Bad cut on my finger from a bread knife trying to cut a particularly crusty loaf of bread I baked. Only time in my life I’ve needed to go to the emergency room (for myself).

Burned my face while breathing fire with Everclear.

I used to work nights. When I had the next day off, I would usually stay up all day and go to sleep that evening. So, wake up around 2-4pm Friday, go to at 10pm to 6am Saturday and not sleep until Saturday evening.

This eventually caught up with me. I was riding a bicycle down a hill, just coasting and fell a sleep for a second. Down I went. Need stitches in my head ( I still have a bump), tons of road rash, and banged up my knee.

I recovered fully except for the bump on my head.

I once cut the inside of my thigh as a kid by bicycle jousting with my friends at night-time along the streets and sidewalks. Slammed into one of my friends’ tires head-on, and got thrown forward into the crossbar. I was lucky I was slightly off-center, but I came away with a nasty bruise, a laceration, and a rip in my shorts.

I was cutting slices out of an apple with a comically large Bowie knife.

My roommate said, “Hey, that looks pretty dangerous.”

I said, “Nah, bro, it’s perfectly safe.”

Somewhere around the middle of that sentence, the knife sliced through the apple and into my palm.

He had to drive me to the hospital for stitches.

When I was about 12 or so I had a AA battery and some copper wire I used for crafting. Out of nowhere I suddenly got really curious how good of a conductor that wire would be. So I pressed it onto both poles with my fingers. Had a nice black scorched line in my thumb for a few months because it turns out the excess energy needs to go somewhere. In this case in the form of extreme heat.

I shattered my ankle, separated my tibia and fibula, and broke a different part of my fibula. All in one moment. How, you ask? By stepping outside. My dog pulled too hard on her leash and I stumbled and twisted my ankle in just the right way. Got a fancy Maisonneuve fracture that had to be surgically fixed.

Shot my finger with a BB gun. Didn’t think I’d pumped it and put my finger over the barrel and pulled the trigger to get the BB out of the chamber. I remember the spurt of blood arcing through the air in slow motion. Gotta love that “oh i fucked up” shift to slow motion.

Slipped on the sidewalk in the rain and somehow broke an arm (clean broke it). Needed surgery and 2-night hospital stay. This after climbing multiple mountains without a scratch.

In middle school, I was playing racquetball at the YMCA, pivoted to hit the ball and something in my knee popped and it hurt like hell. Turned out to be a combination of lack of cartilage and Osgood-Schlatter disease (a painful lump just below the kneecap). The lump corrected itself, as it’s something weird to do with bone growth in child development, but the cartilage deficiency is still a problem today. I can’t do a lot of running or jumping or even kneeling.

I sprained my wrist in my sleep.

I’m in California. If you feel the need for a defensive weapon, the most you can get away with is a plain, wooden cane from a drugstore. Even then, if a cop thinks you don’t need that cane, you’ll get the shit beat out of you and the stick taken away.

Ask me how I know.

Thought I could/should work through discomfort and then pain at the gym, supersetting overhead push-presses and triceps dips. LOL, nope, gave myself a labral tear and tore my supraspinatus. My shoulder now has an unpleasant popping feeling + significantly less strength when I’m doing anything like a bench press with my elbows properly tucked; I’ll likely never be able to do narrow grip bench press or triceps dips again.

Why was this dumb? Because I was a personal trainer, and I fucking know better than to try and push through pain. But I was trying to get back into lifting seriously after losing a lot of time to the pandemic.

I cut the edges of the mouth lips (rightmost and leftmost zones) while shaving my beard about two months ago, and I still get microcuts because since the zone is so flexible, it tears every time I open my mouth.

It’s not even visible, it’s just annoying and painful and not healed yet.

i can still see scars from where a plumbers snake designed for a toilet embedded itself in my hand. it was a short snake with a metal sleeve with a slight angle in it for help getting around the toilet trap.

the widened part at the end of the snake got stuck in the sleeve and in an effort to unstick it my friend put tension on the snake while i held the sleeve. well, the snake broke free, and in such a force and fashion that it ripped the sleeve from my hands and in milliseconds had turned and screwed itself into the fleshy part of my palm by my thumb. it was in and out, looking like a loch ness monster photo.

there was still pressure on it and the only reason it stopped was due to the skin being pinched when it got to the snake part that was coiled tightly. we were probably around 12 years old, there was no pain at first because it happened instantaneously, just the pulling on the skin. i yelled out to my parents. “emergency room!” and we walked into the living room. my dad was on the phone and immediately said he had to go and hung up. he then told my friend to start untwisting the snake and the poor guy nearly passed out, weak at the knees, and told my mom he thought she had better do it. he handed it off then booked it outside and ran home.

this is when i experienced the first pain. my mom in her panicked state started to turn the snake clockwise adding more tension and trying to pierce another hole in my palm. i screamed, my dad screamed, as he was on the floor with me stabilizing my hand and the end of the snake. we both screamed out “wrong way!” and my mom just kept saying sorry over and over. she began unscrewing but the skin pinched in the snake was now preventing it from being extracted. eventually there was enough force applied to break free from my skin and I can still remember the feeling of the tip going in and out of my flesh. it didn’t hurt, it was just an odd sensation.

i didn’t know or expect it at the time but the real pain hadn’t begun yet. we drove to the emergency room (called it) and the doctor there had some concerns, primarily that this oily metal that had been in contact with a toilet clog had been inside my body, not once but eleven times. he didn’t want to risk more damage by incising each puncture to debride them, so instead my hand was soaked in a bowl of iodine for a while. then they came back and scrubbed my palm with a toothbrush for what seemed like forever. they repeated this process every 15 minutes for three hours. my palm was nearly scrubbed raw and there was still a little black dot on each wound. i had to grip the bedrail with my other hand while i clenched my teeth in agony every time the nurse came back. it was the most pain i had experienced in my life to that point.

eventually my dad convinced them it was under the skin and they weren’t going to make any more progress and it was time for me to go home. i think i was given some antibiotics and sent on my way. it took about three months for the last black spot to work its way to the surface and now i just have faint white spots and a white line scar where it scratched at the end. that’s been 30 years ago.