It was about 7:00pm and the day was cooling. I was four or five years old and outside playing on our swing set. Since it was the end of the summer, it was still light outside. My brother and I were having a contest on the swings to see who could go the highest.
After I won, I jumped of my swing and declared my intention to play on the monkey bars. I climbed the ladder to the bars and started across them.
“Heather, get down from there, you’re wearing a dress!” My mom called from inside the house.
“Just let me finish crossing!” I yelled back.
I crossed the bars, and instead of climbing down the ladder, I decided to be a daredevil and drop down. The entire swing set was metal, held together by screws that were extra long, so long they needed a plastic cap to protect the sharp edges. Unfortunately, when I dropped down, I brushed up against a support pole that had a screw missing its protective plastic cap.
I heard a rip, and knew my clothing had torn. I freaked out, because dropping down from the monkey bars was forbidden. So was playing in dresses. So was RUINING dresses.
“Kyle! Did I tear my dress?!”
He peered around me and gasped, “Hedder, I think you ripped your BUTT!”
I put my hand on my backside, and when I pulled it back it was covered in blood.
That’s when I started screaming.
My mom ran out and carried me back in the house, where she, my dad, and my grandma exampled my naked bleeding tush.
A diagram, for your understanding:
I made lightening bolt scars cool.
The Brain Trust of my parents and grandmother decided I didn’t need stitches, and I spent the next few days laying on my stomach, butt in the air. You know what? No one gives you gives you Popsicles for a ripped butt. It is a totally underrated child injury.
Unfortunately, my parents and grandma were wrong, and my ripped butt healed totally funky. Something like this:
Obviously my butt is wider (but still as perky) than it was 26 years ago.
It’s bumpy and the skin around it has stretch marks.
It ended my butt-model career, which was a bummer. I had such a future.
As scars go, it’s my most interesting. And, if I had to have a body part torn open, I’m very very glad it was my butt cheek and not, say, my vagina (c-section! Yay!).
Mike just came over and asked me what I was writing about. When I told him he said, “I didn’t know that story!” And now he’s trying to one-up me with bizarre injuries.
So, tell me your weird childhood injuries. There has to be one that’s better than tearing yourself a new one.
InDueTime says:
My “coolest” scar is my open heart surgery scar. I was 7 months old.
Go me!
Karyn says:
When I was 5, I split my chin open at dance class, during the tap routine. I shuffled and then ate it on the wood floor. I vividly remember the ER and how painful a needle feels going into your chin. I also remember calling the Dr a “poop face” and telling him I hated him. My poor mother must have been mortified.
bethany says:
Lets see. I have TONS of interesting stories, but I’m not sure any of them top yours. This one perhaps? This happened at an embarassing age (18) I was home for the first time from college and decided to hang out at a park with my friends who were also home from college. It was about 11pm and I was sitting on a 2×4 which was a part of a wooden school bus (big wooden park), about 9 ft in the air. Well one of my friends made a joke and i slipped forward, cracked both shins on the 2×4 directly below me, then fell backwards and knocked the wind out of myself. Well turns out despite wearing jeans, I had cut both shins, one a small cut but the other had a deep gash. That I decided to then run around and play hide and seek until I admitted I really couldn’t walk and just ended up getting a bandaid out of someones car. After it had healed a bit, I could see a clear INDENTATION in my shin, which is still there 2+ years later about 1 cm long and noticeable dented.
Hindsight is 20/20 I really should’ve gotten stitches
kay says:
OK well it started with a little fall out of a rocking chair when i was 5 nothing crazy about that i cut under my right eye in the corner of the coffee table. The story takes a turn when i am at the hospital the stitches are done and my mom is talking with the Dr about follow up care and i was sticking my fingers in the hole in the bed where like i guess an iv pole could go i was just sticking all my fingers in it one at a time. Well one got stuck but i did not immediately tell any one and my finger began to swell. My mother told me it was time to go and being only five i started to cry i thought i was going to a either have to stay there for ever or B lose my finger. After what seemed like forever the Dr finally freed me, after lathering my finger up and gently pulling. Come to think of it it was probably lube gross. It serves so many purposes
Spokeit says:
I also tore myself a new one! I was on the wooden bleachers in school wearing shorts, and when I slid over to tell someone something a piece of the wood from the bleachers went straight into my butt! I had to have it removed, and got stitches, and too spent a while with my tush in the air…makes for an interesting scar (have you noticed it tingling when there’s a storm? Strange sensation that is)
Kristine says:
So, in third grade, I broke my arm by playing “Red Rover, Red Rover.” We were erm playing too close to a brick wall, and I didn’t stop running, just ran -bam- right into the brick wall.
But, wait for it, I get even more stupider.
In middle school, I broke my leg. I jumped out of a barn. Just leaped right out of it.
Kate says:
This may be a bit much, but:
When I was four, my dad got a promotion that caused us to move something like 200 miles from where we’d been living my whole life. It was sort of a fast turnover, so we moved into my great-aunt’s house temporarily while my parents looked for a place for us. Obviously, almost all our toys were in storage, waiting to be moved, but it mostly only sucked for me because my sister was 16 months old and hey, at that age, cardboard is a fun toy. Because there was so little to do, I spent my days creating different distractions.
One summer evening, when we had my grandmother and other relatives over after dinner, I was playing in the yard when I realized that my dad had left the wheelbarrow turned on its side and, somehow, in my four-year-old head, that looked like a fantastic slide. So while the adults all sat around drinking, I started — I don’t even know what I was doing. In my head, even now, the wheelbarrow was enormous and I was tiny and it was all very WHEEEEEE. I suspect it was more of a case of me sitting awkwardly on it and scooting myself down the side.
Whatever the case, I was only wearing my bathing suit, and somewhere along my FUN ADVENTURE, I slipped.
Onto the very edge of the wheelbarrow. The sharp, jaggy, rusted edge.
Needless to say, I cut myself in a place that required I be taken to the ER, whereupon I was pinned down, told I didn’t need stitches, and sent home with the instruction that for the next week, I could only go to the bathroom while sitting in a the bathtub with a few inches of standing water to, ahem, keep everything flushed out.
It was horrifying. I still look back on it and shudder.
(I also once fell on my roller skates and hit my elbow so hard on a step that I couldn’t use it for two days, but by then I was about seven and my parents, having turned into “we don’t take you to the doctor unless a body part has fallen off” parents since having my brother (who I think ended up with three ER visits before he was 2), made me suck it up. I spent several days with an ice pack and was later ruled “fine.”
Nothing compares to wheelbarrow-to-the-girl-parts, though. Nothing.)
Missy says:
I think you win…..
Pam says:
Hands down.
Mindy says:
My mother is Korean & thus made enormous amounts of kimchee. The kimchee was stored in special clay jars outside in the back. When I was 5 I was spinning, arms in the air, round & round near the said jars & I must have gotten dizzy. I fell over the jars & cut my leg pretty bad. At the emergency room I remember nurses & my parents holding me down so that the doctor could put the stitches in…ouch. After I’m sure I was told to take it easy so as to not re-open the injury. Well I was 5 & wanted to play. I did in fact re-open the injury & this time it was so mangled that it could not be re-stitched….ouch. It had to heal “open”. All through my school years I was very embarrassed about the scar on my leg & would never wear anything to show it. In P.E. I would wear knee high socks so nobody would see. Somewhere in my 20’s I stopped caring though & thank goodness!!
Amanda M. says:
I have a very similar story. Except I was walking on a bench and the scar is on my face, not my butt. Though I hear it’s difficult to tell the difference.
My husband broke his leg a couple of weeks after learning to walk. Pictures of his baby cast are so cute!
Most of my scars, and the stories that go with them, happened in the last decade. Aren’t people supposed to get less clumsy after childhood?
Jen says:
I was playing outside at my grandmother’s house pulling a long chain across her lawn to the side of her house. I do not recall WHY I was dragging said chain, but I was five and this was how I rolled. ‘Nuf said.
Anyhoo, there I was walking backwards while pulling this chain. I turned to see where I was going and walked right into the corner of the brick chimney on the side of her house. Gashed up my forehead straight away and in microseconds, an incredible goose egg blossomed. I put my hand on it, felt the bump, saw the blood and began to scream bloody hell that my brain was falling out.
Hey. It could have!
Everyone came running. Oh, the drama.
I don’t know what stung more: the antiseptic my grandmother used to dab the sore or watching my grandmother biting back her laughter while tending to my wound and hearing me recount the terrifying ordeal.
Still have the scar. It’s my mother’s most favorite story to retell. And I think of my grandmother’s house everytime I see it in the mirror. She’s been gone far too long but this little scar brings her home to me. I’ll take that. Maybe one day your butt scar will bring something far too long gone right to your front door. Or backdoor. Whatever.
Amy Collen says:
My weirdest injury was to my neck. I was doing my own lame version of “the snake” when “pop” there went the neck. So, when my parents got home (I was home alone dancing to 80’s music and my absolutely FAVORITE band The New Monkees, not the original Monkees mind you) they took me to the ER for X-rays. Sadly this was the SECOND time I was injured due to New Monkee rockin’ out dancing. I popped my hamstring while trying to do the splits. Again, my parents came home and found me with crutches and a heating pad (the lady across the street from us happened to be a nurse). I had to use crutches for like 2 or 3 days!
Karen says:
Mine isn’t halfway near as amusing as some of these, you’re all making me wish I had macho scars on unmentionable parts of my body. (Though, to be honest, if I could skip the excruciating agony part and just get the scar, that would be grand.)
Mine happened when I was 10 so arguably old enough to know better, though I swear I was set up. I had been complaining all weekend of sore shoulders so my mother explicitly forbid all forms of handstands for a day or so, which is pure agony to a 10 year old. Why not just tell me I can’t SKIP or play kiss-and-catch whilst you’re at it?! Anyway, I was doing MARVELLOUSLY and had sat to the side for, oh, at least a whole 10 minutes when one bright spark discovered the masterful notion that is kick-up handstand. (You know the one, where you bend over, stick your butt in the air and kick your legs up into a handstand.)
Now, I swear, I wasn’t going to do one. I WASN’T. But just as the bell was going, the whole idea excited me and I felt I just had to express it by putting my hands on the ground and kicking. Just a little. I mean, if I’d MEANT to break the rule, I’d have gone into the middle of the grass area away from all obstacles so it really couldn’t have been that. Fate just has it in for me and, with a little bit of help from luck, my one moment of jubilation resulted in my shin being brought down on the top of an old-fashioned metal faucet.
Busted.
Perhaps the most amusing part of the story is that my teacher at the time, (male!), put a bandaid on it and when my mother took me to the doctor that night because there was a 2cm HOLE IN MY LEG, I was in dressings for two weeks. I still have a funky scar and a slight dent in my leg, testament to the fact that life just can’t take a joke.
Veronika says:
I have a couple. There was the time I cut my hand on a corrugated iron sheet while playing ball with my grandparents’ dog. I passed out, fwiw. Then there was the time my twin sister and I were chasing each other through the house and while fighting to close the bedroom door, she ripped my big toe nail off. Then there was the time I was studying for final exams, accidentally stabbed myself in the leg with the pencil and passed out. Oh, I was mortified by that one. Because it didn’t even draw blood.
emily says:
My crazy accident as a kid? I had more than a few but my worst had to be breaking my back in 3 places when I was 6 years old. My best friend and I were sledding in my yard when one of us ( I still think it was her idea, she says it was mine) had the idea to sled off of our pig’s house roof. Yes, a roof. It was maybe only 2feet off the ground but she slid down and was fine, I went down, hit the ground, got the wind knocked out of me and she ran and got my mom, who’s a nurse. My Mom said I was fine And had me lie down for a bit. The next day, the School nurse called home cuz I couldn’t raise my hands. Off to the doctor we went, where we discovered I had a compression fracture of T-10,11 and 12. Needless to say, we were all quite shocked. Dr. White still very much remembers that, some 19 years later.
Heather, Thanks for keeping me going thru these early morning breastfeeding sessions. With your Annabel stories, I usually have to keep my laughter quiet in order not to wake my husband or my 1m old daughter. Your writing is amazing and I’m so happy I came across your blog. Maddie is beautiful and I Can’t believe how stinking cute Annabel is. Thanks again.
Elle says:
When I was 5 I had open heart surgery. I have scars from when they did a few heart catheters prior to the surgery, including one in the crease of my right arm that looks like railroad tracks. Since I was so young they were able to go in from my back when they did open heart surgery. I’m grateful for that although it makes wearing bras even more of a pain in the ass since it rubs against my scar.
When I was a teenager I got so tired of being asked “why do you have a big scar on your back” (I wore a lot of tank tops) and I started to get creative. I would say I got into a bar fight and someone knifed me. Classmates would stand there, eyes wide. I would wait a few minutes and then I would say “Hello, I’m only 15! Like I could really get into a bar.” Of course I left out the fact that I had a fake I.D. and would go to clubs on Sunset Strip. But alas I never got into a bar fight.
Kate says:
I love the creative scar explanation! That’s brilliant!
When I was 16, I had to have a mole on my face removed, which left practically no scar but did require that I have a massive bandage on my cheek for two weeks while I waited for the stitches to heal. Despite having told all my teachers about it ahead of time, my newspaper advisor completely forgot I was having it removed. When I walked into the office before school, she freaked out and demanded to know what had happened.
And I, being 16, did what any teenager would do and told her my brother had stabbed me with scissors.
She totally freaked out and the rest of the newspaper staff (who also knew I was having my mole off) just laughed and let her in on the joke. After that, I started creating even more ridiculous stories. I think the one I ended up using the most was that I’d broken into the zoo to try to steal a baby elephant and been knifed by a zookeeper when he tried to stop me.
Elle says:
I think next time someone asks about my scar, I’ll have to borrow the stealing a baby elephant and was knifed by a zookeeper excuse. Brilliant!
Audra says:
I was playing “Don’t Touch the Floor” with my friend in my basement. I walked along the back spine of the couch, slipped and fell, head first, onto the concrete floor. I gave myself a concussion which, in the end, proved much worse than getting eaten by the “lava monster” on the floor had I not tried to be so stealthy.
Naomi says:
I was playing the same game with my cousin in the outdoor eating area of a McDonalds which used to have concrete square tables and stools – slipped on spilled pop or something and took a table corner to the forehead. It’s my biggest scar. Apparently this game doesn’t go well with concrete!
Lynn from For Love or Funny says:
I laughed so hard when I saw your rendering of your butt scar! My biggest scar is on my face from chicken pox.
Four Gambel Girls and a Guy - documenting the adventures we call life says:
Wow ~ I realize how lucky I was after reading all the comments above mine! Mine was a cut to my knee on a “slip and slide”. A piece of glass was underneath the plastic and I went “slipping down the slide” on my knees and it sliced my knee wide open….still have the scar to prove it! But compared to the other stories….pretty minor!
Amber says:
When I was younger, my sister and I were playing in the backyard and I ran through a pile of ashes that remained from a bout of burning leaves earlier in the week. The middle of the ash pile was still very hot and I burned my foot. I jumped in the air and pulled both of my shoes off immediately. After examining my foot, my mom declared me fine. We went shopping and visiting family all day, all the while, I complained. When we got home, my mom, who was sick of my complaining, went and got my shoes. To her dismay, the side of my reebok tennis shoe was gone…burned into my foot in a third degree burn. It took two weeks of intense scrubbing (on her part) to get the wound clean and on its way to healing. On a side note, when my baby was born, she came out head first and then hand (instead of shoulders) causing a nice tear down there. I am pretty sure there is a wicked scar in my special lady place, but I am not checking!
Thurieyyah says:
Have to agree with Gambel Girls & Guy – I dont have any weird childhood scars…but both my kids have – my son was about 2 when he ran and fell & knocked his eye on my mother in law’s coffee table – he had to be rushed to ER – where they glued the cut – you can still see the scar today (his 10 now) but his eyebrow covers it.
Then when my daughter was a 1 year and bit – she pulled over the iron (I still get the shivers just thinking about it) – I had been doing the ironing in my son’s room and had pulled the door close behind me when I went to get some more clothes (I’d left the iron plugged in) – but then he went into his room to fetch something and she followed him – on coming out she knocked against the ironing board and the iron fell over on ther forehead – the wound healed nicely – but there’s still a scar – at least her hair covers that .
But my lessson learned on the last incident was to always in plug the iron (even if its only for a couple minutes when Im getting some more clothes to iron).
I hope she forgives me one day !!!
Tamara says:
Trust me, she forgives you! I forgave my mom!!
When I was a baby and we lived overseas (and didn’t know anyone OR speak the language) my mom ironed everything…sheets, pjs, you name it! She somehow left the ironing board and iron next to my PLAYPEN and turned her back…I pulled the darned iron down on myself. Burned the holy heck out of my knee…she said I didn’t even CRY!
I obviously don’t remember it, but have a lovely scar on my knee to this day (30+ years later!). But yeah, I forgave her!
Melanie says:
When I was 3 or 4, my whole family was in the living room watching tv. My sister was laying on her stomach with her feet in the air. My dad always played “Superman” with us on his feet, so I sat on my sisters feet somewhat similarly. She was fine with this at first, but being the mean big sister she was, she decided she didn’t want me on her feet anymore and kicked me off, right into a glass coffee table. This coffee table had been made by a family friend who didn’t use the right strength glass. My head crashed right through it, slicing me open and leaving me bleeding profusely.
The cut was deep enough that it must have cut the nerves or something, because I didn’t even feel it. I just knew something was wrong because my mom was FREAKING out. I remember someone rushed to get our neighbors as someone else wrapped my head in a (quickly blood soaked) towel. I sat in a lap all the way to the ER, while my mom SOBBED uncontrollably.
As I sat on the exam table getting stitches, I asked the doctor, “Do you think my mom is going to be ok?”
I now have a 2 1/2 in scar about 2 inches behind my ear.
Rhonda says:
When I was 2, my brother and I (and I DISTINCTLY remember this) happened to think it would be fun if he lifted me up to get a drink from the birdbath…I know, I know. Well in said birdbath happened to be an unsecured statue of the Blessed Mother. She fell over, split my forehead open and crushed my middle finger. I still have a deformed middle fingernail. I also remember my grandmother sitting me on the dining room table and cleaning me up so we could go to the hospital @@……LOL…and then once there, they ‘papoosed’ me by putting pillows over me and strapping me down so I couldn’t fight them. I didn’t want to fight them I just wanted to see what they were doing….I loved medical stuff even back then.
Amélie says:
I don’t have many exciting stories about my scars, but I seem to have the dumbest… I should have known better when I got them.
As a highschool student I always had troubles with deadlines. This explains why I still had to study at 4 am the day of my final. I got up but I was still very sleepy so I tought I’d eat something warm to wake up better. I decided to make a croque monsieur. As we had no slices of cheese in the fridge, I was going to grate the gruyere. I took the cheese in my hands and remember thinking: if I leave my thumb there, I will probably cut myself… Nah, this wont happen grates are not that sharp…
Well I can tell you they are… 2 seconds later I had cut a slice off my thumb. After having tried to stop the bleeding for over an hour I had to wake up my parents, apparently I had really taken a slice off my finger.
Long story short: we noticed we didn’t have any good bandages in the house left, I didn’t have time to study for my exam anymore because it took us some time to stop the bleeding, and I ended up with a scar.
Heather says:
I`m not sure how weird it is… but here goes:
In elementary school our bathrooms had two entrances, one from inside the school and one from the play yard. Outside door was locked when we where in class, outside door was locked when we were on recess. In the winter we were playing tag, washroom being the time out spot for the girls. On snowy, gross, wet morning (it`s Canada, we have four seasons… snow, wet, hot, wet snow) I go running in to time out away from the person who was it.
She runs in after me, breaking the rules of the game and slides across the wet floor into me. I fall back, through a stall door and smack my head off of the toilet bowl. I saw stars! I always thought that was a myth, but no, I saw swirly lights.
I was helped out to the teachers by friends, holding my head because it hurt. I got to the first teacher we saw 30 feet away and I babbled something through tears, then I took my hand away from the back of my head. There was blood everywhere! All over my hand, my coat, the snow. I was rushed in to the office, the creepy grade 6 teacher who used to put mistletoe up in the classroom door frame every winter (he was super creepy, picture Larry from Three`s Company… but kissing 12 year old girls) wrapped my head and from there I have no idea how I got to the ER. I ended up with 10 stitches in the back of my head and a pretty sweet ridge scar on the back of my head.
Sherri says:
When I was in middle school, we lived in New Mexico. My BFF’s grandparents had a ranch in Datil which is in the middle of nowhere. We were doing a “cheerleading” routine on the porch (hell no, I wasn’t really a cheerleader…they would have never had me!) and then I ran over to the railing and leaned back to watch BFF and I went right over. I plummeted about 10 feet to the ground and landed on my head. After I came to, and after much debate (seriously? they thought I didn’t need medical care?!) I insisted on going to the hospital as I WAS bleeding from the back of my head AND I had been unconcious (sp!?). The nearest hospital was in Socorro, a 2 hour drive. Once we got there they (ACK!!) shaved the back of my head and put in stitches. For at least a year after that my hair was all kind of out of control with different lengths. SOOOO…if I ever shave my head, I have a very pretty (not) scar from my trip off the porch!
Island Mom says:
I have two (interesting ones).
First:
I was about 9 or 10 (4th grade, for sure), and really, really into making puppets. I was using my mom’s good, super sharp, sewing scissors, but, unfortunately, not looking as closely as I should at what I was doing.
One wrong snip, and oops! There went the tippy top of my left thumb (not far enough to get the nail, just enough to get rid of the layer of fat on top). I didn’t realize right away what had happened, as it mostly just felt a little numb, like when you bite your tongue. Then I looked down and saw blood. Lots of blood. Dashed to the bathroom and rinsed it, and (obviously), still bleeding. By now, it was starting to hurt, too. So my next step was to run downstairs, shaking my thumb the whole way down (white walls, of course), yelling “mooooommmmmm…..I have a problemmmmmmmm!” She still hasn’t let me forget about the blood splatter in the stairway, even 18 years later. We went to see my grandfather (a doctor), who fixed me up w/out stitches, and to this day, have a 1/8 inch white scar on top of my thumb.
Other one, not nearly as stupid.
I was working at a camp one summer, and it was in the middle of the rainy part of the summer. I was taking a couple of kids out of the bunk, carrying one (they were 4-5 years old). The steps were rickety and a bit slick from the rain. One wrong step at the bottom, and, bam! Flat on my back, scraping a good gash in my lower back on the way down. Hobbled to get the kids where they needed to go, and then hobbled over to the clinic where they bandaged me up. Still have a slight scar there from that one.
Emily says:
My brother and I are nearly 3 years apart, and have always been very competitive with each other. One summer when I was 8 and he was 5, we were playing tag in the park. My brother couldn’t keep up with my gazelle-like 8 year old strides, and instead of trying to tag me, he heaved a javelin-like* pointy stick at me (possibly trying to tag me? or just slow me down?)
The stick hit me just so and wedged itself under the skin. It wasn’t particularly deep or bad, but it did bleed quite a bit, apart from the fact that I HAD A STICK IN MY HEAD. My mom came over and after telling me to calm down, took before and after pictures of me with the stick, er, sticking out of my head. Didn’t leave a scar but the pictures from that day are still floating around at my parents’ house and from time to time my brother pulls them out to remind me that even at 5 years old, he could still kick my ass.
(*note: I just googled javelins, and the stick was not nearly that large. it was about a foot long, and as thick as a pencil. Can you imagine a javelin sticking out of someone’s head? geesh.)
christie says:
Wow. There are 2 I can think of. I have a small scar on my chin after attempting to sock skate (think ice stake, but with my dressy, frilly, slippery socks on) just after mom had cleaned/waxed the floors. I (of course) fell and hit my chin on the bottom of the trash compactor. I remember getting those 4 stitches because they didn’t numb me up and I was 4 years old. OUCH!
My other one was when I was 12. Mom had just left to go have lunch with a friend and thought she could trust me and my sister to stay home by ourselves for a little while. I remember her specifically telling us to stay inside. Well, we were 10 & 12 and it had *just* finished snowing. We decided to go outside to have a snowball fight. I had dumped a box of snow on my sisters head and (for some unknown reason) thought it would be a good idea to climb a tree to get away from her. The branch broke that I was standing on and as I fell, it went into my leg just below my knee. One terrified ambulance ride later, I’m at the hospital. We finally got ahold of my mom (this is pre-cell phone days!) and she had arrived. The emergency room doctor had mentioned it was the worst injury he had ever seen on a kid. Thankfully, I had just tore my leg and didn’t do any damage that would require surgery. Unfortunetly, I required over 350 stitches inside & out, was able to see my bone for a little while, couldn’t walk for over 6 wks, and REALLY heard it from mom the next day about how she specifically told us to NOT go outside. =) Thanks for sharing your story!!
Susan says:
6 years old. New sled. Lots of snow. Split rail fence on the downhill slope. YOUCH!
Missy says:
I have two scars on my butt. The first one is about 3 inches long down the same cheek as yours. I was about 14. My little brother (11) who was the meanest child ever ( he stabbed my grandmother in the hand with a fork too) put a huge piece of clear glass in my bathtub. I was scooting forward to let the water out and it sliced me right open. The glass was so sharp I didn’t even feel it. Imagine my surprise when the bathtub filled up with blood. No stitches required but I still have that scar.
The other one is on the tip of my tailbone…. if you get my drift. I had a cyst that went from pea sized to golf ball sized over night. It hurt so bad I was literally screaming anytime I moved. Anyway I had to go to the er and get an emergency surgery that ended without stitches. The gaping new hole right by my old onehad to be packed with gauze until it healed. Just what every 16 year old wants their mother all up in their business. At least I got good pills.
feefifoto says:
I have a deep dimple in my right cheek (FACE cheek) that I got from falling out of bed when I was two and hitting the nightstand on the way down. Nobody believes it’s really a scar until I bring in my mother to testify. When we were kids my friend Robin walked around for a week with her finger shoved into her cheek, hoping to make a similar dimple, but nothing happened.
OldGreyMare says:
I have a scar from falling out of bed when I was 6. We had hardwood floors and it just burst open my chin when I hit. I wasn’t even goofing around in bed — I was sleeping at night. I had to have several big black stitches so at the time I looked like a 6 year old girl with a goatee.
Barbara says:
Hmm… I didn’t really get a scar from it, but when I was about 15 or so, my friends and I were hanging out at the bottom stairs of a metal fire escape during recess. Right above us the fire escape formed a narrow walk with railings to each side. Just for fun I started balancing on the small ledges the railing had on the bottom side meaning I put one foot on the left railing and the other on the right. Remember, my feet were only about 20 cm above the “floor” of the fire escape. Suddenly I slipped and my right leg went through the gap between the railing and the platform.I bruised and scratched my leg from ankle to thig and it hurt like a mother….but it healed after I walked around with five of the worlds largest bandaids for two weeks.
I do have a scar though from when my sister accidentaly cut me with a steak knife and thus sliced the tendon in my index finger half through. It did not require stitches but the moment my mom removed the skin closure strips one week later it started bleeding again. I’m still a bit suspicious that it wasn’t soo unintentional
B in Oz says:
I too have a “new-one”.
I love summer peaches but the fuzzy skin sucks so I always peel them. When I was about 15 I threw a peach and a small knife in my school lunch box, at lunch time I threw my bag on the ground and went to sit on the edge of my bag (girly girl didn’t want a dirty butt) and the knife had pushed through the bag and right into my right cheek. Ouch, but no blood (yet) so off the bathrooms with a friend who upon inspecting my bottom passed out when the blood flow started, I had to carry her to the office before being sent off to the doctors to receive my 3 stitches… I never did have peaches at school again!
I must enquiry as to what story Mike thought could better your very perfect diagrams?
Mary Ann says:
New Years Eve my parents went to a party down the street and left me home with my teenage brother and sister – I was 8. We began a water fight – not sure how it started but it ended with me locked in the bathroom filling up a huge glass of water. I opened the door knowing my sister was on the other side. What I didn’t know was she had the same idea – a huge glass of water. I reached around the door to throw the water at her as she was throwing hers at me the glasses clunked and broke cutting us – we both wound up in the emergency room with 3 stitches in our index fingers. The Dr. suggested plastic cups next time. Happy New Year!
designHER Momma says:
ok, I can totally one up ya. I might even have to blog the details. I’ll give you the short version.
I was in the backyard, running into the house. I ran up on our gigantic swingset, pushed the swing out of my way, and the chain link got caught in one of my totally 80’s, totally too big hoop earrings.
riped my earlobe right the heck off (almost)
yes, it’s the only place I’ve had plastic surgery.
DefendUSA says:
Candy was a big treat in our house as kids. I had a crocheted pocketbook that held my treats. Of course, my brother wanted it since he scarfed his.
We slept in the same room in bunkbeds. He found my stash and proceeded to tease me. I am the most clumsy person I know. I ran up the ladder to my bed to get my candy and the ladder fell with me under it and my arm torked. It hurt pretty bad. All day at school I babied it. Finally, I couldn’t take it. I went to the nurse. Who promptly touched my hot (broken) arm and then twisted it!!
My Gramma came to get me and take me to the hospital and my mother followed. Sure enough- A compound fracture!! The doc asked me if I wanted pain medicine for the casting because he would have to set my arm. No thanks, I said. Just do it.
He took my arm and did his thing….One single tear and that nice hot plaster was all it took for me to feel such absolute relief!! I have a scar where the cast removal saw got me because, again, I was a kid and “of course it wasn’t going to cut my skin, only the cast.” My mother never took for granted again, when I complained of hurting something, because my threshold for pain is fairly high.
As for my brother…he was my slave for 6 weeks and I gave him the candy.
Jana says:
Ninth grade. Flag football in PE. With a coach that called us girls on the dance team wussies (she was *ahem* not one). I got my finger caught in a friend’s flag and broke my finger. It was literally a 90 degree angle. But I was still a wussie. The next week, the PE coach broke her ARM playing flag football and had to have surgery. Karma’s a bitch, huh?
Cindy says:
I didn’t have any childhood injuries. I was a very careful kid. Fortunately, my 3 year old is so far exactly like me.
My brother on the other hand- oy.
He got hit with a glass Coke bottle that some teenage girl casually tossed over her shoulder. My mother opened the door to see my brother covered in blood as his head split open.
Then in summer camp one year, he was maybe 12 and was walking through a trail in the woods, carrying a saw, when he tripped and sawed his own thigh. Lots of stitches. That was 33 years ago. I bet they don’t let 12 year olds carry saws anymore, do they?
Margie says:
I was playing hide-n-seek when I was about 8 years old in Mexico. I hid under a big and, after I was found, I sat on the sidewalking waiting for the rest of the kids to be found. It being Mexico, there were a lot of kids. So, I sat there thinking I was sweating. I wiped it away only to realize it was blood. Apparently I had sliced my head, not open, while hiding under the big rig. I now have a nice scar in the back of my head that sometimes feels as big as the Grand Canyon.
Abby says:
When I was 9, I broke my arm while playing on the playground at school. It was a horrible break and I was in physical therapy for about 8 months. And THEN, a week after therapy ended, I broke my OTHER arm at Zoo Camp, trying to get a leaf off a tree to feed to an emu (I tripped over a hose). I’m really coordinated, obviously.
chris says:
I am the most clumsy person I know. My BFF calls me Grace because of all the ungraceful things she has seen me do through the 30+ years we have known each other!
I crashed my bike into a parked car.
I crashed my bike into a yield sign and ripped off a finger nail.
Let’s see, there was the time I tried to pound a dent out of a car hood from the inside with my fist (still have a scar on my left hand
There was the time I burned my hand in chemistry class on a hot o-ring.
The time I burned my middle finger in the french fry grease at McD’s.
The time I wash pushing a cart taller than me up a ramp in college and it got caught on some grout in the tile and the bottom flipped towards me. It took out a good inch long chunk of flesh almost to the bone. I still have a dent in my right leg.
The time I fell down the stairs at my gym about 6 months after my husband and I got married. Massive bleeding on both shins, sprained both ankles and was a mess for about 12 weeks.
There are many, many more. Luckily, none of them involve butts or lady parts!!
Gemini-Girl says:
I was 6 and Jeapoardy was on. I was supposed to do my homework, but didnt and as I was chewing on my clear plastic pen, a piece of it got LODGED in the roof of my mouth. I couldnt eat for DAYS. i had a piece of flesh hanging from the roof of my mouth. it was disgusting.
My mom did force me to eat and then rewarded me by buying me a cabbage patch doll from the PREEMIE collection.\
I still have a huge bump on the roof of my mouth.
Marsha says:
Ok….so my parents say that I was an accident waiting to happen. Broken bones alone include arm, leg, shoulder, and collarbone. I’ll just share one week of my life as a 4 year old with you for “my most interesting injury” story….
I was playing on the driveway with my big sis and her friend. They were swinging me by my arms and I fell forward and chipped my tooth. Mom took me to the dentist and they were just thankful it was my baby tooth. Then, A couple days later, I was dancing on our kitchen chairs with wheels…flew off and hit the cabinets. I know this sounds far-fetched (but I have photos for proof)…this spill caused 2 black eyes and a goose egg on my forehead. Then I fell and rechipped my same tooth…can’t remember exactly how the rechip happened. And finally….fell off the playground equipment at my sister’s softball game. This trip to the er was when they started questioning my parents about abuse. My mom said she was horrified and embarassed—just the beginning of the many times I did things that horrified my sweet mom, I’m sure!
P.s. You got a nice little behind there…that second pic of it made me laugh out loud! …still just as perky!
Leslie says:
It was 1953. I was five years old, and taking an early evening walk with my mom, dad, and baby sister in late summer in Falls Church, Virginia. Out of nowhere a bicycle plowed into me, knocking me over and basically running over my face. I was bloodied, and my parents were frantic.
Stitches just under my nose left a very faint scar that I still have to this day.
The thing I remember most clearly about the incident was that when my dad tracked down the kid on the bike, he found out the young boy’s mother had just died an hour earlier, and the boy was blindly tearing around on his bike, most likely unaware of anything else in the world but the loss of his mom.
I have thought of that boy many times over the years. I wonder whatever happened to him, and if he even knows I carry a small scar in honor of his mom …
DefendUSA says:
Aw. That makes me want to cry and it gives me a pain in my heart. Aw.
Janet Shupe says:
Hi Heather. When I was in the second grade I was running in the hall at school. A teacher called my name and when I turned to look at her I ran into a trophy case. I knocked 3 upper front baby teeth loose. The principal took me home–he was a neighbor and family friend. My mother said if I would let her pull the 3 teeth instead of taking me to the dentist she would buy me roller skates. Of course I took her up on that.
in Ottawa says:
I was given a medicine serynge from my little brother’s trip to the hospital….you know the kind to give kids liquid medication.
We used it as water pistols, juice box straws…anyways…I realized that if I put my tongue on the hole and pulled the other end, my tongue would stay stuck adn I could pull it around and do stupid things in the mirror…and then I pulled and pulled and pulled, until it slipped out of my hand and hit my teeth – I blasted my two bottom teeth and one front tooth in pieces. I was 9 years old…Im now 32 and still having troubles with the teeth!! No scars, but 3 artificial teeth!
Whitney says:
I was playing on a swing set (climbing on it, not swinging), and I fell down a few inches from whatever I was holding. The left inside of my thight WAY UP THERE was bleeding profusely and I had to waddle across the street bawling for my Mawmaw. Surprisingly, I still don’t have a scar.
Another time, I kneeled in some very tall grass and kneeled right onto a piece of cactus the size of my shin. Once my friend got me home, my Momma, my friend, and his mom had to hold me down while they pulled it out with my jeans (yes, WITH them). Then they pulled my jeans off and we all grabbed a pair of tweezers for the left over needles. Ouch.
Another time, at daycare, I was coming in from karate and my mouth went straight into this other girl’s head, as she was running outside. Bam! Blood everywhere, teachers freaking out, trying to make sure I didn’t knock a tooth out or something. All I remember was that I kept putting my head back, like when you have a nose-bleed, except that meant I was swallowing my blood and they were not having any of that. I was definitely a weird kid..
Jaclyn says:
So one day when I was about 9, my sister and I were watching TV and I scratched a scab off of my leg. To my surprise, it started spurting blood about 6 inches into the air in time to my heart beat. I was like “Jenni, come and look at this!” and she was like “cool!” We kept poking and watching the spurting until I started to feel not so well and kind of dizzy. Then we were thinking that I was loosing an awful lot of blood. My mom had to come home from work and take me to the doctor where we found out that I had picked the scab all the way to an artery! Had to have it cauterized and stitched shut! Now that is a horror story to tell any little kid about why we don’t pick our scabs…
Lisa says:
Our swingset growing up had those same long, plastic covered screws. None of use ever ripped our butts, but we ended up with plenty of scrapes from them.
I don’t think it is necessarily a cool injury story, but it is a monkey bars story. When I was about 9 or 10 I was playing the park with my babysitter (a friend of my mom’s). I decided I wanted to play on the monkey bars and convinced my babysitter it was a good idea even though I was wearing jelly shoes. I proceeded to get myself set up to do a back flip on the bar when my feet slipped off the bar they were resting on causing me to loose my balance and flip forward instead. I ended up landing with my arm crossed across my chest so my arm was sandwiched between me and the monkey bar I landed on. Needless to say I landed hard and broke my wrist. When I sat up and looked at my wrist it was like I was in a cartoon. There was literally horseshoe shaped hole left in my wrist from the monkey bars. I freaked out, completely.
My babysitter was thinking with a clearer mind and went to the convenience store to use the pay phone to call my mom and to get some ice for my wrist. I couldn’t really use the ice since part of my wrist was hanging down.
I wish I had a picture of it. Unfortunately no one was thinking about the great story this would later be and was thinking more about getting me to the hospital.
The break was required surgery to set it properly and I spent the rest of the summer in a full arm cast.
No weird scars or anything, just the memory of the cartoony looking bar shaped whole in my arm.
Michelle H says:
My right pinkie finger has a big mountain slope to my knuckle that doesn’t straighten out. When I was in first grade…. I was chasing the boys on the playground. I actually caught one or two. They jumped on me crushing me to the ground and breaking my pinkie finger. I should have learned then to leave them boys alone!!!
Shaw says:
It wasn’t a cool scar that I ended up with, but the injury was… unique. Iwas a fully-grown adult with a baby, and while the baby napped, I decided to lie on my bed and take a snooze myself. As I became drowsier, I felt a little chill from the ceiling fan above me, so I stood up on the bed to turn it down. Wrong move. The ceiling fan was white, the ceiling was white, and with the fan running, you couldn’t see where the blades were moving… and I stuck my head in the ceiling fan. It slashed me right next to my eye but thankfully spared it. I tumbled off the bed, staggered down the stairs and outside to my husband, who was planting in the garden. He grudgingly made me an ice pack (ridiculing me all the while) and then returned to his gardening.
I ended up with a shiner, but did more damage to the fan–that ceiling fan is off-kilter to this day!
Adrianne says:
Hmm…I was a pretty careful kid, so I’ve never broken a bone or had crazy injuries. When I was two, a german shepard decided that my face looked like a good meal and took a bite. I have a scar above my lip and on the top of my head (looks like it’s the part in my hair but bigger). But I don’t remember that injury.
My “weirdest” would probably be when I was 16 and working at a country club. I was polishing wine glasses with a napkin, holding the bottom of the glass in my left hand and polishing the top with my right. I guess I pushed down too hard because I shattered the bottom and stabbed the stem right into my left pinky. The skin was flapping and I had to get quite a few stitches. The worst part was the two shots they gave me IN MY PINKY! That was some serious pain! I survived though and now I have a pretty cool jagged scar on my finger:)
OldGreyMare says:
When I first started reading yours I thought it was going to turn out to be exactly like what I happened to me, but I was washing a large drinking glass in dishwater, gripping the dishcloth inside the glass and twisting my hand to “scrub” inside the glass. The glass split as I made a quick twist and the edge of the break sliced the top off my middle finger knuckle as neat as could be.
My most unique (I think) childhood scar is from a mosquito bite. It got infected and left a round scar on my arm a little smaller in area than a dime.
Lamb says:
I don’t think this quite tops your hilarious butt injury, (laughing WITH you, not at you, of course!) but my childhood accident also involves the monkey bars. I was in 2nd grade and swinging from bar to bar on the school playground, all alone because my best friend hadn’t come to school. When I was done playing, I looked down and saw a HUGE blister on my palm. How huge? Look at your hand. My entire palm was a blister! I knew I needed to go to the nurse, but I was soooooo shy and afraid to go. Instead, I spent the rest of lunch wandering around the playground, kinda dazed and jittery and wondering what to do.
Eventually, a group of little girls took me to the nurse. Thank goodness for second-graders with a motherly instinct!
Shelly says:
That same thing just happened to my son over the weekend. He and my daughter were playing on some monkey bars and he came back and said he was “just tired”. When my daughter told me I might want to check his hand, I nearly fell over. Huge chunk of meat just gone – layed back like a flap.
Becky says:
I broke my toe when I kicked my brother in the butt! No kidding and I didn’t tell my parents because then I would be in trouble for kicking my brother!
Tail bones trump toes.
Sara Mc. says:
I have two “torn” stories…
Picture it – Oklahoma City 1978 (or some year around then.) I was in pre-school (4-ish years old) and they put my shoes on the wrong feet. Then I was sent out to play on the gravel black top. I remember tripping over a stick and for some reason unknown to me, I guess I opened my mouth and sliced my tongue open. Right down the middle. I do remember them picking me up and running me from sink to sink as the blood was gushing from my mouth. Now when I picture it, I’m sure it looked like a homicide. I had numerous stitches and couldn’t eat with a fork for a really long time. It’s an interesting scar as well. For the longest time, my crazy Aunt Hazel tried to tell me I got it by playing with scissors and cutting my tongue open. (I did say she was crazy!)
My second story is one where I should have gotten stitches. My wise older brother had convinced my sister and I to trade rooms with him. Ours – nice, spacious, plenty of room for everything. His – cramped, small, probably the size of a pantry. Being the dumb girls we were at that time, we jumped at the chance. We were also lazy and after we moved all our furniture over to our new room, we left the gigantic mirror off the back of the dresser. It was huge. Anyway, the next morning I woke up late for school, rushed out of bed, slipped on a trash bag, and landed on said mirror. I kid you not when I thought I cut my leg off. That mirror shattered like a bomb went off. The gouges out of my left hip were numerous. My dad in his infinite wisdom, put neosporin on it and a gauze bandage. The gauze got stuck in my wounds and I had to sit in the bathtub for hours trying to get it out of there. I really, really should have gone to the ER for stitches. My only thinking on why I didn’t was I am 1 of 6 kids and money was tight? Oh I was in 7th grade when that happened. Now I’m 36 and you can still clearly see all the scars I have from that fiasco.
Sorry if these are too graphic.
Aunt to another Maddy says:
I was a careful kid but had heart surgery that left me with a scar around my left side from front to back. Have had some antiquated doctors in Japan ask me if I had a lung removed due to TB! Otherwise the only dumb scar is on my leg from falling in the creek where everybody skinny-dipped when I was in college.
My brother was one accident after another, though. Jumped from his changing table to his crib — across the room, thank you — at 18 months; a scar that he still has. Hand in the automatic door at a supermarket. Etc etc etc. It was so bad my dad used to say that if he got home from work and nobody was home, he’d go around the house searching for blood.
But my favorite was this: when my brother was 10 or so, he was waiting for the school bus with the kids from next door. Somebody (this has always been a little vague, but I suspect my brother) had suspended a SHOELACE from a tree branch to swing off of. My brother, who was a good sized 10-year-old, swung from this and, when it of course broke, fell down and cut the back of his head on a tree root. More stitches.
This is one of my best moments as a big sis, because it wasn’t long after Halloween. I didn’t go to school as early as he did, so I knew before I left for the day that they’d rushed to the hospital. I piled a selection of candy on his bed for him to see when he came home….he’d of course eaten all his candy within 24 hours the way he usually did. I think I even put in some really good stuff, like a Hershey’s with Almonds. Anyway, when he came back from the hospital my mother said he had tears in his eyes when he saw the candy….
Lindsey says:
Hi, I was holding my breath reading about your monkey bars accident because I had one as well when I was 6. Not as dramatic as yours but we were at a family reunion of sorts in a park and I was on the monkey bars, showing off for younger cousins and decided to do the dreaded “drop down” just like you and fell and broke my arm! But my grossest childhood injury was biting my tongue practically in half! I used to like looking studious so would carry around our huge phone book and one day as I was carrying it down our front steps (I think I was about 4) I tripped and bit my tongue. It took many trips to the ER with the doctors sewing it up, only to have it rip open a few days later and sew-rip-sew, etc til my tongue looked like hamburger meat (my mother says). They finally let it heal on its own and I have a pretty good scar from it. Is it any wonder we are neurotic about our own kids when they start playing on jungle gyms, etc. I LOVE it when you open up the floor for our experiences. You are a fun person – wish you lived next door! I would help you watch that sweetie of yours when she ventures out on the play equipment. Now, I just am biding my time til mine (all out of college now) get married and give me darling Annabel-like babies! BTW my oldest daughter’s name is Annah and we call her Annabel all the time! LOVE that name!
laura says:
Funny, it’s not my scar, but my husband’s. When he was a babe, he took a bath with his favorite rocks. One of those rocks was a bit too sharp for bathing with (and I’m sure at his young age he was very insistent on taking the rocks in the bathtub) and it cut one of his cheeks. He too has a funny scar on his rear. We always get a good laugh out of it, and time to time I ask if he needs his favorite rocks with him while bathing! (my funky scar is from a play structure screw too, but the inside of my thigh. I too had parental decision not to get stitches since it was a perfect half moon shape and fit back together easily. I have this funky scar on the inside of my thigh that I always remember the ladder I was climbing down on the swing set. I chose to jump off at the bottom, and ooooo..I remember the pain and grossness of that cut…)
Maegan says:
Lol…My husband has a goofy scar on his face from childhood stupidity…He was 6, and instead of waiting for dinner, he grabbed what he thought was a plate from a countertop taller than he was. Turns out it was a STACK of plates. A couple slid right into the bridge of his nose, breaking it – well, breaking the nose & the plates.
He’s got a scar and his nose is crooked. We *think* our youngest has “his” nose…minus the scar & the break…so we’re curious to see what his would have looked like had he not just waited for someone to serve him a plate.
Deborah says:
Honestly, I don’t remember any major childhood injuries. To this day (I am 31), I’ve never broken a bone or sprained anything. I’m sure that now that I’ve said that, I will fall down the stairs when I leave work today, but whatevs.
I’m starting to think now that maybe I should have played a bit harder as a kid………………
Deborah says:
OH! OH! And of course the minute I hit Submit I remembered one!
My cousin and I were building a go-kart of sorts from scratch. We had a ton of old wheelchairs at my grandmother’s house (my aunt used to work in a nursing home and gave them to us….we would all actually race down the street in these old wheelchairs!), and we decided to saw off the wheels to use for our go-kart. Yes, 10 year olds with saws. How could it possibly end badly!?!?!? Naturally, I missed the wheel and sawed my finger. Not to the bone or anything, but enough to create a scar on my left index finger that remains to this day. It was worth it because we had tons of fun in our little death machine once we completed it.
Maegan says:
OMG, I am DYING over some of these stories!!!
I once stood on an ottoman, slipped, slammed my hoohah onto the edge, and had bruises there for a while…I just remembered that it hurt to pee and looked gross. I did pee blood for a while.
I also tried to use a wheel well to step off the side of a dually truck. That’s the kind that has 2 rear weels, so there is a huge wheel well to cover sticking out the side. I was wearing sandals, and thought, “Hey, I could just step off the side of this, right? No. The sandal did not have enough traction, my leg slid right out from under me…the other leg was still in the truck bed. So I’m straddling the wheel well when I just slide right down. No permanent scarring.
I also slipped on a kitchen rug, skated across the floor cartoon-style, then fell & slammed into the side of a countertop, where my knee was ripped open. Surprisingly…I have never broken a bone!
Kate says:
When I was 8 and stupid, I was playing with a friend on a seesaw. We were each standing on one end of it (I know, I know…) when she decided to jump off, with no warning. I face-planted, of course, and when I looked up she was screaming because there was blood everywhere and my front teeth were gone. My brand new adult front teeth. One was broken straight across with only a couple of millimeters left in my mouth, and the other was sliced diagonally – jagged and incredibly sharp (they couldn’t put a bonding on it until after Halloween that year… it was pretty awesome). I have fake front teeth to this day.
When I was 21 I fell down a flight of stairs with a glass in each hand and landed on one of my hands (in the puddle of shattered glass). The multiple deep lacerations required 27 stitches in the ER and surgery 5 days later to repair two severed tendons and a sliced nerve. The surgeon who went in to find the severed tendons (which, apparently, are spring loaded, so they peel away from the injury site and get lodged in other parts of your hand… was that TMI?) made zigzag cuts which he said would heal faster (they did! Your butt-scar was on to something) so I have a lightening bolt scar too.
KK says:
While learning to ride a bike, I had the terrible habit of watching my feet peddle. Not so good an idea. I managed to side swipe a large pine tree. Did I mention I was young enough not to be wearing a shirt? I managed to scrape myself from forehead to belly button perfectly down one side. It looked so bad, my folks were scared to take me to church less someone think I’d been beaten.
cindy w says:
Mine is that I can never shave my head, because when I was 3, I was dancing around our living room to the “Grease” soundtrack, and I fell and cracked my head open on the brick fireplace.
Seriously. I have a “Grease”-related injury. Maybe not as good as a ripped butt, but still.
Alicia says:
When you started this story, I thought for sure you were gonna have an injury like the one I sustained sliding down the chain on my grandmother’s swingset and smacking my crotch right into the triangular metal end at the bottom. I thought I might die, it hurt so bad. But I was so embarrassed, I didn’t tell anyone. I am pretty sure I permanently damaged the hoo-ha area.
Lisa_in_WI says:
This one isn’t weird so much as silly. It was the spring of my senior in high school, and I decided to go for a bike ride. I had on these worn-out sandals that flopped around on my feet and probably should have long been tossed in the garbage. My mom told me to change my shoes because “you’re going to hurt yourself.” I laughed and rode off.
I got around the corner from my house, and my right sandal started to come off my foot. While still riding my bike, I tried to slip it back on, but the pedal pushed my foot into the spokes of my bike. I stopped to get off the bike and put my shoe back on.
That’s when I saw the blood. The spokes had ripped open the ball of my foot. It didn’t really hurt, which was odd because I’m a total wimp about pain. (Realized later I was probably in mild shock.) I saw my neighbor and said to her very formally, “Would you go get my mother and tell her I’ve hurt myself?”
My mom came wandering around the corner, because she figured everything was fine if I wasn’t screaming. She saw my foot, and my parents threw me in the back of our car and went to urgent care. I experienced the worst pain of my life (no, I’ve never given birth) and got 7 stitches in my foot. I spent the last weeks of high school — and my graduation ceremony — on crutches.
Mary says:
My first one was when I was 5. Icicles always formed off the roof of our front porch and I decided I wanted one that was just a bit out of reach. I stood on my tip toes to reach it…the porch had a rounded edge…and I fell forward on my face in the snow about 5 feet down. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but my sister had left a rake out, tines up, and it was covered with snow so everyone had forgotten about it. I fell right on it. One time hit right by the inside corner of my eye, one tine hit right above my eyebrow. At the time, my parents were pretty sure my eye was hit. Went to the local doctor, he sent us to the emergency room where I was strapped to a table so they could stitch me up. I don’t remember the ride down there or the procedure. What I remember is having my arms strapped down and screaming…SCREAMING…”I WANT MY MOMMY!!! I WANT MY DADDY!!!!” The whole thing probably didn’t take very long but holy cow did I scream!
The second freak accident was sledding with my brothers. We were riding those flimsy plastic sleds and doing “jumps” by going over little ridges in the hill. I went over a ridge and came down right on a stick/stump of a tree. Ripped the sled, ripped my pants, but only a slight rip around my tailbone. I’m fairly certain I broke my tailbone but I don’t think we went to the doctor about it. Or maybe we did but they couldn’t do anything about it. We rode a bus to school, along bumpy roads, and it was extremely painful for the next few days/weeks. It did get me out of freshman gym, but the gym teacher really didn’t believe anything was wrong with me. I sure wish I’d had one of those doughnut pillows back then…
Suzanne says:
Mine is actually really similar to yours. I was climbing across piles of those tiny molded fiberglass chairs they used to have at preschool (something I wasn’t supposed to be doing) while wearing a dress and slipped. I fell right on my…uh…crotch on one of the chairs and managed to get my girl-parts all full of fiberglass splinters. TINY, INVISIBLE SPLINTERS. I couldn’t sit down for days, and it hurt so much to pee I almost gave myself a bladder infection from holding it. It hurt more than the stitches I got after I pushed a baby out.
It didn’t help I was scared of being in trouble and didn’t really have any words to explain exactly WHAT hurt and WHERE so it took days before my mom figured it out.
Mary says:
I have a few.
One, similar to yours, but on my stomach. I was doing flips on the top bar of a swing set and one of the bolts without it’s plastic cap scratched my stomach – about a 3 inch gash. No stitches, just mecuruchrome tincture and a band aid.
The second, I got when I was about 5. I was walking with a pair of scissors (that I had permission to play with) and slipped and fell. I was holding them point-down, but when I fell, I turned my hand in such a way that they stabbed me in the neck. I got three stitches and missed a major artery by less than an eighth of an inch.
Finally, once I was running down a friend’s driveway which was pockmarked with potholes. I was about 3 or 4. And I fell, scraping my knee very hard. What I remember most is that the red corduroy pants I was wearing didn’t tear, but my knee sure did. The scar is one of the most obvious I have.
AmazingGreis says:
In elementary school I fell off my bike and the metal pedal tore into my ankle. It was a very deep cut that bled forever. After a 3 1/2 hour ER wait I left with 10 stitches. I was also grounded because I wasn’t supposed to be outside riding my bike. OOOps!
I played softball in high school. During afternoon practice, my freshman year, I was hit in the elbow with an aluminum bat. Our coach had us doing this stupid wiffle ball drill that went very wrong!! I broke my elbow, but the swelling was so bad that they couldn’t cast it. It was black and blue for weeks. And it hurt like a mo-fo! LOL
Kay says:
When I was 5 years old, I tried to learn to fly. I was watching superman, and apparently felt inspired. Unfortunately, 5 year olds don’t understand “do not attempt at home” and I gave it a go off my living room sofa. I did well for about 2 seconds before I came crashing down collarbone-first into the coffee table. My mom says she heard a huge crash, and found me face first on the ground, barely moving. I don’t have a scar per say, but I now have a nifty bump on my collarbone.
I do however have a scar from where my ‘wonderful’ older cousin, Nicky, pushed me into the coffee table mentioned above. We are 17 months apart, so we had a bit of a rivalry going between us. We had been bickering all day, and our mothers apparently gave up fighting the inevetable, and let us duke it out. What happens when a 4 year old boy and 2 year old girl duke it out you may ask? The two year old girl goes face-first into the coffee table and splits the skin under her lip open.
Mrs. Melberry says:
When I was about 8 months old, I was in one of those baby walker things (it was 1985 so they weren’t exactly safe back then). I somehow rolled out of the kitchen, through the utility room and out the back door in about 5 seconds while my mom and older sister were doing the dishes and had turned their backs for a moment. Our trusty family dog started barking like crazy and my mom realized I was missing, and then found me on the back patio. I still have a scar on my forehead from the 13 stitches. It was the first of many falls I’ve had in life and one of two times I got stitches on my head as a child.
Virginia says:
I have a long scar under my left thumb, a square one on my right knee and another long one down my left shin. All three came from the same incident. I was 6 years old, my brother was 2 or 3, my dad drove a tour bus. As my mom was helping him unload everything from the bus at the end of a tour my brother and I found a stuffed toy lobster, the tour had just been to Maine. So I decided to chases my brother across the gravel parking lot with said lobster, tripped and skinned pretty much the entire front of my body. Those three scars remain.
My other weird one is a large lump of scar tissue behind my left ear. When I was 3 I decided to ride down a small hill in our yard on my trike, our dog was chained to the house on this hill. I ended up in the chain with the dog at some point. Lots of blood and 20 stitches in my head later here I am.
Trisha Vargas says:
The weirdest childhood accident for me; It would have to be the hanger in the eye.
Ouch!! So in Florida at the flea markets back in the day, you could buy these cool little alligators that were on a wire hanger type leash and walk them around. I loved them, thought they were so cool.
Mine was hanging up on the wall in my cousins room and we were batting a balloon back and forth. I jumped up to hit the balloon and the wire hanger from the gator snagged my eye and hooked it just under my eyeball through my bottom lid.
So the paramedics arrived and had to cut to hanger down and put a cup around it and transport me to the ER. They had to sedate me a little, heh, to get it out and I had to wear a patch for like a week and I occasionally have phantom type pain in my right eye from the injury. A little scarring inside the lid, but at least it didn’t pierce the eye itself.
Yep, that was weirdest amongst many. I was prone to silly accidents and ER trips.
(((HUGS))) from Florida
Jolene Kingston says:
Hooollleeee CCCRRRAAAPPP! That will give me nightmares. Sweet Jeebus
Mical says:
My best scar is also on my butt cheek. Apparently when I was three, I hated clothing and thought that everyone should be naked. All.The.Time. My parents for some reason didn’t agree so we compromised. I could be naked after bath in the evening and then again in the morning before getting dressed. There was a big production each time. I had a theme sound (Nakedland, Nakedland, how I missed you Nakedland) and one night after bath I decided my parents needed to witness the greatness of Nakedland. I came out of the bath with my towel and began my song and dance. At the end I whipped my towel off and went to bow. We lived in an older home in south Texas that was big on wall furnaces. My grandiose bow allowed for my butt to meet the hot furnace. Even though my Mom ran outside and broke off an Aloe leave and rubbed it on my butt for days…I still have three straight little lines that remind me to never bow while naked. It’s a good lesson to learn!!
Bobbi says:
When I was 7 or 8, my brother and I used to spy on our next door neighbors who like to sunbathe nude. We thought we would take “photos” without a camera for our neighborhood newsletter (non-existant). I was the smallest, so I was hoisted to stand on the lip of a metal trashcan. The noise startled the neighbors, startling those holding me and my brother took off. I feel into the metal trashcan and gashed my knee. I have a lovely scar now to show how creative we were as kids:)
Shelly says:
Hum, so many to share! LOL
I guess the most interesting childhood injury scar that I have runs down the entire bridge of my nose. My cousin was chasing me with his bb gun and I didn’t have anywhere to hide so I climbed a banister on my grandparents’ porch. My cousin ended up shooting at me while I was climbing and I lost my grip and slid down the banister, trying to stop myself with my nose. Of course my mom had pictures scheduled soon after and didn’t reschedule so she proudly displays with picture of me in my cute little dress and Mary Janes and a HUGE nasty cut down my nose.
Another was when I wanted to wear this one shirt to school. My mom told me no so I hid it in my bag and changed when I got there. At recess I was climbing (see the pattern?) on a wall and slid off and completely tore up the inside of my thigh. Huge concrete “strawberries” all over it, oozy and pus and the whole works. It was so bad my mom had to come get me. I tried to change into my other shirt before she got there but the school nurse wouldn’t let me so after my mom found out I was okay, I got in serious trouble for sneaking stuff.
Ahhhh, the memories! LOL
Kelly says:
When I was 8 years old, my sister slammed my head into the marble countertop in our parents bathroom. I now have a fake front tooth as a result.
Tina says:
My childhood injuries are boring. No ripped ass cheek for me
Rebecca says:
The only one I’m willing to tell was the time I walked to this candy shop a few blocks away (but only about a half block when I walked through the woods people often dumped old wood and nails) and took the short cut that I was warned to never take. As luck would have it, I fell down and landed on a nail. It went about three inches deep into my lower leg. I was in terrible pain but knew I’d get my butt kicked if I went home crying to mom, so I just pulled my leg out of the nail finished crying (I was 7 or 8), walked to the candy shop and bought some candy and asked if they had a band-aid and paper towels. They helped clean me up and then I walked home eating my candy. To this day my parents still don’t know.
Jamie In Indy says:
When I was in first grade I tripped over a swing set pole and my left arm went right into a hole and my arm snapped. I remember running down the street to my house yelling at everyone that the Devil bit me! Some old man came out of his house and asked me if I was hurt. Well, duh. I was screaming bloody murder and my bone was sticking out of my arm. When they were wheeling me in for surgery I remember the orderly leaving me in the middle of the hall and saying to my mom “hey Lady, don’t pass out on me” as my mom hit the floor. Everyone forgot about me while they were reviving my mom with smelling salts! Then I remember waking up in the middle of surgery and vomitting in the gas mask. Fun times were had by all.
Sara says:
After church, my mother loved to just stay and talk with other women. She was an at home mom in the 70’s. No internet, no mom play groups, you get the idea. So while my mother would stay in the church and talk, us kids would play outside on the grass. Or if you’re a monkey like me, you would play on the rhododendron bush that was so huge, it was like a tree. I was three at the time and I slipped and fell onto a stump of a branch that had been clipped off.
I didn’t feel so well and I went to my dad and told him. I remember him laying me down on the seat in the car (lovely ford station wagon) and him lifting up my dress. There was a huge whole in my lower stomach! They took me to the hospital where I had to get stitches and they informed my parent’s that I was lucky that I didn’t bleed to death before they got me there. Yes, I had punctured my intestines.
AppleTree says:
When I was 3, maybe 4, I was at my great aunt and uncle’s farm. My uncle was missing half of his right arm (this will become important later)
My little brother and I were playing (unsupervised) outside.
There were bunches of chickens (I have no idea what one calls a group of chickens), and my only orientation to farm fowl was Foghorn Leghorn on Looney Toons, so I assumed all chickens were kind, animated creatures.
So I decided to pet one. A big one. A BIG MEAN ONE.
The chicken attacked me.
I somehow ended up on the ground, getting pecked on and about the face.
I ended up with a sizable gash in my left eyebrow that bled heavily.
I was screaming, my brother was screaming, my mom and uncle heard the noise.
My uncle came running from the house.
With a gun.
He shot the chicken from the front porch of his house. Pretty impressive considering his advanced age, poor eyesight, and ONE ARM.
Me, being so young (and clueless), didn’t reason through the situation, and believed, aside form the attack, I had also been shot.
There was so much blood.
My parents, like yours, didn’t think stitched were necessary. I have a lovely scar through the middle of my eyebrow, and a fun story for parties and barbecues.
AppleTree says:
Stitches, not stitched.
OldGreyMare says:
A flock of chickens.
Christy says:
You win! That has to be the best story ever! I did get attacked by the neighbor’s Alaskan Husky in 5th grade during spring break, resulting in 50 stitches and several days in the hospital, but your story is much better!
melody says:
I too ripped myself a new one! Third grade, I was at a friends house playing on one of those big, old propane tanks… we weren’t supposed to be on it. When we saw her dad coming down the lane, we both immediately jumped off. Apparently, there was a big rusty nail holding the little top on the propane tank… well I slid right over it. Same situation as you… thought I ws gonna get it for ripping my jeans… only to discover I hade ripped my bum open! After much embrassament and explaining ourselves to my friend’s dad, I went to the ER and got stitched up. So no cool lightning bolt scar for me… justa plain ol’ stitched scar. BUT I did get to take a blow up donut cushion to school to sit on for the next week or so! Oh, the embarassment!
Kelly says:
I broke my two middle fingers on my right hand “tasting” the frosting my mom was making. I was the brilliant one who stuck her fingers in the bowl while she was mixing the frosting with the mixer. My fingers were jammed between the beaters to the point that the mixer’s engine blew. I got to go to the emergency room, and wear stupid splints on my fingers, and I don’t think I ever really got my “taste” of the frosting.
Lori says:
I was probably in 1st grade… kneeled down to tie my show at recess. Stood back up and started running. Into a tree. No stitches, but yeah, I ran into a tree and almost poked my eye out with a limb.
Second story- with my parents at a friends house. We’re getting ready to leave so I stick my head out the 1/2 rolled down window and yell something at the kids… when I pulled my head back in I hit the back of my head on the door frame. So my head bounced back and forth- skull on door frame, bridge of nose on the window. Over and over it seemed like… I was holding my head because I swore my head was split open. Until my friend so helpfully pointed out my face was a bloody mess. Another trip to the ER. No stitches but another Lori-Story.
And I don’t even want to go over how many times I’ve hurt myself simply by walking. Poor ankles.
Laurin says:
So, so many… I have a wicked double 4-inch long, wide scar on the back of my calf from falling on a roll of barbed wire (Mississippi injury). My “brain trust” also decided that I didn’t need stitches. I love to give my parents shit about that!
Chloe says:
The new one that I ripped was unfortunately on my left vaginal lip when I was 8 years old.
I was riding my bike around the block and there was a section of upraised sidewalk that my bike wheel got stuck on. The bike and I flew up in the air and my bike seat turned when it hit the sidewalk and the point of the bike seat went up my crotch. I’m screaming loud enough that neighbors are pouring out of their houses and my parents heard me in our house on the other side of the block.
I wouldn’t let anyone touch me as I’m walking my bike back home with blood pouring out of my crotch. The sear literally tore my vaginal lip and I had to get 20 stitches. Anytime I have a new doctor – I’m having to explain the tear/scar.
AppleTree says:
Dear. God.
You win.
I had to stop myself from curling in a ball under my desk when I read this one.
Jess says:
Omg. To know that’s even physically possible made my tummy ache. Ouch.
Amy says:
My most memorable scar would have to be the huge slash to the back of my thigh. Let me warn you, I was a strange kid so this story is pretty typical of my childhood. I was playing like I was a ninja with a real steak knife in our huge kitchen. As I was doing a super technical leg lift knife slash move on my imaginary enemy I miscalculated my slash and cut my leg instead leaving about a 1 1/2- 2 inch cut. Of course I wasn’t going to tell my mom I was playing with a knife so I just bandaged it up and wore pants for a couple days. By the time my mom saw it, it was too late for stitches. I must have done a bang up job of bandaging it though because it never got infected, just an ugly scar remains.
Mama Fuss says:
There was this metal bar – probably 3″ in diameter, 10+ feet long that was used to prop up the cover on the dumpster outside the school cafeteria. It had fallen on the ground and several of my 1st grade classmates had tripped over it that day, as we were playing after lunch. SO I decided, it should be propped back up so they would see it and not trip anymore. A classmate – his name was Mark – was jumping on it when I bent over to pick it up. He jumped off and said “do you want to pick it up?” I nodded and bent to do so. I picked it up by placing my fingers inside the hollow pole and lifting. Mark thought it would be funny to then jump on it and make me drop it. I dropped it, alright, and screamed. There had been a sharp spot and I sliced my ring finger open. It required an ER visit, a plastic surgeon, 2 layers of stitches that totaled 32 stitches. There was a blood trail from the cafeteria to the office for years after that.
Diane V says:
Not my scar, but a neighbor when I was a kid. Beth let her brothers convince her to stand in front of a dart board attached to their garage. One of her brothers managed to fling a metal dart dead center in her forehead. The dart went far enough into her skull that they had to go to the emergency room to get it taken out.
She has a round scar from that dart in the center of her forehead – led to interesting conversations when she was a Playboy bunny in the early 1980’s.
Marnie * says:
According to my mom, when I was about 2, I was walking into a friend’s house when I tripped on the door jamb. My teeth went through my bottom lip. So, I have a jagged scar just below my lip on the outside & two small scars from my teeth on the inside of my lip.
Beth says:
OK, so picture it…12 years old, NJ native with a mullet, glasses and braces. Hits the town pool for some swimming….
Girl emerges from the deep in a white plastic bathing cap and rams her big head right into my mouth. Braces actually pop off my teeth and wire shoots out the side of my mouth. Cute lifegard thinks I am drowning and dives into pool to save me. Carries me out of pool. I am DYING OF EMBARRASSMENT. My mother runs up to see what is going on and I say some fresh preteen thing to her and she HITS ME ON THE FANNY IN FRONT OF EVERYONE. Could this get worse? Of course it can! In the midst of all this chaos. I get my period for the first time. Who had the best day ever???
Lorena says:
So I was on a softball team when I was about eleven. We practiced in a school yard and the location of the diamond was on blacktop. The third base side was houses the other side of the fence. The first base side was a busy street with a chain link fence and no gate to go through. Every time some one popped a fly over the fence, we had to scramble over the fence both ways, very hard and time consuming to do. At some point, someone cut a hole into the chain link fence behind the backstop and we could crawl through when necessary.
Someone popped a fly ball over the fence. I was three batters away, so I went through the hole, crossed the busy street and got the ball. I threw it back and had to wait a minute or two to cross the street again. As I was going back through the hole, I heard “Lorena, hurry up it’s your turn!” I stood up, even though I wasn’t through the hole. I have two deep scars on my back where the cut metal from the chain link scratched my back. Bleeding through my jersey, I still took my turn…
Tricia says:
So this isn’t my injury but I was there and she’s my little sister and it was kinda my fault so I can tell it. I was about 5 and my sis was 3. We had this pop up Pound Puppy tent (damn that wasa long time ago) and a picnic table in the backyard. I decided that it would be totally awesome to put those ruffle socks on our hands like superhero gloves and jump off the picnic table onto the tent and bounce gracefully onto the patio….yeah, not so much. I went first, nailed it and then it was my sister’s turn…someone decided to miss the tent completely and land chin first on the concrete patio. Needless to say, she had to get stitches, I got in trouble AND she ruined my socks. Nobody won that day.
Heather K says:
Thankfully it was you’re butt and not you’re face.
One day when I was 3, at daycare, and I was wearing my brand new yellow dress. They had installed new swings & gravel for us to play on. I was swinging my lil heart out, I leaned back really far (the swings were close to the ground, they were for little kids) and caught a hunk of glass in my head and it ripped down my head. When I leaned up, my face felt wet, and I looked down at my new yellow dress and it was now turning red, covered in blood! I screamed & cried, the teacher ran over & she screamed, so I cried even more. I ended u getting 20 stitches in my head and a swing phobia, that is still with me today. I am TERRIFIED of swings, I’ll sit on them and maybe move a little, but that’s it! My mom never made me get back on a swing. My hubby doesn’t appreciate that, he says I’m too paranoid when our kids are on a swing. He’s right, but I try every time I see them on a swing to breathe & remain calm!
Adrienne says:
I, too, tore myself a new one when I was 14. It was on a wooden sled…..with very rusty nails. We were barreling down the hill when we lost control and hit a berm of ice. The sled stopped, but the rest of me and my fellow riders still moved forward……quickly. I heard the tear, but thought it was only my pants. Nope. I tore my right butt cheek in a huge “L”. After everyone examined it, it was determined that I probably needed stitches, so off to the doc we went. However, because I tore it on a rusty nail, from a sled stored in a barn, they wouldn’t stitch it up. They gave me a tetanus shot and told me to leave it open and watch closely for infection. Nothing like a weepy wound on you butt for a week! I have a nice scar now.
My other embarrassing injury is a scar on my hand (barely noticeable now) that I also received at around age 14 in the shape of a grid from hardware cloth. We used to have a burning barrel (back when burning your trash was legal here). It was my job to go out and light it when it was full. I got it going really well, but noticed that part of a bag was hanging out and pushing up the screen we used to keep the embers from blowing out and setting the countryside on fire. The fire was going pretty well by now, but it was further down in the barrel by this time. So, genius that I am, I decided to push the screen down and push the bag that was falling out into the barrel. I set my hand down firmly on the metal screen, pushed hard, and the sizzling began. The screen was so hot it immediately became embedded in my skin and I had to pull it off with my other hand. I went screaming into the house. We never went to the doctor for that one. I remember how hard it was to not use my hand, and the blisters that also formed in a grid pattern. Now, everyone gets a good laugh from that one, even to this day! I’m an idiot.
Funnelcloud Rachel says:
When I was 3 or 4, my family was walking down the boardwalk on the Jersey shore one evening. I remember pushing my brother in a stroller. I remember my parents telling me “Don’t run on the boardwalk!”
I did it anyway. I tripped and totally bit it. I screamed.
My parents carried me back to my grandparents house and laid me out on the bed, got out the tweezers, and proceeded to remove HUNDREDS of splinters from my legs as I screamed and cried.
It was my grandparents’ house so they only had antiquated first aid supplies, and my mom drew pictures on my legs with mercurochrome (the red stuff – which I just googled and found out is no longer sold in the U.S. because of mercury content!). Anyway, I had a smiley face on one knee and a frowny face on the other!
Funnelcloud Rachel says:
Oh, and a few more! I grew up in a house that was at the top of a very long asphalt driveway – it was a great hill for sledding, riding your bike, and getting hurt!
Injury #1: I was in kindergarten. All my friends had bikes and I still was riding a big wheel. I really wanted a bike. One day my mom came home and there was a new blue bike in the back of the station wagon. I wanted to ride it immediately, even though I had never ridden a bike before. I took it to the top of the hill and started pedaling around the flat spot. My friend was over and she knew how to ride a bike, so I guess I wanted to show off…and I started riding down the hill. About half of the way down, I realized I had no clue how to brake. I was gaining momentum and crashed into a fence at the bottom. Ouch!
Injury #2: This one happened to my brother. We were sledding down the hill and he was running and jumping onto his sled headfirst – only he missed the sled and face-planted into the ice-covered driveway, knocking his two front teeth out.
Injury #3: I was in middle school and riding a scooter down the hill – trying to go as fast as I could. When I got to the bottom, a neighbor kid was playing in the street and HE THREW A FOOTBALL AT MY HEAD. Asshole! It hit me and I fell off the scooter and landed on both knees and I remember my knees sliding about 2 feet on the asphalt. OUCH. I think I yelled some cusswords at the kid and then screamed for my mommy!
Rumour Miller says:
I put my front teeth through my bottom lip crashing a snowmobile. Snowmobile was fine. Lip was not. Did not get stitches but still have the scars on my bottom lip.
I was a dare devil, I tell ya.
Melissa says:
I broke my ankle on the monkey bars when I was seven. Nothing too exciting but I did get a pink cast and crutches, which I thought was cool for the first week.
I also have a scar on my chin where I fell off the table at daycare and hit the bird cage on the way down. No memory of it (I was 3 or 4) but still wonder what I was doing on top of the table there in the first place!
MissAujahAcron says:
Around age 7, I slid down the pole on my swing set and same thing…. there was a screw exposed and it ripped my stomach open… still have a scare.
Jen L. says:
Well, when I was 4 I stuck a button up my nose. Don’t know why. Another time when I was 4, my sister dropped a baby doll stroller on my head that required stitches in my forehead. This ocurred about 3 hours before out of town relatives were arriving out our house. My mom was not pleased. When I was about 7, I gashed my leg on a piece of metal at my aunt’s. My mom was a nurse at a cardiologist office and the dr. looked at it, put some butterfly strips on it and then proceeded to go get a tetanus shot from the hospital across the street to administer to me. Since my mom was nurse, we never actually went to the dr….. In 5th grade, I broke my collar bone at school during PE. It happened about 1 hour before dismissal and the teacher did not think I was injured enough to do anything so I stayed at school and then walked home afterwards. A broken collarbone is very very painful. The school got an earful from my mom. Luckily, I was taken to the ER for that one. I sprained my ankle at McDonald’s jumping up and down for free food the night before my parents 25th wedding anniversary party. That hurt too!!
Issa says:
I am very clumsy. My eyes are horrible, so it’s just a fact. I run into walls, I always have bruises that I’m unsure where they came form and I’ve broken bones and had to say to doctors, I have no idea how I did that.
However the worst as a kid? I had a Mickey Mouse bike. I was riding without shoes, which I knew I wasn’t supposed to do and somehow I put my foot in the wheel as I was riding. The blood was everywhere. I was convinced I’d loose my foot. I have scars on three of my toes and one on the top of my foot.
Laura says:
Number 1: Sledding when I was 7 or 8. My mother, in search of the steepest part of our backyard hill, didn’t realize she’d pushed me directly toward our woodpile. I didn’t think to bail out of the sled (I was headed downhill face-first), and I thought to myself, “It’s my face or my head.” So I put my face down on the sled and the top of my head took the impact. I had a bump on my head the size of a baseball. It was awesome.
Number 2: Also in the snow; are you sensing a pattern? I was younger, maybe 6, and I thought the snow was a big pillow. Because that’s how it looks in cartoons, you know? Anyway, I jumped off the top of our swingset, thinking the snow would catch me. Yup. That fall hurt. Miraculously, no broken bones. Just a headache.
Number 3: Not really an injury. But I was 6, my nostril itched, and I didn’t want to get yelled at for picking my nose. So I did what any normal kid would do, and I grabbed the yellow hand that went to a Lego man, thinking of it as an extension of my finger, and I put it up my nose to scratch the itch. It got stuck. Eventually my 3-year-old brother told my dad that I “still had that Lego up my nose.” A call to the doctor ended in uncontrollable laughter on the doctor’s part, and my dad, brother, and I (mom was out of town, thank goodness!) headed to the local ER so someone could take scarily huge tweezers and pull it out. At check-in, the conversation went something like this:
Nurse: “What’s the problem?”
Dad: “She has a Lego up her nose.”
Nurse, not skipping a beat: “One ‘g’ or two in Lego?”
I sobbed, the doctor thought he was being funny when he pulled out the slime-covered Lego man’s hand and asked me if I wanted to keep it, and my brother bravely told me he would protect me. To this day, my parents delight in reliving that experience.
Erin says:
It’s not my story, but my sister’s. I am involved, however. I was about 3 and my sister was 5. My mom was playing softball with her team which just happened to be next to a cemetery. My sister was watching me and I took off into the cemetery. She chased after me and instead of dodging the headstones, she ran square into one…with her forehead. She still has a 3 inch scar/dent in her forehead, and she’s 38 years old. She still blames me. Hey, I was 3.
jenny says:
So I just remembered this one the other day, watching my 5 year old play on the monkey bars. Flash back.
I was probably about 5 – and was too young to be playing at the playground alone, but we lived in a ridiculously small town where kids did that sort of thing. I was standing on the high bar, which I knew I wasn’t allowed to do, but who was there to catch me? And I slipped. One leg on each side of the high bar. Landed right on my you know what.
I fell to the ground and waited. Then when I got home I “peed” blood and never told anyone about it. My mom was the most nice, loving mom around. I totally could have told her without any punishment at all. But I knew I wasn’t supposed to be standing on that high bar and I was embarrassed.
Lucky for me, all my lady parts were in tact, and I went on to have 3 babies when I grew up. But it was interesting the flash of terror and wave of remembering I got watching my little girl in her soccer cleats climb up and stand on the high bar after practice the other day. Shudder.
Nicole says:
OMG that was cringe-worthy & shocking! As Zandi would say “Oooh OOOH!!! Bum clench!!! BUM CLENNNNNCH!!!”
Mine is a butt-induced facial injury story…
At 16 and in looooove (swoon), I was wrestling with my boyfriend and he took off running, so naturally I chased him and caught him as he was going up the stairs and his butt was level with my face (ok, before I go further, we were fully clothed!) so naturally, I BIT his ass.
Except that I heard a funny pop and over the course of the next 24 hours my jaw locked up and froze with my chin lining up about an INCH or so west of my nose….Now I have irrepairable Ass-Induced-TMJ, thankyouverymuch.
How to explain to the parents & chiropractor (who reset my face & took care of that lockjaw) that it wasn’t injured by any sexual act, but in a dumbass game of wrestle-the-boyfriend and bite-his-ass….??
Nobody believed me. Especially the high school senior football player (HOTTIE!) who sat behind me in Geometry class and thought it was FILARIOUS that my face was messed up.
I totally have to check in later to read the rest of these stories…will get into trouble at work if I’m here much longer. ; P
Becky says:
I have a few. No butt scars, though.
When I was about 12, I got kicked in the chin by my horse. My jaw swelled up so bad I had to eat pancakes for dinner because it was the only thing I could fit through my lips. No scars, but I learned that when they say “Don’t run up behind a horse) they mean it.
This one needs a picture, but I don’t know how to make one: There’s a channel running between the silo and the barn. It has a low roof to it, and since we don’t use the silo anymore, my dad had concrete stairs poured into the channel. It was only a foot or so across. I ducked (not far enough) under the roof to step across the stairs and cracked my head, and when I came to, my ass was on the steps with my legs hanging out over one side and my head and shoulders out the other. I have a nasty scar with nerve damage on my shin (I have NO IDEA how I hit myself there), and a nifty scar on my hand.
And on the thumb of my other hand, I have a scar where I got bit by a 40 pound pig that I was cradling in my arms as I carried it down a flight of steep wooden stairs. And I didn’t even drop him!
I just realized that all of my wounds can be traced back to my dad’s farm…can I get compensated for that??
Lisa says:
My girlfriend and I were sleeping in the playroom in the above garage bldg. It was late and we were hungry. So while we were still in our sleeping bags we walked down the stairs (see where this is going) about the 3 step from the bottom my friend got spooked and told me to jump, after all it was only 3 steps. and I lept she stepped down on to my sleeping bag and down I went HARD! I saw stars, my head was gushing blood. She ran to get her parents, I could hear them groaning “Oh great” the memorable part was her dad running out to check on me in his “Tighty Whiteys” My eyes are still not the same.
Some years back I was riding my hubby’s bike with some friends, my foot slipped and my “Stuff” jammed down hard on the bike frame and man it hurt so bad. Worse thing was I had a “Girly” appt the next day and my stuff was all bruised and the doctor and nurse talked to me about domestic violence…Not sure they bought my story LOL
Mom again says:
Mike didn’t know this story? Surely he noticed this scar years ago,was he just too polite to ask?
Tracy says:
Who knew we have BUTT SCARS in common?
After returning from a motorcycle riding weekend in the desert…my mom walked in the house, turned on the heater full blast, and went outside to help my dad unload. Having been told to take off my clothes and get ready for my bath …but not GET IN the bath without a parent in the house…I did the logical thing for a seven year old naked freezing child to do…I sat on the floor heater. You know…the METAL GRATE FLOOR HEATER. After burning my arse in a lovely grate pattern it has looked something like this ever since: (=*=)
Fail!
Sandra says:
When I was three or four, for some reason I loved sucking on metal hangers, don’t ask me why! (I guess I liked the metalic taste) Of course, my parents being the sane people they are, told me I was to never suck on the hangers, and I, being the stubborn and sneaky child I was, would do it anyways in hiding, and when I would hear someone coming I would take the hanger out of my mouth and hide it. One time, I heard someone coming, so I yanked the hanger out of my mouth, but, unfortunately for me, it got caught on the underside of my tongue and went straight through. My parents tried hard not to laugh, but if I were in their place, I’d probably have a problem containing my laughter too. Needless to say, that was the last time I ever sucked on a metal hanger. I like to think that I was about twenty years early on the tongue piercing fad.
Carrie says:
I recieved quite a few stitches as a child. The grossest was from slamming my knee into the ground while trying to ride down a gravel driveway on a tricycle (when I was and having a rock stuck in my knee. 5 stitches and a bloody rock later, I still have that scar.
But my husband is also hyper competitive and told me how in his infinite wisdom as a teenager he had gotten nipple piercings and after being cross checked while playing hockey he discovered his nipple ring had been ripped clear out of his nipple..taking his nipple with it. Yup..my husband won that round…
Carrie says:
*when I was 8…that’s supposed to read LOL. Clearly Im not caught up with all the cool icon codes…
Katrina says:
Um…where’s the the pictures? Neat story, Heather, but I’m just not feeling it without photos. The diagrams just don’t cut it.
Cut it — get it? Ha!
Okay, so I’m sorry to disappoint but I just don’t have any injuries that would even be as funny as yours.
Oh well, life ain’t over yet! I still got time for more boo-boo’s. Hopefully at least one of them will have a cool story attached to it.
Ania says:
So my friend and I used to visit this donkey called Sally to feed her stuff (my leftover lunch, usually) after school as we walked home. The nice old lady that owned her let us do this, but her husband ..not so much! So one day he catches us in the fenced area, so of course, we took off running. We crawled under the fence in just enough time to get away, but while I was crawling under, I heard a loud RRRIIIIIIIIPPP! – but I didn’t look back, of course, the dude was scary! I thought maybe I had caught my shirt or something on the fence. Did I mention the fence was barbed wire? Yeah.
So, ran for a bit down an alleyway, and I kept wiping what I thought was sweat dripping down my face. My friend turned back to look at me after a minute, and I can still picture the look of horror on his face. He seriously ran screaming from me like I was about to die right in front of him. I looked down at my hands, and they were bright red with blood, and the blood was running down my forehead and nose, dripping into my hand. But I didn’t feel any pain! It was so freaky weird.
Luckily, I was close to home, so I ran in, made my mom faint, and when she came to she rushed me to the ER for about 12 stitches in my head. My mom is sobbing the whole time, thinking I damaged my brain because there was so much blood. I remember the doctor had to keep telling her, “No, she’s going to be fine! Head wounds just bleed a lot”. Ha!
Chris says:
I have two, the first one happened while riding my bike, I fell down a steep hill and the handle bars went into my side, it looks like a bullet hole with stretch marks around it (two kids later). The other one is from kidney surgery, I have an 8 inch scar around my waist. My sister tells everyone we were doing the magic act of sawing someone in half and it didn’t work!!! Some people actually believe it!!!
Mommy Boots says:
When I was about 6, my parents built a cat tree. Like, one of those things you find with platforms to put by windows so the cats can sit on them and do their cat things while they look out windows.
My parents built one. Out of tree branches and stuff. One day, I was being rambunctious and running around our couch which also happened to be next to the cat tree. I would climb over the couch, jump off the back, run around and repeat. Well, on one of my vaults over the couch one of the cat tree branches caught my face.
My cheek, to be exact. From the inside out. I had impaled my face on a tree branch.
It took six stitches – three outside, three inside – and a plastic surgeon to fix my face to the point that it wouldn’t leave a terrible scar. I still have one. I looks like someone took their thumbnail and gouged me really hard in the face. But it’s not as bad as it could be!
Jen says:
This isn’t about me, but it’s about my daughter. .. My daughter and son were a little over 1 and 2.5 years old. We were living with my parents at the time because our house was being built. My husband and I were watching TV and Jake and Jada were playing in their room and the living room.
Well, all of a sudden I hear a little cry. It just *sounded* different if you know what I mean. I knew immediately that I needed to check on them. When I got to Jada, she was sitting outside the door and her thumb was bleeding a little. I was like “awwww, did you cut your finger?” So I took her to the kitchen to rinse it off.
BUT, when I put her finger under the water the top portion of her thumb (from just below the nail) just bent back. I realized that it was just HANGING there by a little piece of skin. OMG, I just lost it. Thankfully, my mom was there and could watch Jake while we took her to the ER.
What happened was Jake shut the bedroom door and Jada had her thumb in just the right spot and it pretty much cut the tip of her thumb off below the nail line. They were able to suture it back on though. Poor thing had her hand wrapped up forever. She is 8 years old now and her right thumb looks different from her left.
Julie D. says:
OMG, Heather! This EXACT same thing happened to me when I was six… but I tore open my knee and not my bum. Makes me wonder how many monkey bar screw accidents there has been. LOL.
Heather says:
I love these stories!
When I was 8 my Girl Scout Troop took a ceramics class. Somehow I ended up with a piece of metal in my eye from the class…only we didn’t know it was metal in my eye for at least 6-8 hours. I just couldn’t get my eye to stop watering, and trying to go to sleep was impossible (because the metal was brushing up against my eyelid when it closed).
I finally went to urgent care where they numbed my eye to check it out. They found the piece of metal and tried to get it out with a q-tip. That didn’t work, so they got out a BIG needle to dig it out. I got to wear a sweet eye patch for a few days after that!
To top things off, the metal and eye-watering combination left a nice rust ring on my eye, so I was sent to an ophthalmologist who numbed my eye and DRILLED the rust ring out of my eye with what he described as “a very fine dentist drill.” Nice.
Alexandra :) says:
I cut my lip on a pot I was banging when I was one or two. My mom rushed me to the doctor, and I still have a small scar from it. And you’re right. A ripped butt IS highly underrated!
Kristin says:
Oh my, mine was traumatic and strangely similar to yours. It involved the swingset and me standing on top of the slide. I think I was 3 or 4, and I was standing on top of the slide (about 3-4 feet high if I had to guess). My mom was mowing the yard, and somehow I slipped and straddled the top of the lawn mower right as she was coming by. Thankfully, I wasn’t too injured, but my vajajay was bleeding a little bit so my mom took me to the doctor… a male doctor. I remember the embarassment of having to show him my “bottom”. So traumatic. I also remember sitting on the toilet FOREVER because it stung to pee, and I just couldn’t make myself do it. Thankfully, there were no lasting side effects.
Karen says:
I don’t have one of my own so I’ll share my husband’s. He has a soft patch on his left calf as when he was six years old he tried to jump over one of those green-plastic-coated wire fences after a ball. However on this fence the criss-crossed tops were not coated and he wound up hanging off the fence suspended by the muscles and flesh of his calf. He tore clean through most of his calf muscles and wasn’t expected to walk again.
He has some nerve damage to his left foot, a permanent limp, and still gets crampy from the scar tissue but he grew up playing ice hockey.
Cass says:
When I was a freshman in high school I decided to give my friend a piggy back ride down the hallway. I wanted to show off in front of the boys’ basketball team that was sitting nearby so I started running. And just about as soon as I started running my left knee bent backwards sending my friend literally flying through the air as I faceplanted into the linoleum. Walked on it for two weeks before I found out I had three fractures and two chipped bones. The knee still bends backwards. Won me Gwen Stefani tickets once.
Michelle W says:
I was in Grade 6 and playing Grass Hockey (in the gym) when one of my classmates got between me and the ball, raised his hockey stick and wham! I took it right in the face, my mouth took the full brunt. I don’t remember much after that until I was in the nurses office with a huge fat lip. The teacher was eating an apple while sitting with me and made some comment about “oh I’m sorry I shouldn’t eat this in front of you.” I didn’t know why she said that until I ran my tongue across my front teeth and felt the jagged edge. My front tooth was chipped in half. When I went home I was terrified of how pissed my Mom was going to be and had my hand covering my mouth until she insisted I show her. She was pissed (not at me for the record). I don’t know the dentist we first went to but I think they got their degree out of a crackerbox, soon after getting it “repaired” I was sitting in the library listening to a story and inexplicably hitting myself (gently) in the mouth with the book when it simply popped out. I got it redone somewhere else and it was never again a problem. The guy who hit me in face was very apologetic. Somewhere there is a picture of me smiling with my half a tooth.
Once I was at a babysitters and was playing on the swing set. I jumped off the swing and a nail sticking out of the tandem swing beside me ripped my ear lobe open and I had to get stitches.
Those are my best stories, unless you count the time when I had an accident as an adult (stupid me, no seatbelt at the time) The roof of my car took out a road sign but luckly I didn’t flip the car on it’s roof. I was in severe pain from my neck down past my elbow and my fingertips were numb but they assured me the x-ray was clear and I was sent home. Over 24 hours later they called my home and spoke to my husband and asked him to get me back right away, seems the x-ray tech missed the fact I had a broken neck. Fortunately it was not serious enough to require surgery, a few days in hospital, a neck brace for nearly 3 months and then I was back to work. Had they not caught the error after the fact I could have ended up paralyzed. I always wear my seat belt now.
Chrissy says:
When I was about 3 years old, I was at the babysitter’s house and she had one of those “Sit and Spin” toys. You remember the ones you would sit on and there was a handle in the middle that you kind of wrapped your legs around and you pulled the handle and it spun you around? Yeah those.
Anywho. I noticed the bigger kids were standing on them and using a big red school desk to swivel themselves around.
You know where this is going right? I so wanted to be cool like the big kids and decided to try doing the same thing they were. And as soon as I did, I lost my balance, grabbed the big red desk and pulled it down on top of me. The edge of it slammed into my forehead. I didn’t even cry until I saw the blood run down my nose and into my eyes.
8 stitches and 33 years later, I have a really cool scar right smack dab in the middle of my forehead.
Ciji says:
i’m mobile this has to be short but i have a scar like a sheriff badge from crawling under bus seats when i was 5. the bus driver laughed & refused to give me a bandaid. i think i held my knee all day
Ella says:
I was sitting on my bed studying one night and when I got up to turn off the light my foot got caught in the sheets and I fell off the bed and dislocated my elbow. After telling several nurses at the ER and the Dr.’s office that I fell off my bed, someone said “Well, at least you were doing something fun.” It finally dawned on me that I had been telling people ALL day long that I fell off the bed, but left out the all-important “while I was studying, by myself.”
Cathy says:
It was the summer of 1970, Jodi and I were 5 years old and wanted to be nothing more than cowgirls. Dressed in our cowgirl duds and hats Jodi decided she wanted to lasso me with the hose, unforunately the a clover shaped metal sprinker head was attached to the end. Needless to say, that didn’t go well and I have a scar on my head where my hair parts naturally and it doesn’t grow hair.
I also wasn’t a graceful child, I managed to break my collar bone twice, once falling off Jodi’s porch (see above story for my antics with Jodi) and the second time at sunday school.
Wendy says:
Ok, when I was 11yrs old, we were visiting my Grandma’s house for Easter. After the weekend was over all of the family (cousins, aunts, uncles, etc.) were hanging out, talking and saying our goodbyes. There were about 15 people in the living room. I decided to tease my older brother (6 yrs older then me) and depants him in front of everyone. He got really mad and I ran between all the people, hit the coffee table (with rounded corners) and hide in the corner. After my brother left the room, I came out from hiding and looked at my knee expecting a little scratch. Unfortunaely there was a big gash. I had to get 21 stiches and have a “V” shaped scar on my knee as a reminder.
My Mom once washed a trash can out in the kids bathtube. Later that day my sister (10yrs old) went to take a bath. Turns out there was a piece of glass in the trash can and Mom didn’t know it, so my sister sat on it. At that point my Mom, Dad and Uncle decided she did not need stiches. They layed her on the kitchen island and used butterfly strips instead. So she too has a wonderful butt scar to show for it!
erica says:
Well… I broke my ring finger playing line tag in the rain and you can still feel it in the bone. Even better was my sophomore year my Sister and I were moving a stovetop to the alley and I got my pinky finger pinned between the stove and the brick pillar in the backyard. The pool of blood in my hands- awesome. My Mom took me to a clinic because it was a Sunday and the stupid doctor listened to me say “I don’t want stiches.” He steristripped me up and my general doc on Monday was like what in the world you needed stiches well too late now. I had no feeling in the top half of my pinky for months until a ball hit my scar and my finger kinda wigged out and spazed around- then the feeling came back.
Worst though- my poor baby Sister (she was 14ish) tripped while rollerblading across the busiest road in our super small town. She slid on the gravel and got rocks in her face and I think at least one tooth through her lip. My parents were gone I don’t even remember where and I was working an event at the high school (I was in college) and this was before cell phones. She limped herself to a video store we rented from a lot and they called my parents friends until they could find one to come and take my Sister to the hospital. When my parents showed up where I was lifeguarding I had no clue what awful thing happened. My Sister was a bruiser though and she was fine. Can’t say it was the last accident for either of us.
Sara says:
OMG I have a scar in the exact spot that I got when I was 7! My grandma had made my this green jumper that was still pinned together and she wanted me try it on before she sewed it. The embarrasing part of this is as I was trying it on my grandpa came into the room, having no top on, I crossed my arms across my chest and said, “Oh ah I lost my bra”. I was so horrified that he just walked in on me and embarrased that, that had just come out of my mouth. As I was removing the jumper a stick pin ripped my tush, leaving me a 3 inch scar.
Anne Lalla says:
This is actually my Mom’s story, who is now 68! I don’t remeber her exact age, but I’m guessing between 6-9 she was “messing around” with her older brothers. My Mom decided to use a rod iron curt rod as a pogo stick. You can only imagine the damage that did, she is very luck she didn’t damage any organs. She has large scar on her stomach, almost from her waist to her chest.
Erin says:
I was a bookworm as a kid, so no good stories from me. But I’m a physical therapist, and here are a couple of my favorites:
1. I had a young patient who was about 9 years old, was hanging upside down from the monkey bars when she decided it would be cool to drop down (about a foot) and land in a handstand. She broke both wrists.
2. Another patient was apparently focusing very hard on something when a friend came up and yelled “boo,” startling her. She jumped and spun around, slapping him hard enough that she gave herself shoulder tendinitis.
3. Last one, I promise. One older widow who had sprained her knee climbing out of the shower, but decided that was too boring of a story, and started telling people that she hurt herself learning how to snowboard with her 20- year-old boyfriend named “Fabio.” the looks she got from other patients was priceless!!
Angela says:
Actually, I caused injury to my brother, but it was totally his fault. Twice.
#1 – we were running through a hotel restaurant. He was 4, I was 6. I was chasing him. He could have veered to the right, but for some reason, he went to the left and hit his head on the table. Fortunately, my parents did know that he needed stitches.
(His version of the story involves something about running for his life. He tells it wrong).
#2 – this is the Rube Goldberg story. I was standing on a stool in a doorway, talking to my mother. I was probably putting up decorations for Christmas.
My brother walks up behind me, holding a bottle of pop. He could have gone the long way around, he could have asked me to get out of his way, but no. His way of getting me to stop blocking the doorway was to punch me in the small of my back.
As a reflex, my right foot swung up. My heel connected with the bottom of the bottle he was holding. The top of the bottle took out a corner of one of his front teeth.
#3 was my fault. He made me mad, I was swinging my metal lunchbox, I swung it at him, and took out the other corner of his abused right tooth. He had the tooth capped.
Kristi F says:
I am sorry, but none of my childhood war wounds can even hold a candle to that one. You win!
Amanda says:
So I was about 4 I think and I was outside with my brother and neighbors. We were playing with my baton (danny took baseball lessons, I took baton) in the front yard and having a good time. We were tossing it up in the air and watching it then catching it. We apparently thought this game would be waaaaaaay more fun underneath the giant maple tree across the street.
Then the stick fell, in my eye. Well technically not “IN” my eye, but I did end up getting stitches right below my eye. 3 guesses what I got to be for halloween that year. At least I already had the awesome eye patch!
Kristi F says:
Although, I must ask, does this lightening bolt bum scar make you “Harry Potty?”
Heather says:
when i was 6 i put my hand on the stove for some unknown reason. lifted up a pot and place my hand on the burner. don’t know why, just did it.
i still have a scar on my finger from it.
also, isn’t it cute how everyone says Hedder instead of Heather when they are little? =)
Becci says:
I was VERY accident prone as a kid (and still am as an adult), so I have several strange injury stories. Lol. Here are a few of my favorites…
1.) When I was in first or second grade I was attending a very small school. We had K-10 all in one building. So, naturally, some adjustments had to be made for the smaller kids. One such adjustment was a stool near the fountain, that way they could reach it to get a drink. What they failed to do, however, was put the stool on a side where the grate (you now, the one that gets MEGA hot) wouldn’t hurt them. I was wearing shorts and managed to get second degree burns from a water founatain. THAT’S always a fun one to explain. I’ve gotten many WTF!? type looks. Lol.
2.) I have 3 scars across my chest from where my cat scratched me badly around the age of 3. In his defense… I WAS trying to flush him down the toilet.
3.) On my knee there is a lovely scar where I cut it to the bone on a sectional couch. Being a stupid teenager I held it together with bandaids and duct tape. When my mom, who is an LPN, saw it she promptly said that I needed stitches or it’d leave a nasty scar. I replied back that it was going to leave a scar either way, so it might as well be a cool one! No stitches and a wicked scar later, is always makes me smirk when I think about it.
4.) At 17 I was sitting in the bathtub (with the shower running) one day. I had an umbrella cockatoo who was sitting on the shower rod. For some reason I decided it would be a good idea to spray him with water, so I stood up. I failed to check how close I was to the faucet while attempting to stand up… way too quickly. I took a HUGE chunk out of my back, but I didn’t know it at the time. It burned, but I continued my shower (not noticing the blood apparently). After wrapping up and realizing how bad my back hurt, I asked my friend to take a look at it. HE SAW BONE! He started flipping it, while I asked him to find bandaids and duct tape (see the pattern with the duct tape? It fixes EVERYTHING for a teenager). After much debate I finally went to the ER, where the nurses couldn’t believe the size of the wound… how I got it… or the fact that I was stupid enough to cover it with duct tape. Five years later and I still have a nasty scar and NERVE DAMAGE from where I took that chunk out of my back. -Sigh-
(To prove that I’m still as bad as an adult… I work a hotel (thirrd shift – night audit). I was putting papers under the doors a few nights ago, stood up, and SLAMMED my head on the doorknob. Yeah. If they weren’t awake before, I bet they were then! -Sigh-
stuckinmypedals says:
When I was 5 I chased my brother and sister down a hill, tripped and landed on a rock that gashed my knee. The scar healed in the shape of a 5 on my knee cap. My hubby takes great pleasure in giving it a high five whenever he can.
Michelle W says:
I know I already blathered on far too long but someone’s story reminded me of the story of someone else getting hurt, but while I was on watch..
It was my first day working in a daycare and I had taken the kids into the “gym”. Which was really just a small carpeted room with some toys and a tube slide. One of the kids came down head first, face planted into the floor and when she stood up screaming I saw a LOT of blood. Turns out she had driven both front teeth up and through her gums and had to have them both yanked. I was horrified and was sure I’d be fired. The parents assured me it was okay, she was apparently accident prone and they all took it in stride.
Cindy says:
My husband swung from a tree & landed on a broken bottle when he was 8. He has a scar just like yours, except instead of a lightening bolt, it’s a j.
The little dot above the j is where a piece of glass abscessed out about a year after it happened. Ouch!
Kristy H says:
I’m going to tell you my son’s childhood injuries, he’s only 11, but from the ages of 3-5, he’s had some doozies! And at the risk of being deemed a HORRIBLE mom, because only I was around for these, here we go!
When my son was 3, we woke up one morning and I walked into the bathroom. Not knowing he was following me, I went to shut the bathroom door and immediatly heard a scream! He had followed me, stopped at the door and when I went to shut the door, his pinky was in the door and got caught. It gushed blood, I freaked and off to the ER we went. He needed 7 stitches, and it was so close to the bone that the Dr said we were lucky I didn’t close the door anymore than I did! Yes, I spent the next few months spoiling my baby because I felt so horrible about it!
About 6 months later, I took my son to the mall, and I had him in the stroller as we got into the elevator. He wanted to push the button so I picked him up to hold him. He put his hand on the elevator door, and the door started to open, and his hand went IN with the door! AGain, I freaked, panicked, all I could think was the elevator was going to take off and my son would go with it! I slammed the Emergency button and a man next to me started to gently pull my sons hand. It took about 30 seconds, seemed like hours, but his hand finally popped out. His hand was all bruised and funky looking, so again, off to the ER. I was starting to think we could get some sort of frequent visitor points! Thankfully, his hand was just bruised, nothing broken, and we were sent home with a ton of stickers and a few ice packs!
After that, we only had the usual boy bruises and bumps, but I have always felt so horrible because of what happened! My hubby always joked about how no accidnets happened while HE watched him, but thankfully, we;ve been accident free since then!
Megan says:
A few summers ago my family bought some jet skis and we headed off to the lake for vacation. I hadn’t been on one in years and had never driven one so I was a little nervous. My step-brother took me out a few times, doing all sorts of crazy stunts that threw me from the jet ski, which completely got rid of my uneasiness about riding them. I decided I wanted to drive it by myself so I hopped on and zoomed off. My confidence was sky high and I was doing all sorts of jumps over waves and hard turns….and then suddenly the shore was approaching me faster than I could react. The shore covered in trees and rocks, that was basically forest. I shot onto land, somehow miraculously missing the trees. My face, arms, and neck were all scratched and torn up but I didn’t break anything. It was a miracle I didn’t die or worse. My poor father was freaking out because the side of the shore I hit was uninhabited and they had to bum a ride off of some very kind people with a boat that saw the whole thing happen. He had no idea if I was alive or dead until they got the boat to me. I wasn’t a kid when that happened but I still have a scar on my upper lip and a few on my neck from that one.
When I was maybe 12 my dad and I were wrestling in the living room and he karate chopped me and broke my pinky finger, my mom was SO MAD, lol. He kept saying “well I didn’t MEAN TO!” I thought she was going to kill him!
MICHELLE says:
I have a scar on my chin. When I was young my mother told me not to drive down a hill with my sister on the handlebars of my bicycle. So we thought we were cool to be out of their sight and try it. I had the brilliant idea to wiggle the handlebars to freak out my little sis (I think we were like 7 and 5), but I lost control of the bike and when I flew off the handlebars I broke my sisters fall with my face ;p.
I also have a scar on my knee from being around 12 and being dared to go down a hill on a bicycle wearing roller skates. When I was going down the hill a car was backing out of their driveway and I rolled over the top because I couldnt stop the bike wearing skates…lol
the crazy ideas we do as kids!
edenland says:
Well Hedder, a day before my seventh birthday, I tore open my shin so badly, you could see straight to the bone. I got seven stitches. The next day was my party … I couldn’t join in any party games. My two sisters took charge of everything, and when I trod in dogshit they shouted and laughed to all of my friends, and made everybody laugh at me.
Bitches. See why I gloat that I am the skinny one?
XOX
Juanita says:
mine happened around 12 or so. I remember standing around some icy stairs in the winter time and seeing my friend slip and fall and for some reason it was funny and I was laughing. She had no scar or anything. But less than a week later I slipped down some icy stairs and fell on my butt and for some reason it caused a cyst to form a few weeks later on my butt-right near the crack. Ouch. That thing would fill up with puss and then the rubbing of jeans would cause it to pop and ooze blood and pus. Then it would heal and it would fill up. Repeat a couple times and I finally had to have it removed surgically . I still have a small crater there from where they took all the tissue out. Gross huh. I guess that is my childhood scar story/ karma story.
Andrea Steuer says:
1) I have freckles…everywhere..and when I was younger my mom said I took a scouring pad and some SOS to my face to rid myself of freckles, I was a childhood genius right?
2) a have a scar on my left eyebrow from hitting the wooden dashboard in our van when we got hit from behind, but back in the day it was cool to stand between your parents seats..seat belts schmeet belts
3) I have a triangle burn on my left left from dancing with a hot iron in college, it was a 3rd degree burn and I had to go see mean nurse Nancy and have it scrubbed like raw meat every other day. Never step on your roomate’s bed to answer the phone after they have been ironing on it.
4) I have 2 scars on my neck, both representations of my battle with cancer. I won. Now I need a plastic surgeon because my scars didn’t real right. $ is the issue. People ask about them and I say I got in a knife fight, it’s not entirely a lie.
5) I have several scars on my body that represent infertility. They use to stick me in the same spot in my arm for an IV until it scarred over. I also have abdomen scars from numerous surgeries. I lost that battle.
6) I have a big scar on my left knee from crashing my bike on a gravel road and having a rock imbeded in my leg while I peddled home with blood running down my leg. Mom picked the rocks out, I needed stitches but didn’t get them because they would have had to drag me to the hospital.
My parents didn’t name me Grace for a reason:)
Violet says:
Oh my goodness! That is so funny and so sad! I have a LOVELY scar on my rear end too! My Mom put a broken picture frame propped up against the counter next to the toilet, in the bathroom we NEVER used. But, when I was about 15, I had to go SO BAD, and it was closest, so I ran in there, dropped my drawers, and the picture frame fell over RIGHT as I was sitting on the john! Literally, you could see that fat on the chunk that came off my rear. Ewwww! My parents decided I also did not need stiches (what the heck?!) and I have quiet the scar.
Another one is on my middle finger. I was so excited my parents said my girl friend could stay the night that I tore down the stairs, arms flying behind me and slammed the 3 inch mental door shut on 3 of my fingers. My hand was a perfect door jamb. My friend had to climb the front porch, and bang on the slider to get my parents, and Dad had to take the door of thee hinges to get it off my hand. My Mom looked at one side and said “oh, it looks fine.” She’d been in the ER the day before with my litte brother, who’d gotten his toes caught in the spokes of his bike. Not until she flipped my hand over, and saw bone sticking out did she realize she’ be spending her second day in a row in the ER. My hand was in a cast with my middle finger sticking up for months!
Noelle says:
In Jr. High I knelt down on my bedroom floor and heard a big crack. I couldn’t get up! I finally managed to stand but my knee was in excruciating pain. I hobbled around for a couple of days until my knee was bright red, hot and swollen about 3x normal size. We went to the ER and the Xray showed…nope, not a broken knee cap…a freakin’ SEWING NEEDLE lodged under my knee cap! I had to have surgery to have it removed! My mother went home and went over my bedroom floor with a magnet…and found the other half. The cracking noise was the needle snapping in half. Talk about a bizarre injury!
B says:
OMG,i thought i was the only one thats ever happend to,its nice to know im not…….we never did find the other half of that needle but i was in pain for weeks after that
Chris says:
So, your blog is always the first thing I read every morning and yet, here it is a full 20+ hours later before I comment because I kept thinking to myself, should I really share this? And finally I decided that if there was ONE place out there in cyberspace I probably could share this (since I don’t have my own blog) it’s here. After all, we’ve all watched Heather & Mike go through the best and the worst of times and nothing seems to be verboten.
So, disclaimers aside, my scar. I have dozens of scars but the one that haunts me, the one that has a story that makes people just stop in their tracks is the rather large bump on my head. Since it’s covered by hair I’m assuming it also has a scar but I can’t really see it, it does leave me with a lovely bump. A bump of the kind that makes changing hairstylists have the added fun of “Does that hurt?” and “What happened here?”
Well, no it doesn’t hurt, by now it’s just solid bone. What happened thought will probably always hurt. I was barely 4 and we lived in a house that had a high deck overlooking a golf course. The deck was between 20-30 feet off the ground over rocks and opened off our family room. One day while my psychopathic grandmother visited she took me out on the deck and very angry at me over a perceived transgression threw me over it. I landed in the rocks and cracked my skull, something no one would know for many, many years due to her threats. And, it was I recently found out the catalyst to the chain of events that caused me to spend the last 20 years (as of today 10/13) suffering from RSD. So, that’s a scar with a lot of mileage on it.
And putting that all out there was an awfully scary step. Thank you for teaching bravery Heather.
Heather says:
I hate that you have a story like this to tell…but you ARE brave and totally awesome for putting it out there. If you were here, I’d give you a big hug…and then I’d want to touch it, because that’s the kind of gal I am.
Swerds says:
I had about half my face torn off by my dog, twice. Exactly 24 hours apart. On a family road trip. I was 3 1/2. Luckily, the second time we were within 20 minutes of my former pediatrician (and the University of Nebraska Hospital) who took one look and called the top pediatric plastic surgeon in the area. He saved my eye. I have 2 noticeable scars, an anchor-shaped scar on my lower left cheek, and a much smaller scar below my left eye, near my nose that shows up mainly when I’m REALLY tired.
Johanna says:
I have three pretty hilarious scars.
When I was 11 and my brother was 14 we were forced to stay with our grandparents for the summer and were dreadfully bored so we invented a game called Hallway Chicken which as you might have guessed involved us running from opposite ends of the hallway at each other and seeing who wimped out. Well neither of us were wimps – he bared his brace covered teeth, i put my head down and consquently I have a scar on my forehead from where my brothers braces became embedded in it.
Number two was I left a pair of surgical scissors open on my bed when i was 14 (One big side one tiny pointy side – My mum used to get free stuff like that from the pharmacy she worked at) and when i sat back down managed to tilt them up with my hand and got the sharp blade stuck in my hip, to the bone. That one involved me passing out in the hallway and a few stitches.
Finally I was 16, I was waiting breathlessly for the results of a job interview but needed to go to the toilet. When I was sitting there – knickers around my ankles – the phone rang and i was so excited I jumped off the toilet, tripped over my undies and bashed my head into the wall resulting in a black out, concussion and a few stiches – that one still makes me blush lol
Missy says:
Wow, between me and my kids, I’ve got stories. I still have a big black mark on the palm of my hand from when I was running in school and fell on my newly sharpened pencil… the point broke off in my hand. I had a hole for a VERY long time. I also have a “suicide” scar on my wrist. I fell on top of a ceramic box while cleaning and it sliced my wrist open ( up my arm, not across my wrist… just strengthens, the “suicide” look of it!) It only took 4 stitches, but they said I was less than a millimeter for hitting the artery and if I had I would have bled to death before I could have gotten to the hospital. I was 8 I think!
My son has scars on his head from being scratched and knocked over my our 120lbs dog. He had to have 15 stitches and they had to glue his forhead closed. After we no longer had that dog we got a puppy, who was chasing my son throgh the house and got tangles in his feet. MY son fell head first into the edge of our coffee table. No blood, but a HUGE bump, that is still there to this day, almost 4 years later!
AZ says:
Seriously….the SAME EXACT THING happened to me.
I was about 4 or 5 and was crossing the monkey bars which were unfortunately wet from rain. My hands slipped off the first bar. On the way down, my inner thigh caught on one of those freakishly long screws that was missing the safety cap. When I looked down at the wound, I knew a band-aid wasn’t going to fix THAT. Twenty-one stitches (and a few popsicles) later, I was all closed up. I now have an odd Y shaped scar on the inside of my thigh that prevents me from wearing short shorts. I choose that as my excuse instead of the cellulite bumps…
Sarah says:
I don’t recall how old I was, but my dad had actually built me a swing set, he cut down the trees, cut off the limbs, and actually sanded the tree so it was smooth. Then he painted it forest green. It was amazing, and my dad was my hero. He made me a seat out of wood, and strung up chains for me to hang onto. Well me not knowing better put my little pinky inside the chains and used to swing and swing and swing. Well one day my neighbor was down swinging with me, and he actually jumped off the seat mid air, it was so cool, so i thought I should be cool like him and do that as well. Well as I got higher and higher and higher, with my little pinky inside the chain, I jumped from me seat, and well…dislocated and partially tore my pinky off my finger. It was horrific, and I swore to NEVER get on that swing set again. Well my dad being my hero, took a hose and cut it so that it fit over the chain so I wouldn’t get my little fingers stuck. He really is my hero.
Tauni says:
My coolest scar is on my nose. I was climbing the dresser drawers like steps when I was two. I slipped and slid down the side, slicing my nose from top to bottom. The hospital doctors and nurses held each side of my nose skin down on each side and could see just the bone/cartilage of the nose. They promptly called the plastic surgeon! I got plastic surgery on my nose at 2 I actually remember them putting me in the papoose to stop me from moving so they could work on me.
Janine says:
I have a small scar to the outer corner of my left eye. My brother hit me in the eye with a child-sized Mickey Mouse shovel when I was about 6. Not sure what his motive was, but we love each other now.
AJ says:
I did almost the exact same thing as you, but I ripped my stomach open. Same set up though, old metal swingset and monkey bar antics. My younger brother said “your dinner is going to fall out!!!”
It actually looks like an old-school appendectomy scar. Which confuses doctors since I had laproscopic appendectomy a few years ago, so it looks like I have scars from both!
Jolene says:
I was like 4 I think and I was running out of Chucky Cheese and opened the car door, well it had the old metal handle that you lift up and my pinkie finger got caught and ripped off the top of my finger. I have a nasty scar, the finger nail never grows and I have no feeling. Super! I have many more horror stories but that one was the worst. My 2 year old daughter seems to be taking after me in the “graceful” department. Whoo boy!
karen says:
well I wasnt that young but I was still at school. It was the end of my final year at school and I was rushing to finish a sewing project.
If I say sewing machine needle, finger and a need for speed, would you then understand ambulance, needle, finger and pliers to separate me from the sewing machine? Yep, I’m a little more careful now as it DID go through the nail too, bleurgh…..
Helene says:
When I was 2 I fell off my changing table while in the care of my grandmother. She was too afraid to take me to the ER, so I ended up with a strange circular scar on my lower lip. Until I was old enough to know better, I thought all people had a circle bump on their lip, and when I drew pictures of people, I always included a circle on their lower lip. I still have this prominent scar today and will always remember how much I love my grandma when I touch it!
Kara says:
Thanks for sharing!
Mine was embarrassing considering the circumstances…
I had just moved from Australia to Canada – it was my very first day at a new school where I knew no-one! In Australia, I definitely wasn’t the coolest kid (picture NERD) so I decided Canada would be my new, fresh start to be “cool” (note: hindsight being 20/20… who cares!).
Anyways, my first day in homeroom (first class of the day) we were in the drama room where there are a big set of metal bleachers. I hadn’t said a word to anyone in the entire 10 minutes I had been there. At the end of homeroom, everyone jumped off the bleachers and filed on out to the next class. I followed suit, and jumped off from about 5 feet up. No worries. Until I realised there was a table, with a funky design where the legs are diaganol and meet in the middle in a nice point. I landed with my thigh on the metal point of the table, and put a six-inch long gash on my thigh to my butt!
I stood up, put my hand over it, saw the blood, covered it again with my hand and went to the bathroom. I sat in the bathroom all day crying, not knowing who to talk to or what to do. It was so painful and embarrassing (not to mention my new spunky cord pants are ruined!).
About 4 hours later a girl heard me crying and asked if everything was ok… I confessed no and told her what happened. She turned out to be one of the greatest friends I had!!
Still have a decent scar from it… still have embarrassing memories too.
Heather says:
I’m late on this, but I took a knitting needle in the butt cheek when I was about 12 years old. My brothers and I were fighting and one of them kicked me off the couch and I landed right on my mom’s knitting supplies. I had to pull the needle out myself, and found that it was bent at a 90 degree angle. (OUCH.)
These were the days before cell phones, so I called all over to try to get in touch with my mom, who had been in Jazzercise class. I finally tracked her down at my grandma’s house, at which point I frantically screamed, “MOM! I have a hole in my butt!” To which she laughed and replied, “Everybody does!”
I couldn’t sit right for days. Surprisingly, I received very little sympathy.
Lori Vann says:
My coolest scar is my open heart surgery scar – I was 5, year was 1986. My aunt though did a similar butt scar to you though – she had the bright idea to slide down a 2×4 that had a nail sticking up – tore her a new one too..just like you!
Angela says:
OMG weird. I also have a big butt scar. From playing on metal in a dress, which got ruined. Except mine was from sliding off the roof of an old chicken coop because the slide on our swingset wasn’t tall enough for us. We were idiots. It’s amazing we survived childhoold@
Cheryl says:
I was NOT supposed to cross the tracks leading to the east side of town, but I did anyway. I was riding my bike and hit a gravel road. I decided to be a hardcore kid and slam back my pedals, trying to be cool. Instead I lost control and ripped my knee open to the cap. We didn’t have insurance so my mom just cleaned it. Then yelled at me.
Almost 15 years later, I still try to get “sh*tty” on gravel roads. I’ll never learn to listen to my mommie.
Annie has gotten so big, it is almost unreal. She is gorgeous. Enjoy the holidays with your family!