Injuries and broken bones

I have had 30 surgeries, varying in seriousness. Most were major.

As for broken bones, I've fractured my femur twice.

Do I win?

Cameron, you totally need a new avatar.



When I went to Australia the last night we were there I was acting a fool in the parking lot of the restaurant we had dinner at and slipped because it was a gravel lot. I landed directly on my left knee and gashed it quite a bit. Not enough to require stitches or anything but just enough to drive a pebble sized piece of gravel under the skin about a 1/4 of an inch above the cut. I had to squeeze it out like I was trying to get the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube.

A few years ago I was playing a tennis match and the courts were built incorrectly. The bolts that hold the fencing to the posts are supposed to be on the outside. I went to chase a ball down wide and returned it with a nice backhand. I knew the fence was coming up and didn't want to run my shoulder into it so I stiff-armed it and drove a one inch bolt through my left hand at the meaty part just below the thumb.

This occurred at approximately 7:30pm and I went to the Urgent Care and as the doc was stitching me up around 9:30 he asked when it had happened. I told him and he glanced at the clock then at me. I had to explain to him that I was captain of my tennis team and couldn't very well leave my match to a forfeit in case it meant the deciding win 3-2 win. I had a large gash with some fat and tissue hanging out but managed to wrap it up nicely and finish my match before I went to be treated.

Its called having Spina Bifida. Lots of things need to be fixed or tweaked over the years. The most fun and painful being a spinal fusion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinal_fusion

I'm hardly fragile though. Far from it, really.

Cameron wins. Short thread...

I've had I don't know how many surgeries because of Crohns Disease. I lost count at eight surgeries when I was 13, but I've had a lot more since then. A lot of them were very, very major. The last one took place this past January.

I also broke my leg a few times when I was younger.

Broke my big toe in elementary school when me and another boy kicked each other in the feet playing soccer. Had to wear a thing on my foot so it would stay flat.

A couple of years later I broke my little finger playing dodgeball of all things. The doctor stuck the break twice with a syringe to give me this painkiller that burned and hurt worse than the actual break before setting it and giving me a caste that immobilized the broken finger along with my ring finger. It was my dominate right hand, too, so I handed a lot of poorly scribbled homework in written by my left.

Best part was that I had to tape a garbage bag around it to take a shower.

Oh, no, I gathered that from the cripple thread. I was just keeping it movie related.

Borke my pinky toe once 'cause I kicked a big rock by mistake when I was running, and several boxer's fractures. I need to stop punching things.

Same here. Never had surgery of any kind, either. Never been hospitalized for anything. Had to get 3 stitches once in junior high.

Knock on motherfucking wood...

Damn borken bones.

I've never had a broken bone. I do have nerve damage in my hands though. Plus, one time I got my foot stuck in the front spokes of my bike while I was going 15 miles an hour or so, and flew over the handlebars. I also once crashed while skiing and fell down an entire double black diamond mountain face. It was a controlled fall though and actually sort of neat. I had to try and direct myself away from the edge with all the trees.

Cameron Hughes still wins though

Never broken a bone. Had to have part of my coccyx removed though. It wasn't fun.

I have Basal Cell Carcinoma Nevus Syndrome, which basically means my body makes cancer naturally. Because I've had jaw and brain cancer and a ton of related complications, I've had the occipital plate of my skull, most of my teeth, and a large section of my lower mandible removed.

I also shattered my right distal phalanx in college when I ran full force into a concrete wall blind drunk. My left hand was also broken in five places in a fist fight with my brother earlier this year.

One minor fracture on my left middle finger when a heavy wooden window frame fell on my hand. Didn't really heal correctly either, so that finger is slightly askew.

Also, a "friend" of mine whacked a branch of thick Florida palm fronds against me once and drove an inch-long splinter into my arm that stayed in my body for nearly a month until I built up enough pus to push it back out. Fun.

All things considering, though, I'm a lucky fucker.

I forgot, I also tripped and fell and smashed my face into the curb when I was little. Broke and/or knocked out almost every single one of my teeth.

Never broken a bone but at age seven I did rupture my spleen and puncture my stomach and had to spend a few weeks in hospital.

Wednesday I got to see four year old skull. Just as I was pulling into a friends driveway, a mutual friend who lives a few houses down began running down the street frantically.

I inquired what was wrong and he said his four year old had fallen off a go-cart that his 14 year old was driving.

So I backed out, had him hop in the car and we went looking for her. When we got there the top left of her forehead had a playing card sized piece of skin missing as well as her right thumb was peeled off the bone.

I've had a blackhead on my jaw for about 4 years now. I had no idea blackheads lasted that long, and assumed it was just a mole or something. Then someone suggested that I squeeze it and see what happens. So I did, and like two inches of creamy yellow stuff came out and coiled around my hands. It was awesome. I wrapped it up in a tissue so I could show it to friends and family.

I reckon.

If we're going for sheer number of major procedures, I've got you beat by a factor of three and I'm nearly two years younger than you are.

My late brother and I used to take bets on whose medical history weighed more when we were kids. It was a crap shoot most of the time. It depended on the time of year, really.

Between being a terrible skateboarder, being an idiot and being a very active semi-reckless youth that endured far too many falls I'm happy to report I've never really broken anything and have very few scars.

I credit this to my obsession with wanting to be a stunt man when I was a little kid (something that got started with the Riggs/Jumper scene in Lethal Weapon) and learning how roll with my falls.

Now you have me thinking about all the dumb things I used to do that should have resulted in more injuries...

Winner.

Also, yeah, never broke anything though with the amount of times I've been headbutted/punched in the head I should have broken my nose by now. Hopefully I'll stay this resilient for a while.

Broke an arm. I've also had my nose broken twice, which is the main reason I look like a fucking asshole.

No broken bones. Never been hospitalized. No stitches.

I have a dislocated tailbone from a gymnastics injury when I was a kid. The doctor said they would have to go in through my anus to reset it and I said no thanks. Since it's bent at the joint, its pretty harmless and isn't painful.

Broke my ankle falling out a tree; re-broke the ankle by running on it before it was properly healed.

Broke my nose when a baseball hit me in the face during a game; re-broke my nose when I was smashed in the face with an aluminum baseball bat a few weeks later.

Broke my wrist after being body-checked in a soccer game; re-broke my wrist after I was ejected from a car impacting my hand up my forearm, shattering every one of the bones in my wrist and pulverizing the ends of the two bones in my forearms. Later, had to have all those bones re-broken in the hospital because they were set incorrectly. The drugs I was given were amazing.

ETA: 5 stitches in my foot after my sister pushed me through a patio window.

I was skateboarding a couple of years back, next thing you know rusty nail in the hand.

Fractured my skull. Concussed. Didn't know who my folks were for a day.

Christ Nick, how didja do that?

Went out drinking with Aussie Chewers.

I've never broken a bone, though not for a lack of trying--growing up in the sticks, I fell out of more trees than I can remember. The real event that has befuddled me to this day came in high school, when a Jeep Grand Cherokee ran a stop sign and took me and my bike out. I hit the ground just in time to let the front tire roll up on my leg, where it then stopped, thought about what it just did for a moment, then went into reverse and rolled back off of my leg.

And still, my bones did not break. I even asked them to take X-rays to see if I have adamantium plating, but they just looked at me funny. The upshot to this is now I can accurately tell me people I'm car proof up to 30mph, and not feel like I'm lying.

I shall call you brother for this is pretty much the exact post I would have made. The sole exception being that I've got some pretty nasty scars as a direct result of playing soccer for 22 years.

Also, I impaled myself on a tree branch 2 years ago while snowboarding. I had no idea this occured until hours later when my buddy and I were sitting in the bar and I realized that my right hand was covered in blood. Good times.

Broken bone wise, I've only broken whatever that is that gives you a "boxer's fracture" or whatever. Not too painful.

Considering I raced motocross for about 7 years, it's a minor miracle I didn't break more than that. And I had some BAD wrecks. Ah, to be young and elastic again.

I did, however, tear my ACL during racing, and subsequently kept aggravating it playing football in high school. After blowing it out for like the 3rd time (twice racing, once football) during a practice my sophmore year, the team physical therapist looked at it and sent me to the team doctor.

The initial tear and subsequent blow outs were really painful, but those were NOTHING compare to the surgery/recovery. ACL surgery is a looooooong recovery and it fucking sucks. It takes months to be able to bend your knee again, and for me, was years before it finally resembled anything "normal" again. And I was praised for my dedication/progress in therapy.

But in the weeks after the surgery, something would happen where every morning when I got out of bed and the blood would rush back down my legs and past the knee, it was the WORST fucking pain I've ever felt in my whole life. The pain almost knocked me out every time, and I would cry like a little baby for about three minutes every day when I got up. So bad.

Also, I almost died post-surgery. I'm not crazy about blood/injury/trauma (may have something to do with getting run over by a truck on the highway afterschool when I was in 2nd grade); makes me queasy. So when they came to remove the blood-draining tube from my knee the 2nd day after surgery, I passed out and had a seizure where I stopped breathing for a few minutes. Woke up to a Dr. holding the defibrillator pads over me about to jolt me.

The bonus was, to get the tube out they took of my leg brace that was keeping my leg stable. So when I had the seizure, I apparently drew my leg completely up. Bending it that severely after surgery left quite a pain for me when I woke up.

I now hate hospitals.

I fractured my arm when I was young and broke a toe a few years ago.

I had ingrown toenails so severe they put me under and cut half my toenails out at the root (so I have half a toenail on each big toe).

I tore a ligament in my ankle playing basketball.

I tore everything under my kneecap in the military when my knee was bent 90 degrees to the side (my ACL "disappeared" and my meniscus looked like kelp, according to my Dr.), and had 2 surgeries to repair the damage (though it's never been above 75% since).

I've had two doctors recommend surgery on my back in the last year, but I'm trying everything under the sun to keep from being hacked at again.

When I was in second grade I got the flu and couldn't stop "tossing my cookies". I kept puking and puking till I got dehydrated and I ended up getting hospitalized where they had to give me fluids by IV

Back when I was nine, I was riding my bike down a steep driveway. I didn't make the turn onto the road and went hard into a chain link fence. I was thrown over the handlebars, inpaling me on the jagged snipped links running along the top of the fence. It happened so fast, I barely felt it. But I ripped open the flesh of my upper arm just below the armpit. I saw raw flesh from the partial avulsion hanging out. That was bad enough.

That's when I noticed the blood covering my bare chest from my ripped open throat. I ran screaming all the way home, thinking I was dying. The snipped links had jabbed up into the soft tissue under my jaw, missing the most vital blood vessels in the neck.

I ended up having stitches for both wounds, and scars I still carry forty years later.

Six weeks later, having recovered from my stitches and no swimming all summer, I decided to have a new adventure. If memory serves, there must have been an Olympics around that time. I decided to hang from the upper cross bar of a swing set, just to see how long I could do it.

Time for the dismount. I dropped to my feel just fine, but I decided to do a forward roll to get a higher score, or something.

I just didn't know how to do a forward roll properly.

So I turned my left wrist inward with the palm down and rolled.

I came up all right, but for some reason my left arm didn't follow naturally. I looked down to see my left arm hanging loosely. I had basically Joe Thiesmann'ed both wrist bones to the point they were just short of a compound fracture through the skin.

Now THAT I felt! Screaming in agony and panic, the lady whose yard I was playing in held my arm and walked me the block back to my house.

I ended up having immediate surgery on the wrist, which has never healed properly. I can't turn the wrist so the palm faces upwards, I can turn it about 90 degrees as opposed to 270 degrees for most people's wrists. Orthopedics have come a long way since the sixties.

So that was my Summer From Hell.

So, last year I was rehearsing for a production of "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)" which I was also directing. First thing you should know about me is that I'm 6'4" and weigh in at around 350 or so. I'm a big dude. This is a fairly demanding show, as you are constantly in motion, and I was proud of myself for being able to handle all the running around we had to do.

Then it happened. Two weeks before we opened.

The play is basically a satirical take on Shakespeare, where me and two other guys were attempting to put on abbreviated versions of all of Shakespeare's plays in 90 minutes. It's a great show if you get to see it. But I digress.

We were rehearsing "Macbeth". Basically, in this show, Macbeth and Macduff insult one another in Scottish accents and run at each other with large swords, swing, miss, stumble, then run at each other again.

On the first pass, when I stumbled, I couldn't recover. My body went airborn, much like Raiden in Mortal Kombat. I went face first into the wall offstage. My mouth hit a chair guard that was nailed to the wall. After that, my neck snapped back, I landed chest first, and then my feet tried to continue their journey forward toward my head. I essentially tried to fold myself in half, backwards. Kinda like what Jason did to that kid in the bed on Freddy vs Jason.

I needed four stitches in my lip, and was bedridden for almost two weeks because everything below my chest and above my waist felt like it was on fire whenever I tried to move.

We had to push the show back, but ultimately it turned out to be a great success.

When I was twelve I broke my arm playing roller hockey. I was wearing roller blades that didn't fit me particularly well and at one point I was reaching for the ball and fell and my arm landed between my body and my hockey stick. I ended up breaking both bones and the growth plate in my arm.

A couple years later I broke my ring finger playing football when during practice one of our lineman got knocked over and somehow his large helmet covered head managed on only land on my finger.

I broke my left foot shortly after we got our dog in high school. We had baby gates all over the house and one night I was heading up to bed and my foot clipped the gate but it didn't really hurt and I slept fine until waking up early the next morning in serious pain. My Mom didn't believe my out of nowhere foot injury for about a week before taking me to the Doctors.

I tore my ACL skiing my Freshman Year of College. My recovery ultimately wasn't nearly as bad as JoeyPants' but it sucked because it happened during Winter Break and my school wasn't insured to do PT on non student-athletes so I had to walk around on it for the whole winter in Connecticut.

I had this same problem after my second ACL surgery. It was a BITCH. The first time it happened I thought someone had set my leg on fire. I spent 2 weeks holding my bathroom breaks in as long as possible just so I wouldn't have to get vertical. Glad you recovered! My knee still sucks (but, I had a shitty surgeon and horrible rehab).

Borke?

Wrong Bork!

Knee is (mostly) great now. Over the past year, some sort of floating object has been getting "caught in the gears" every now and then. My surgeon said they couldn't see anything from xrays and all that, but he would scope it if I wanted. But they told me it was mostly fine and not a danger.

All my cartilage is gone in the knee, so it could be a small remnant leftover.

But other than that, the knee is good as ever. Like I said, took about two years to really feel 100% again.

Fell hip first onto a raised railroad track when I was in high school.

Doctor who looked at the X-Ray says that happens dozens of times a year, and almost always results in a shattered hip.

I daintily chipped the bone, was on crutches for two weeks, and done. I don't have any feeling in the area anymore.

As for major surgery, though, I've only been to the ER once: a high school fight, the only high school fight I lost, that ended in me being carted off in an ambulance for emergency dental work.

Fucker hit me dead center in my mouth, bent in the entire bottom row, three up top, knocked out one. 4 hours later, walked out with braces I had to wear for 6 years.

And I'm in Anakin's Dad's situation where I've had procedures done for ingrown toenails my whole life due to my massive feet. The last one finally recovered and is starting to look normal just in recent months.

At age 12, I jumped over my house's two meter high fence...only to remember too late that since my house is ona slope, the other side of the fence was much deeper...almost 5 meters.
I fell on the pavement headfirts, but i used my arm to cushion the blow, so I broke and displaced my elbow...the physical description was that i know had a baseball undermy skin where the elbow was supposed to be.
Went into surgery and had two metal rods inserted into my elbow for six months.
After that, its all been ligament ruptires and the like, nothing broken so far.

Appendix burst! And I sliced open my finger at the base with a boxcutter. seven stitches and a scar.

The men in my family don't brake bones. On my father side of the family I only have one male relative that has had a broken bone. Ligaments that our weakness, I guess when your muscles and bones are really strong the weakest link( Ligaments) is what will brake. Both my father and brother have totaled their ACL.

Damn! There's a lot of hardcore pain and suffering documented in here, so I guess I'll just try for some comic relief with mine.

I've got a mole on my head (it's completely visible because I shave my dome) that used to be equivalent to the size of a half spent, rounded off pencil eraser. It's dead center, and just over an inch behind my widows peak. One day, I had a sneezing fit at a restaurant I used to work at. I doubled over in mid sneeze and managed to catch my mole right on the edge of a steel prep table, slicing it wide open. Naturally it began to bleed profusely down my face and into my eyes. Not even a minute after, the mother of my ex-gf and her son came into the back of the house to pay me a surprise visit. I held my hand on my head to cover up the bloody hole-y mole-y action while we exchanged pleasantries, then quickly proceeded to excuse myself from our little reunion. Once I'd gotten rid of them, I asked our head chef to hand me the sharpest knife in the house, (A butcher knife that measured approximately a foot and a half in length) and then I made a b-line to the employees bathroom. Once I'd had a good look at it, I started doing what needed to be done... slowly carving off the hanging-open-back-half of the mole. The front of the house manager walked in on me while I was doing this, and immediately started to wince and whine directly into my ear as he watched me perform my handy work in the reflection of the mirror. I told him that he really needed to chill out because he wasn't helping me with what I was doing, which obviously required a very steady hand to accomplish. Once I'd finished the back, I became a bit upset that my mole was no longer going to be perfectly symmetrical, and so I proceeded to slowly carve on the front half. I quickly realized that it was offering me far more resistance than I had anticipated, and that I should just cease and desist after having made it approximately half way through the meat of the front. I grabbed a plastic to-go ramikin to provide a little house for my freshly severed half-mole piece. It hardened up solid in about a week or two, which provided me with a very unique, and personal maraca.

On the bright side of the mole, the surviving half looks a lot like a little <3.

That's not comic relief Uth, that story nearly relived me of my lunch dude.

EW.

I'll do you a solid, Rain: There's plenty more where that came from.

My history's kind of about avoiding serious injuries - my family always jokes about how I used up about five of my nine lives.
Here's a choice anecdote:

About five years ago I was driving back home from the gym in my dad's car. It was kind of a hot-hatch sporty thing (we loved that car to fuck), so in one of the turns I oversteered and was about to plow myself and the car into some trees. I over-corrected to the left and launched the car over the divider between the two lanes; The car barrel-rolled through the air two and a half times (eyewitnesses later said I near-missed a bus going through the opposite lane) before landing upside-down, smashing the windshield and the left-side window into a thousand pieces and into my face. When the car finally stopped I was hanging by the seat belt, legs up and head down. I freed myself and dropped to the roof of the car, crawled out and was relieved to discover I didn't hit anyone. Called my dad, told him I had an accident (he was home so he got to the scene in a few minutes). I was lucky enough to crash just around the Magen David Adom (the Israely ambulance service) station where I used to volunteer back in high-school, so the ambulance came right over. At the emergency room it took about 35 minutes to get all the little glass shards out of my face; and about half a minute to pull the big-ass shard from out my left elbow. The skin there was really thrashed so there wasn't anything to stitch together; I was bandaged and instructed to change the bandage every day until it healed. That wound took about a month to close, and I still have a real nasty scar, complete with little pieces of asphalt - like a bad tattoo. It's a reminder not to treat the road like a racetrack. I was so fucking lucky that day - the car was totaled, with the entire front end section of the roof smashed and caved in - there wasn't much between my small injuries and getting decapitated.