Trivial Injuries

Some injuries are cool to boast about, like breaking your leg while doing some crazy parkour or breaking your wrist when punching a tree in your righteous frustration. Other injuries are… not. This post will recount some of the more stupid, trivial wounds I’ve received while just living my life.

Spraining my Ankle

We have a trampoline in our backyard. One of those industrial-size ones that you need a small stepladder to get onto, and with a big black net strung all around it because my mom didn’t want us to fall off. It was my favorite form of exercise as a kid; going outside with my siblings and playing on the trampoline, jumping and playing a circular version of tag and putting every ounce of energy to good use. In the summer we’d put sprinklers under it and bounce around to our hearts’ content. And whenever our cousins or friends came over, the first thing they’d want to do is play on the trampoline with us.

One of these times when our second cousins were staying at our house, they woke up early in the morning. It was on my 8th birthday, and we were going to celebrate at Chuck E Cheese’s later in the day. I was super excited. The cousins woke up my older brother and I by watching cartoons, first of all- because this is in the summer, and what better summer morning activity than watching cartoons? But they quickly got bored of that, and once it was light enough outside, they begged us to go outside and play on the trampoline. So, of course we did! But when you’re a small 8-year old jumping around with larger preteens, things can go wrong. And they did.

When I was launched into the air by a powerful jump from one of my cousins, I landed incorrectly on my ankle and sprained it. Of course, none of us kids knew what that meant, but I was in pain and crying so one of them rushed to wake up my mom. After ten minutes or so of panic, my mom figured out that my ankle was only sprained, not broken, and so it would be fine in a few days as long as we put ice on it and didn’t let me run around too much. So though it was painful for a while, my mom helped me walk around, and I still got to go and play at Chuck E Cheese’s. I just had to do it carefully and without the reckless abandon of most 8-year-olds. It felt better in about two days, if I remember correctly, and didn’t even hurt that badly.

Losing a Toenail

(Kind of gross, so don’t read if you get easily grossed out by injuries.) My family has a fireplace in our house. Not an electric fire, not a fake fire, an actual fireplace with a brick chimney on our roof and everything. We use wood to build fires, so my dad and older brother chop wood in the summer to fill our woodshed for the winter. The children (once we were old enough, of course) were always in charge of getting wood from the woodshed to build fires that kept the house warm. It was much cheaper than using the house’s built-in heating system, and very effective when done correctly. We would go and put heavy pieces of wood in a wheelbarrow, move it over to the back door, and then pass them in fire-brigade style to the wood-box next to the fireplace. This was a system that usually worked very well. One day, however, it didn’t.

When my siblings and I were getting firewood on this one day, passing it through the doorway to someone inside by the wood-box, my sister handed me a really heavy piece of wood. I misjudged its weight, so it slipped through my fingers and landed straight on the big toe of my right foot. It hurt a little bit, so I handed the wood to my brother and walked inside, sitting on the couch and breathing for a few moments. My mom, who had seen what happened, panicked and took off my shoe to reveal that my sock was turning red. She gingerly took the sock off and saw that my big toenail was almost completely ripped away from my foot- the entire thing, not just the white edge. It was just hanging to my toe by a string of skin.

It was still bleeding heavily, so my mom put my foot in a bowl of warm water until the bleeding stopped and the pain ebbed a little bit. Once it stopped hurting too much, I was just happy to have gotten out of the rest of the work. My dad ended up carefully severing the dangling nail from my foot with a pair of pliers, and I just had to be extra careful with my toe for the next couple of weeks. It grew back in a couple of months, though the nail is a little malformed compared to the other ones, so no major harm was done. But it’s not the cool sort of injury you talk about, and it happened in a very minor way.

Breaking my Front Tooth

This one was very recent. Just last November, actually, here at college. One Friday night, my friend and boyfriend and I were going to watch a movie with the Harry Potter Club- I just needed to put my backpack away in dorm first, and my boyfriend was going to go call his parents for a bit. Since it was the winter, it was dark despite being just before 7pm. I put away my backpack, then came back to walk to the FoxHole (hangout spot where the movie was being shown) with my friend. My boyfriend was going to catch up with us later. A car was coming down the street, so we walked next to the parking lot for a little while instead of on the sidewalk. My friend suggested that we go to the other side of the road, so we crossed over. But when I lifted my foot to step onto the sidewalk, with all the force of power-walking behind me, my toes caught the edge, and I face-planted right onto the concrete.

Falling is a weird feeling- you don’t quite realize that it’s happened until three seconds later, when you’re lifting your face off of the sidewalk and looking down in confusion at the small puddle of blood that’s growing. A tiny white chip of tooth lay next to the blood puddle, and reaching up with an adrenaline-trembling hand showed me that my lip had split open and my front right tooth had its bottom half snapped clean off. My friend had seen me fall- she managed to hold herself together in the face of a very understandable panic, looking for the campus security number to call on her phone. Someone walking on the street also saw the predicament, and got someone from the nearby Hadlock Student Center to come over with a first aid kit. More people came to assist- making sure my RA from just 50 feet away was contacted because she had to file an incident report, calling campus security to give me a ride to the emergency room, gawking at the flow of blood coming from my face. Honestly, it was embarrassing.

I felt no pain, due to being in shock, but I was frustrated at myself for getting such a stupid injury in such a stupid way. How hard can it be to step onto a sidewalk? Also, I hate dentists, and so the fact that now I would have to deal with one was anxiety-inducing. I would rather have broken my wrist, even though that definitely would have taken longer to heal. But in the end, all was well. Campus security drove me, and my friend, and my boyfriend (who had rushed up once he heard the news) to the emergency room (the other hospitals weren’t open, given that it was almost 8pm by this point). They ascertained that my lip didn’t need stitches, gave me an ice pack, and told me to go see a dentist to get my tooth fixed back on. Luckily, I’d saved the small chip of enamel, and they gave me a little container with cleaning fluid to put it in.

Telling my parents about it was… fun. I’d used up my yearly dose of college shenanigan stupidity without even trying. They contacted our dentist, however, who agreed to see me the very next day in order to fix my tooth. I had to eat around a swollen lip for the next two weeks, and only soft foods for roughly a week. Talking was difficult, singing even more so- unluckily, since I was in choir and since my job involves talking to people on the phone. My dentist informed me that I am no longer allowed to bite into apples or carrots with my front teeth. Everything has been fine, though. Almost three months later, my teeth are still okay, my lip has healed completely except for a tiny scar, and neither my friend nor my boyfriend abandoned me despite my stupid injury causing them to miss a fun night of watching a Harry Potter movie. As a matter of fact, they both stayed with me the rest of the evening. Not only did they come with me to the emergency room (out of no obligation, just because they were that nice), they came with me back to my dorm room and cheered me up. When I left to get a drink of water and came back, there was a mysterious dollar under my pillow from “the tooth fairy.” They still sat and ate with me even when I had to chew with my mouth open or find some way to get a spoon of oatmeal past my swollen lip. They are true friends, the real deal, and I’m lucky to have them in my life.

So yeah- those are some of the miniscule, but annoying injuries I’ve gotten over the past 18 or so years of living. I’m sure I’ll get injured in many more stupid ways before I die. While these were all somewhat crazy experiences, everything always turned out well, and sometimes it was even a good thing. I think especially in the case of me breaking my tooth, I was able to feel a lot closer to my friend and my boyfriend, and they really came through for me. I hope that when you guys inevitably suffer a similarly stupid injury, that you have good people to help you through it!