dwell on that scene in ”The Wall“ where Pink damn near... nevermind.)
Ribs can get broken when you smack into something (commonly the ground plus some intermediate obstacle, like a tree limb), and vice versa (such as when you obliviously walk into the path of a batter’s practice swing, or lose a game of urban Frogger). But the bone can also get separated from the cartilage in a condition called costochondritis (i.e., an inflammation of the place where the bone and cartilage meet). That pain can last for many months, to the point where you forget what “normal” felt like. The problem is that this joint is designed specifically to provide some flexibility when you’re moving around and breathing and so on, but that very mobility continues to irritate the injury and delay its healing.
My impression is that belly injuries mostly involve getting the wind knocked out of you, and I have very few specific tales beyond the likes of, “I was playing football when...,” “I was boxing and...,” “I landed on my stomach when I fell off/out of a...,” or, classically, “My brother jumped on my stomach and....”
(For what it’s worth, there are some stories that I am not including here because they also involved serious internal injuries for the kid, which entailed a whole lot of worry among family and friends, and that sort of thing is not entertaining to me. If it’s a story about me, that’s one thing, but not when some other kid really gets hurt.)
I was about five at the time (that seems to have been a dangerous year for me), playing with some kids on a flatbed truck parked across the street in a neighbor’s driveway, and we were tripping each other off of the bed so we could land in odd positions on this innertube-and-canvas trampoline sort of a thing. I invented a particularly peculiar landing position which involved diving head first into the ground, thus diverting most of the force of the blow through my spine, but catching one shoulder on the innertube, both popping the innertube and absorbing just enough impact to keep me from being killed outright. I guess that the broken collarbone accounted for a lot of my inability to catch my breath for the next couple of hours. Either that or the punch in the gut that I took for popping the innertube.
My wife’s uncle described launching a welding spark into the depths of his navel, and I must say it sounded like an excruciating experience. That said, you truly have to admire his aim.
Late one night I was walking just past the corner of a 24-hour convenience store with my hands in my pockets when a guy came barreling out of the alley and bowled me over. He hit me on my left side and my feet both fetched up against a concrete parking lot bumper, so I landed very heavily on my right side while squarshed by this two-ton idiot (where my estimate of his weight accounts for the gravitational effects of his inertia, i.e., my injury, so my physics). The police officer who immediately came flying out of the darkness behind him seemed to be very happy that I had been there to provide a helping hand, and I spent the next few months trying to remember what painless breathing had been like before I separated my chest cartilage from my ribs.
My friend Gary was standing on a second-floor landing, and I was passing the side of a waterbed frame up to him. (I don’t know why we didn’t just carry it up the stairs, but it was likely because cornering can be annoying, and just handing it to him would have seemed faster.) I started to let go just as he lost his grip, and I kept it from falling on my foot (yay) by letting the attached metal bracket dig a furrow into my belly (boo).
The Back includes all non-front above-the-waist non-extremities, namely: your neck, back, shoulder blades, spine (not including the tailbone, which belongs to The Butt), and kidneys.
Similar to the butt, there are a couple of primary ways to injure your back. One is by damage to the spine, of which the tailbone is the butt extension. We don’t really have a term in English that would be the non-spine, above-the-waist back analog of “buttocks,” so I’ll just say “backmeat” if the need arises (which it probably won’t). And of course by “kidneys” I don’t mean the internal organs here, but rather the area of the back that would be targeted by a kidney punch, which, now that I think about it, suggests captivating new meanings for such familiar terms as “fruit punch,” “paper punch,” and (perhaps most distressingly) “heavy-duty hole punch.”
The most insidious kind of back injury, of course, is all of the abuse that you heap on it by lifting overly heavy and ungainly objects by sheer force of youth, where you don’t feel the wear and tear when it is occurring. You have to wait to grow older when all of a sudden (or so it seems) you can’t even lift your spirits without ending up in traction for a month.
Like it was the day before yesterday, I can still hear the sound of my friend’s spine after he slipped off of a branch and landed backward across a tree limb, only to spin headward to bellyflop thuddingly onto packed earth and roots. He walked away from that one... after a while, slowly. That ratchet noise was not as similar as I might have predicted to the singular crack his spine made when he flipped off of his bike and landed across the split-rail fence, or for that matter when he went flying up off of the half pipe and landed across the lip. I wonder if this is the sort of thing that inspired Fosbury. (Now there’s someone who truly benefited from the advent of foam padding.)
A friend got bucked by a pony and landed on her back in a pile of ponyshit. (At least it was fresh, so she had that going for her.) My understanding is that the first thing to do in that situation is to lie there in pain, being grateful that you weren’t riding a horse. Or an elephant.
My friend Carl fell backwards into a bed of ivy for a high school movie project, cleverly discovering a sprinkler head with his kidney. So, yeah, the whole “plunging into the unknown” thing can be bad news.
These kinds of stories seriously retract the landing gear.
While a kick to the groin is pretty unpleasant no matter one’s sex, from a male’s point of view the worst of these kinds of injuries (other than the outright loss of the parts) involves “nutcracking.” I can’t even watch the ballet in question without an occasional tremor of sympathy pain. We went to a restaurant that had a collection of, you know, nutcrackers, and it made me nervous just to sit near them.
There have been a few movies in which people have been chased by dolls or toys that have come to life, but I haven’t yet seen some poor guy being chased around by a nutcracker trying to crush his targets.
There were four of us crammed into the teacup at Disneyland: Jeff, myself, and the two young women whom we were escorting around this theme park. As entangled as we were, Jeff’s date had her foot more or less resting in his lap. When the ride started, Jeff and I went to work on that little wheel in the middle, first whipping that teacup around so fast one way that it was hard to reach into the middle, and then slowing it down and going the other way. The ladies were finding it impossible to hold their respective heads up, and Jeff and I were still spinning the thing and laughing like maniacs, when Jeff’s date decided that her only defense was to apply crushing pressure to the foot brake. Jeff’s hands left the wheel in desperation and mine went limp in my lap out of sympathy. My lap went limp as well.
Maybe she thought it was only fair to share the nausea with him.
I was sleeping on the couch wrapped up otherwise naked in a yellow thermal blanket, when I suddenly heard a noise and got up to figure out what it was. The second I got up I started screaming bloody murder because the cat had fallen asleep on my lap and decided to hang from me by its claws. Yes, right from the end. That would have been bad enough but the cat was also wriggling around trying to gain purchase on my legs with its hind feet so it could let go and land with some decorum.
I have been bludgeoned, poked, sliced, stuck, broken, and on and on, but there is a meaningful sense in which this numbers among the worst of my injuries.
My advice is that if you ever have the opportunity to avoid having your most sensitive body parts even mildly shredded by a cat’s claws... take it!
This book would not be complete without solemnly mentioning the horizontal crossbar on boys’ bikes. (The design of girls’ bikes used to take skirts into account, so the crossbar was curved to be low near the seat.) I know that you’re supposed to adjust the bike so that you have a couple of inches’ worth of clearance over this bar, but: 1) many people can’t afford to ride a bike that is optimally adjustable to their personal configuration, and 2) a couple of inches just isn’t enough to save you when you’re flying forward off the seat (during some daredevil stunt, or from just hitting a small but stubborn rock). More than once I’ve seen a kid land poorly after launching up a homemade ramp, and in one case the bike maliciously held onto my friend’s pantleg as he tried to kick himself free. (That episode ended in a memorably solid crush.) While grunching yourself on one of these nutcrackers had virtually become a rite of passage for a young man, I am pleased to say that many bikes are now designed with a slanting crossbar. With all of that in mind, let me just make one suggestion: pool noodle. (No, I am not referring to Seinfeldian shrinkage.)
And for the sake of all that’s good and holy, if you’re teaching a boy child to pee standing up, either install one of those slow-close toilet lids or teach them not to rest on the edge.
There are two particularly bad ways to find out that your urethra is unusually sensitive to the introduction of certain chemicals. (Well, okay, there are far more than two, but I’m going to focus on a couple of specific ways that are not deliberate.)
“Fuzzy Wuzzy Bath Soap” was furry-animal shaped (e.g., bear, dog, monkey, and so on), and it would grow a pelt of crystals. Which of course was all well and good until the burning began. There was supposed to be a toy inside (of the soap), but of course we didn’t get that far before throwing it away. And how the hell do you rinse your urethra from the outside?
Nonoxynol-9 is a spermicide whose flame-throwing effect might not be felt until the next morning. The first significant hint of the allergic reaction is your knees buckling when you go to pee (even if you are already sitting down). And it’s not like you can decide not to pee until it gets better. The only relief is what you feel when the doctor tells you that you don’t have a serious STD. To add insult to injury, when you go in to find out why your urethra is on fire, the nurse has to take a specimen by swabbing way down inside. And then they act all incredulous when you don’t remember wrenching the rails off the gurney.
In terms of damage taking, there are two main areas of the butt, namely the tailbone and the buttocks. The tailbone tends to get smacked, and the buttocks either tend to get stabbed, or the muscles get pulled or torn. Part of this difference is probably due to the fact that a smack to the buttocks is rarely perceived as a grievous injury, and I am given to understand that it’s difficult to be accurate enough to stab the tailbone without hitting the buttocks instead. Plus, if you fall on your ass hard enough for it to feel like an actual injury, you’ve probably bruised or broken the tailbone too.
When I asked around to see what support I could get for this conjecture, I was surprised to find that there is some controversy around the use of the term “yoga butt.” Some people want to reserve it to describe the silhouette-altering effect of practicing yoga for several months, while others feel that it should join the hallowed ranks of such occupational syndromes as: “tennis elbow,” “housemaid’s knee,” “cycler’s sack,” “diver’s palsy,” “lover’s fracture,” “rap music,” “weaver’s bottom,” “barbecue ribs,” “welder’s navel,” “swimmer’s ear,” “pirate’s chest,” “baker’s asthma,” and “plumber’s crack.”
I slid down a flat, wet rock on my back into the Sacramento River, only to find myself paralyzed after having caught my tailbone a solid smack against the raised edge of a split in the rock face. I ended up doing a marvelous imitation of Frankenstein as I floated slowly and rigidly downstream.
When my grandfather was young he hopped into the backseat of a flivver or tin lizzy or zoot buggy or whatever they used to call them back then (perhaps a car) and landed on a porcupine pelt (or, as they used to say, a porkypaloozer). The extraction process was reported to be memorably painful.
I can’t help but think, what sort of idiot leaves a porcupine pelt on a seat of all places? It’s not like he was just a product of his times where no one gave a damn about sharp objects or something; after all, the safety razor had been invented decades earlier, even the type with disposable blades, and they already even had those medicine cabinets with a slot in the back for that very disposal. So it’s not like his decision-making was due to a cultural devil-may-carelessness. No, I think that I can safely conclude that the guy was misguided in his approach to other-centered behavior. But let’s not leave the topic without a mention of Paul Winchell, who invented an inexpensive wholly-disposable razor just a year after I was born; I think it’s very cool that the voice of Tigger (and a raft of other well-known characters) patented and built the first implantable artificial heart.
I wouldn’t kid you about something like that.
For some reason, things that people wouldn’t do to their outsides in a million years they are eager to do to their insides. You wouldn’t pour tar all over your skin, but millions of people pour it onto their lung and brain tissue on a daily basis. I wouldn’t cover my face in plaque, but I’m probably coating my arteries regularly. Maybe if people could see what’s going on rather than having the ugly consequences all nice and hidden away... nah.
Most thrillseeking injuries have to be pretty severe to reach an internal organ, so there aren’t going to be all that many stories here, as there are fewer survivors to tell the tales, plus I don’t like stories where kids get hurt that badly.
Jeff wanted to be a cowboy, so my dad sat down with him and smoked the remains of this beastly pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes that had been stored in an economy-sized peanut butter jar since just after the Flood receded. Jeff lined them up, intending to smoke them all, lit the first one, puffed away, got green, got a nose bleed, and declined to proceed. My dad was all like, “Okay, we can stop if you want, but if you ever change your mind these will be right here on top of the fridge, and we can always get them down again.”
We never did.
I recall several occasions where the family would go to a smörgåsbord restaurant, and Jeff and I would stuff ourselves so badly that we would have to lie down in the back of the car to avoid the worst of the pain. But what a glorious pain it was.
When I was about four, my friend Glen and I sat on the top of the back fence and shared a few bottles of that yummy orange-flavored children’s aspirin. My mom found the empty bottles, notified Glen’s mom, and then worked at making me throw up with salt water. This is an excellent reason to find alternatives to FDA-approved poisons deliberately tailored to taste great to kids.
That said, I still think it’s ultracool that you can go to the apothecary and they will flavor your medicine. The thing is, though, the only available choices seem to be either kid-attractive flavors, like watermelon, strawberry, bubblegum, and banana (which are okay, I suppose), or they cater to pets with flavors like bacon, tuna, and molasses (which might also not be too bad). I guess that if I want my medicine to taste like Bailey’s I can always go out and buy my own kit.
You’re probably well familiar with the fact that the skin is the largest bodily organ. Naturally, then, you will be surprised to learn that few of these stories deal with injuries to the skin. (Go ahead, let yourself go! Be surprised! Help me out here.) The reason, of course, is that cuts and so forth are identified as wounds to specific body parts, possibly because tearing into Emergency screaming, “I’ve cut my skin!” isn’t particularly helpful. For this very reason, the only stories that get put in this section are those which involve generalized damage all over the outside of the body.
Swimming around in the storm run-off slough was dumb for so many reasons that we tended to overlook those times when we would get snagged by old hooks whose lines were all tangled up in the rusty garbage lining the silty muck on the bottom of the creek. Besides, who has time to think about that sort of thing when you’re busy having fun? Well, one thing that makes time is when you’ve got your foot caught in some roots at the bottom of the hole, and you’re lounging about drowning. It would be all the more horrible if you were caught down there on a fish hook or two (or three) and you had to decide whether to rip yourself free or wait a few hours or weeks for the water level to drop below your head.
Yes, it is infused with the most beautiful and vibrant of fall colors, but my grandmother’s sister learned not to include poison ivy amongst the Harvest Festival decorations.
Right after I graduated college, I managed to get a (pretty much) all-over severe sunburn because I fell asleep. I had to wear a suit for a job interview the next day that required a two-hour drive each way. The day after that, my chest peeled off in one sheet. And yes, I am waiting for that to come back to haunt me.
I don’t have any significant conclusions to draw beyond the generalities that already pepper this chapter. What I would like to do instead is briefly talk (only semi-seriously) about the singlemost dangerous place for thrillseeking children to visit (as measured on a per-visit basis, anyway).
No, it’s not your kitchen with its knives and ovens and glass.
No, it’s not your bathroom with its slippery surfaces and noxious substances.
No, it’s not your meth lab with its gas flames and mercury and staple removers.
Yes, it’s your local playground with its enticing color schemes, heavy machinery, and easy access to heights.
The whole environment is designed to present a false sense of security to a specific set of particularly vulnerable users, namely kids, because they have the least amount of practical experience in risk assessment around their personal safety. I know people who, as kids: broke bones on a climbing structure, chipped teeth on a seesaw (half a dozen such folks), cut their eye on a protruding bolt, tore their ligaments after getting their leg tangled in a climbing net, shattered their spleen falling off of a slide, banged their head at the bottom of a slide, broke their tailbone when their partner jumped off of a seesaw, dislocated a shoulder when flying off of the roundabout (aka the carousel, merry-go-round, spinner, g-force puker, centrifuge of death, and so on), and burned their skin on the hot summer slide. And then of course there are all of the falls, breaks, and bludgeonings just from the horizontal ladders known as monkey bars. (Mmm, monkey bars.) I mean, there’s even a study by the Consumer Product Safety Commission that analyzes all of the injuries that entail trips to the Emergency Room, sometimes resulting in death.
And yes, most of the time by far everything comes off without a hitch (break, burn, or concussion), but that’s not what this book is about because I just don’t remember a whole lot of lunchroom conversations going along the lines of, “Hey, I enjoyed another completely uneventful and injury-free day on the playground.” It was always more like, “Look! I got this scab tripping on a kickball and skidding on the blacktop. Wanna trade your chips for this cookie?"
I’ll tell some of these stories in more detail when we get to “Explorations.” The real point of bringing it up here is just to avoid the clunkiness of strewing these examples across this chapter according to injured body part.
Mission accomplished.
You’re filthy, the lot of you.
And I’ll warn you that we’re about to wander into TMI territory in this Note, but I decided to include it in the book anyway because I should qualify what I said about my relatively low incidence of crotch injuries, particularly in light of being diagnosed with cancer shortly after I thought this book was finally ready for release.
So here goes.
The doctor performed the first half of my vasectomy before the anesthetic took effect. I had told him that it would take longer than normal for my body to react to the anesthetic, but he didn’t believe me. I did, however, react very quickly indeed to the wave of intense nausea, nearly passing out as he cut into me. He just said, “You’re not in pain. You’re not in pain.” The thing is, he said it with a particular British intonation, so I didn’t know that he was asking me. It sounded like he was telling me, “It’s only nausea, not pain, which is to be expected, so deal with it.” Fortunately, after not too much more crotchal slicing, the nurse said, “Doctor, that boy is in pain.” I agreed with her wholeheartedly (and half-scrotedly), pointing at her repeatedly and emphatically, then I said, “I’m going to take a little nap now.” The doc responded with, “Oh no you’re not, stay with me,” and tilted the head of the table down. It seems sort of sadistic that he would insist on my being awake for the pain, but I find that I don’t understand Canadian medicine very well. Anyway, for what it’s worth, when he tipped the table I imagined my right nut rolling down the incline and bouncing across the floor, which further amplified the potential for wanton barfamication. (No, not, “won ton barfamication.” Don’t be gross.) The nurse then gave me a cool, damp towel for my forehead, and the doctor decided to wait somewhat longer before continuing to slice me up. I got quite a bit of sympathy from the four other guys in the recovery room, then waddled out and drove myself home.
Did I mention that this happened on Valentine’s Day?
Anyway, on top of this, many people in my family have a blood-injection-injury (BII) phobia. It’s the only phobia that you can inherit, and rather than causing an adrenaline-style fear reaction, you get a vasovagal response that tries to keep you from bleeding out. It draws into your gut a lot of the blood from your extremities, such as your head. So you get a very brief heart acceleration, then a slowed heart rate, dropping blood pressure, and, if you’re not careful (and sometimes even if you are), fainting. If I see someone else getting hurt, then my imagination treats me to their sensation of pain and the passing out from shock.
Unless it’s an emergency situation, then some other part of my brain takes over and I’m fine to help. Until it’s over, anyway, and I have time to think and look around, then I get sick.
I can work in acute care as a speech-language pathologist without issue, and be around wounds and IVs and all of that, but when I would go to watch veterinary surgery (back when I thought that was going to be my career path, not as a hobby), I would start to pass out. Somehow my brain can tell the difference between when I am needed, and when I am not.
Yes, I did need to lie down on the floor during the early-ish stages of labor when my child was born. But I bounced back as the sense of being needed took over so I had no further problem.
I can look at the scars on the backs of my hands and say, “nail sticking out of a board, box cutter, shattering beaker, startled black leopard, glove compartment burr, drinking glass, don’t remember, yanked wedding ring, top of chain link fence, forced screw driver,” and so on. I tend not to do that, though, because it brings on uncomfortable sensations of experiencing the original pain. And once the chemo conveniently wiped out my hair, I could do the same on my scalp with the likes of, “claw hammer from Jeff, cranked out window frame, Buick trunk lid,” and so on.
Phrases with a staccato, trochaic trimeter pattern (i.e., “DA-da DA-da DAA-daaa,” as in, “Fuzzy Wuzzy Bath Soap,” and, “grow a pelt of crystals”) will trigger for me the earworm associated with Harnick and Bock’s, “If I were a Rich Man,” except that the poetic phrase insists on swapping out the original lyrics.