THE DUMB WAYS WE HURT OURSELVES
Facebook post prompts confessions about how things like sneezing and sleeping go wrong
Louis Greenstein was 28 and working as an extra in a friend’s movie. There was a lot of waiting around, and he noticed an electric cow fence.
He picked up a twig and flicked it at the fence. Nothing happened.
He touched the twig to the wire. Nothing.
“So I dropped the twig and grabbed the wire with my hand,” said Greenstein, now 61 and an editor and writer in Philadelphia.
“I got electrocuted and it hurt, I mean, it really hurt. I jumped back and I look back and the entire crew is looking at me with these blank looks on their faces. One of them finally said, ‘Why did you do that?’”
Taylor Swift posted pictures of her bloody finger bandage after a 2015 kitchen knife injury, and Jimmy Fallon nearly lost his finger after his wedding ring got caught on a countertop.
After I wrecked my back relocating a large cat off my lap, I posted on Facebook asking about stupid human injuries and got about 100 comments in less than a day.
They stabbed themselves with meat thermometers, injured themselves changing a duvet cover and tripped over many cats and curbs and stairs. Sneezing and sleeping are particularly dangerous for backs.
Safety tips are usually aimed at keeping children safe, not adults. We’re supposed to have outgrown that. And yet ...
“We had a young man who had a sty on his eye and his father encouraged him to take care of it on his own — and offered him the use of his hunting knife,” said Ann P. Murchison, director of the Wills Eye Emergency Department in Philadelphia. “Thankfully he didn’t do anything to his eyeball, but his eyelid didn’t fare as well.”
Murchison said most injuries are due to falls or allergic reactions, but some of them are people doing really — there’s no other word for it — dumb things. Like trying to curl eyelashes with a curling iron. Or using regular glue to put on false eyelashes and gluing their eyes shut.
Several years ago, Christine Radlinger Solina, 46, of Deptford, N.J, was attacked by a “murderous underwire bra.”
She was getting undressed for bed and took off her shirt, not realizing that the underwire had broken and poked through the middle of the bra.
“When I went to take my arm out of the sleeve, I gashed my wrist on the wire and had to drive myself to the ER because the kids were sleeping and the husband had to stay home with them,” she said.
She ended up with five stitches — and the doctor on call was a classmate of her husband.
“Needless to say, I was the entertainment for the whole hospital staff,” she said.
Mark Krill, 36, a software engineer near Tampa, once separated his shoulder trying to race teenagers on a BMX course and crashed. (He said he’d been able to keep up with his four- and five-year-olds just fine.) He also sliced open his hand trying to open a new grill with a pocket knife and now can’t feel anything in one of his fingers.
Then there was the time he was on his way to a date. A tire blew, he pulled over to change it and an officer offered him a crowbar. The crowbar rebounded and smacked Krill in the face. He ended up with a nasty black eye when he went to meet his date. She’s now his wife and is the one who nominated him for this story.
Amy Milner, 47, in Brooklyn, N.Y., was trying to shove her comforter into a duvet cover when she “punched the crap out of my arm between my shoulder and elbow.” She ended up with a massive bruise.
Paul Leingang, 27, was working at a doggie day care in St. Paul, Minn., when, trying to stop a dogfight, he smashed his head into the corner of a heater hanging from the ceiling.
“I had a concussion and seven staples on the top of my head and the doctors were all like, ‘Did you not SEE the heater there?’” Leingang said.
Then there are the injuries that, decades later, leave the victim unsure how they happened.
Tracy Rowland, 50, of Jersey City once fractured her skull with … a butter knife.
“I was using it to pry off the back of my stereo speaker. It wouldn’t budge so I put my face right down there to see what was holding up the process and the knife slipped out — but I was still pushing hard so it did a catapult-level THWACK right between my eyes, causing a hairline fracture in the part of the skull right above the nose hole,” she wrote, adding that she was roundly mocked in the ER.
Oddly, she has volunteered for Habitat for Humanity for years without injury. Perhaps that’s because she is using the correct tool for the job, she suggests.
“Power tools aren’t as dangerous as butter knives in my capable hands,” Rowland said. “I think when you’re using something that’s labelled as ‘dangerous,’ you tend to pay more attention; household items just sneak up on us.”