Grrl Power #1372 – Benefoot Arnpod
This admittedly jarring transition does sort of back-flow into the previous scene eventually. Trust me.
Frix did ask Peggy if she wanted to close up the scars on her face and fix her ear, and she said that she’d have to agonize over it for a few weeks before making a decision.
Living with something like a lost limb for years would take a minute to adjust to if you suddenly… found the limb, so to speak. That said, I think your brain would probably adjust pretty quickly to it being back. Depending on how long it was gone and what age you were when you lost it/got it back.
Back in high school, I jammed up my big toe real good (I won’t go into details as I don’t want to give everyone a terminal case of the willies) Suffice to say, I wound up with an ingrowing toenail that I really hoped would self correct, but I wound up having to deal with it eventually. It involved, as I recall, using a cotton swab with some acid on it to kill part of the root of the nail so it wouldn’t grow back wrong like an unattended beaver tooth. The toe was anesthetized and the worst part of the experience was getting a cramp in my hip while the doctor was doing his thing. But I still lived with a painful ingrown toenail for like… I don’t recall… a year, maybe? At the time, I knew I would never forget the daily pain and limping, but today, like… 35 years later? I honestly don’t remember which foot it was. You’d think one of my toenails would be slightly narrower, but I guess the root actually did eventually recover, just not as a dummkopf pointing in the wrong direction.
I guess that points to the plasticity of the (relatively young) brain. Also a year spent limping is different than multiple years of not having a leg, so it will probably take Peggy a little while to adjust.
Everyone share your grievous bodily injury stories! Yes, Opus the Poet. You have mentioned getting run over by a truck, but feel free to regale us again. It is possible you “win” at… you know, things-that-should-have-killed-me-but-didn’t stories.
I think the toe thing is my worst one. I’ve never broken a bone. I used to drink about half a gallon of milk a day when I was a teenager. I think that was the only thing I drank at the time. Oh, you know, I say I’ve never broken a bone, but there was a time when I was trying to unwind a swingset swing in a playground, and I jumped up to swat at it, and my foot came down right on the edge of the trench that gets scooped out under the swing, and my foot went 90° sideways. The bottom of my foot was facing the side of the other foot, basically. I’m pretty sure the underside of my ankle came into direct contact with the ground. That was in college, and like a dumbass, I never went and got it looked at. I just limped my way to class the next day. I don’t know if I broke a bone, but I definitely snapped some tendons or ligaments. That ankle is still a little bit misshapen to this day. Though during my peak gym rat days, I was still able to do the full 300lb stack of the standing calf machine, plus another 180 from 45 lb plates hanging somewhat precariously off the hand grips. Like a full set, not a 1 rep max. So it sort of healed up okay. That ankle isn’t that stable with lateral movement though, if I’m honest. Good thing I don’t have a gender driven expectation or desire to wear high heels.
I also stepped on something living in Galveston that left a centimeter barbed… quill? Spine? Something, right in the center of the ball of my foot. That was the only time I ever got stitches besides getting my wisdom teeth out and after shoulder surgery from fucking up my shoulders in the gym. Man, come to think of it my feet have had a hard time.
The vote incentive is finally done!
The update to the TWC image is pretty minor, but the Patreon version has the bonus comic as well as nude versions. I will strive to make the next one more timely.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Was working under water in the harbor when some people had the brilliant idea of moving a big concrete pipe over me with a crane, they then drop it somehow and guess who caught it with their head underwater? I was very lucky that I wasn’t alone down there, and I didn’t end up underneath the pipe, but I’m not sure it counts since I technically did die for several minutes.
Damn, I had someone jump off the high dive in the school pool and land on me, knocking the wind out of me while under maybe five feet of water. I can’t imagine how much worse it would feel, if I’d taken that hit to the head instead of the middle of my back, or worse, being hit by something more solid and heavy than another person’s body.
Back in the fall of 1974 I was riding in the front passenger seat of a 1960’s orange passenger van. It sort of looked like the “short bus” or “mini-bus” that takes special needs kids to school.
I’m a rule-follower for the most part, and prefer wearing a seat belt, but this seat’s belt had been intentionally manipulated into a Gordian Knot by anti-seatbelt fanatics, and was impossible to get out to wear.
With five other young men (we all know that multiple boys under 20 can’t be trusted together in a vehicle, even if they’re only together to play church music on a Sunday morning, right?) we were driving back from performing Christian Rock at two different churches’ services on a Sunday morning in rural Minnesota. Perfectly sunny clear weather, dry roads, etc. with no excuse for dangerous shenanigans.
The driver’s 17 and loves a good laugh. And three of the rest of us were mercilessly tickling the driver’s little brother (aged 14) who’s down on the floor of the back bench seat, with easy access from the two front seats, laughing his head off, trying to get us to stop.
Driving 60 miles an hour on the paved road, the driver reaches back and down to get a hand in on tickling his little brother. And the next thing I know the ride gets rough. REALLY rough.
Somehow I sat back up in my seat to see the view out the windshield looking like a motion picture camera’s shooting at a 45-degree angle low on the left side, and shaking like the camera operator is freezing / shivering with cold.
I see a green wall coming at me, with a little dark hole below it to the right.
When I wake up people are pulling my body the rest of the way out of the front windshield. I’d gone out it face-first.
You know how head injuries bleed a lot? Well, apparently my face exploded through the glass.
People following us in a second car described what happened from their point of view: the van crossed the oncoming traffic lane and drove sideways at an angle down across the steep shoulder, straight along the ditch, and ran straight into a tall driveway. The dark hole I’d seen coming at us was a culvert.
The right front wheel of the van, just in front of and under my car seat, caught in the culvert.
The speed & impact, plus our musical equipment in the back of the van, helped launch the rear of the van up in the air as the front end nose-dived and summersaulted into and over that tall driveway. With me hanging out the front windshield the whole way. Happily I was already unconscious.
The van landed squarely on all four tires (blowing them all out at once) and skidded to a stop across the driveway.
I was hanging out of the front window on my waist, bleeding like it was going out of style. Later, on visiting the van, I found my blood had also run UP the front of the windshield and onto the roof and blew backwards towards the rear of the van for about six feet. There hadn’t been much air time for THAT to occur!
I don’t remember well being pulled out of the front of the van through the windshield, but someone laid me on the gravel shoulder as they worked on extricating the rest of the guys. The guitar player wasn’t badly hurt, but when he saw my face he took off his white T-shirt and laid it over my head. He KNEW I was dead, and couldn’t stand looking at my bloody body.
That made the blood start coagulating in the cotton shirt sticking to my face, which became difficult to breathe through; my spasming got someone to pull the shirt off my face so I could breathe again.
I remember hearing a distant siren. Being roughly loaded into the back of an ambulance and hearing the siren overhead as I rode towards the nearest hospital.
By the time the ambulance got to the Emergency Room entrance at the hospital, I was a little bit aware of my surroundings. They got my gurney out and extended its legs (every little bump & jolt was a painful shock that probably was keeping me from going back unconscious).
They wheeled the gurney into the X-Ray room. That gurney was higher than the bench beneath the X-Ray machine; I heard someone saying I needed to roll over onto the X-Ray table. I thought “Really? All by myself? Well, let’s get going.”
So I rolled over and fell about eight inches down onto the cold hard X-Ray table surface, with no one within arm’s reach to stop me. Of course, LOTS of shouts of concern–the X-Ray Technician had been waiting for a few other E.R. staff to come over and LIFT me off the gurney and GENTLY place me on the table. Sheesh!
MAN, that fall hurt!
I remember questions, and being so groggy I couldn’t make much sense of them, but at least I was trying to answer them. I THINK.
I recall a nurse scrubbing my bare chest vigorously with a stiff brush and grease-cutting soap, trying to get me clean enough to see if there were lacerations beneath the grime. Maybe she was also looking for my eyebrows in the grease? It turns out I’d left them back at the van. But some smart First Responded recognized them in the clotted blood and brought them to the hospital soon after I arrived.
The doctors sewed them back on so well I can only see part of one scar. They did a nice job matching the sutures in with natural wrinkles and smile lines, so only my barber and my wife can see them.
I remember doctors using tweezers and forceps to pull the skin around & back as they pulled glass out of my face. Ugh.
When someone comes at you with a big needle filled with Novocain, and tries sticking it in your eyes, fighting them off makes the needle slip around in your eye socket and in the thin flesh where your eyebrows used to be. Don’t put up a fight.
Ultimately I was in the hospital for four days, extremely stiff. I’d broken a thumb and my nose. Had my eyebrows sewn back on. And I don’t remember much pain at all from the point of the accident to the time in the E.R. Shock did a great job preventing me from hurting so badly right away.
Important safety tip: ALWAYS wear the safety belt. That seat belt would have saved me so much ultimate pain & suffering. Not to mention the agony my mates experienced looking at me, thinking they’d killed me.
The little brother on the floor was beaten up badly by the metal legs of the seats, front & back, during the crash and landing. He was in a coma for three months, and when he came out of it, he’d experienced a drastic personality change as a result of the accident. The happy-go-lucky laughing boy he was pre-accident turned into a quiet and somber, introspective man who never laughs anymore. 54 years later he’s still alive. Has a family. But I’ve never seen or heard him laugh again.
The other three guys weren’t physically injured, but the experience did nothing for their mental health.
Our band equipment was not badly damaged for the most part, thanks to good-fitting cases & a tight pack job. The Fender Precision Bass Guitar experienced a vertical split right through the body, leaving the electronics holding it together. My saxophone & keyboards were just fine.
The van was completely totaled.
I have never ever before in my life heard about someone losing their eyebrows in a way that they could be REATTCHED. (like, burned off and stuff? yeah). Man. great, if horrifying, story.
I had to have the nailbed on both big toes acidified… injecting the anaesthetic was definitely the most painful part. But the podiatrist tested that the anaesthetic was ready by jabbing a needle into the end of my toe repeatedly… so when the anaesthetic wore off the numerous tiny stabs were actually the worst part.
went through the same thing while in HS. My Doc used the pointy end of the nippers she was holding. She also asked me if I wanted to WATCH the procedure!! (i think dad told her I was interested in being a Medic)
surprised duck surprised
Facial scars-granted, mine aren’t so bad as to be considered disfiguring but I actually miss a scar that has faded through the years. At age five I had a puncture wound in my cheek that gave me an extra dimple. In my 50’s I noticed it was starting to fade away. It’s not something I think about every day but when I do, I miss it. I’m not a young woman, so I lack that perspective but I think I would look at it as leg = functionality while the scars fit in with the tattoos.
For irony: she trips over the prosthetic, falls down stairs, getting horrible compound fractures in the new leg, so bad that they have to amputate it, coincidentally right at the exact same length as before. She already has the right sized prosthetics.
10 years old. My brother and I would run down the hallway and fall to our knees on a pillow and skid for a few feet. On one attempt the pillow didn’t move when I landed on it. Momentum caused me to pitch forward and face-plant on the floor. I knocked out both of my upper front teeth. I’ve worn a denture ever since because I was too young to have a bridge put in, and by the time I finished growing and could have it done I was so used to the plate that I’ve continued wearing one for the past 63 years.
It almost hurts to read this comment section.
Almost!?
I enjoyed the tour of Peggy’s tattoos. Thankyou for not giving her a “tramp stamp”. Not that that particular tattoo is bad, it just doesn’t seem like it would fit her style.
In 2019, I was on my bike, riding to work, and going down a down-sloped street at a reasonable speed (about 30km/h, the speed limit of that street).
The minivan in front of me either decided to brake-check me, or stopped in the middle of the green light for no fucking reason. Anyways, I braked, but way too suddenly, my front wheel locked and I flew over my handlebar, and I cushioned my fall on the asphalt with my jaw. The minivan went away and no one around had time to look at the plate number.
I saw a tooth fly out of my mouth (I took it from the floor and I still have it on my desk), my top incisors broke, making a V shape, four molars had a third to a half of them breaking away, as I said a bottom incisor flew away, because it was over the fracture line of my bottom jaw, and a premolar was painful but looked uninjured. Turned out that this premolar was cleaved in two vertically, parallel to the teeth line, so each time something touched it or moved, the two halves were grinding on the nerves… yeaaaaah. So my dentist had to extract that premolar too, there was nothing to save that tooth.
So, two completely gone teeth, six broken teeth, and a broken jaw.
My incisors and molars got fillings to begin with; then after all other dental work was done I got more permanent teeth crowns for my incisors; the premolar got an implant and my dentist made a case that I needed the best type available, as I was 28 and needed things that I wouldn’t need to replace as often; and my bottom incisor had to have a dental bridge, the jaw had badly set and the hole where my incisor was was too small for a full-sized tooth, and the bone under it was still fucked so an implant was out of the question.
All in all, it would have costed 17k CAD.
Luckily, it was a road accident and the paramedics took the testimony of two witnesses who helped me and my bicycle out of the road (so the case was solid), and I live in Québec so the SAAQ (Société d’Assurance Automobile du Québec, the public road-related accident health insurance agency, they’re also responsible for driving licenses) paid for most of the dental work required (teeth are luxury bones that aren’t covered by the public healthcare…).
Final bill: 1347$.
For a long time, I felt my incisors crowns (and bridge) and premolar implant as big intrusions in my mouth, and thought I would always feel uncomfortable in my mouth.
Now, I have to tap on my premolars with my fingernail to remember which one broke (the implant makes a different noise), as they feel like my real ones, and everything but the bridge feels normal. My jaw still feel stiff sometimes, but it’s been like that for years so I don’t remember what it felt like before.
Sydney could have taught you, Peggy – ALWAYS check your surroundings before doing a victory dance!
In 2019, I was on my bike, riding to work, and going down a down-sloped street at a reasonable speed (about 30km/h, the speed limit of that street).
The minivan in front of me either decided to brake-check me, or stopped in the middle of the green light for no apparent reason. Anyways, I braked, but way too suddenly, my front wheel locked and I flew over my handlebar, and I cushioned my fall on the asphalt with my jaw. The minivan went away and no one around had time to look at the plate number.
I saw a tooth fly out of my mouth (I took it from the floor and I still have it on my desk), my top incisors broke, making a V shape, four molars had a third to a half of them breaking away, as I said a bottom incisor flew away, because it was over the fracture line of my bottom jaw, and a premolar was painful but looked uninjured. Turned out that this premolar was cleaved in two vertically, parallel to the teeth line, so each time something touched it or moved, the two halves were grinding on the nerves… yeaaaaah. So my dentist had to extract that premolar too, there was nothing to save that tooth.
So, two completely gone teeth, six broken teeth, and a broken jaw.
My incisors and molars got fillings to begin with; then after all other dental work was done I got more permanent teeth crowns for my incisors; the premolar got an implant and my dentist made a case that I needed the best type available, as I was 28 and needed things that I wouldn’t need to replace as often; and my bottom incisor had to have a dental bridge, the jaw had badly set and the hole where my incisor was was too small for a full-sized tooth, and the bone under it was still badly healed (still is), so an implant was out of the question.
All in all, it would have costed 17k CAD.
Luckily, it was a road accident and the paramedics took the testimony of two witnesses who helped me and my bicycle out of the road (so the case was solid), and I live in Québec so the SAAQ (Société d’Assurance Automobile du Québec, the public road-related accident health insurance agency, they’re also responsible for driving licenses) paid for most of the dental work required (teeth are luxury bones that aren’t covered by the public healthcare…).
Final bill: 1347$.
For a long time, I felt my incisors crowns (and bridge) and premolar implant as big intrusions in my mouth, and thought I would always feel uncomfortable in my mouth.
Now, I have to tap on my premolars with my fingernail to remember which one broke (the implant makes a different noise), as they feel like my real ones, and everything but the bridge feels normal. My jaw still feel stiff sometimes, but it’s been like that for years so I don’t remember what it felt like before.
Last October. I was helping my dad with some forestry work and lost my bill hook. I borrowed my dad’s bill hook which is a lot sharper than mine, swung it right through a thick branch I didn’t think I could cut with one strike and split all of the flesh on my right knee in two, the blade bouncing off of the bone. I looked down, saw my knee with a hole big enough for a 1 euro coin to be put through right on top of the bone without touching anything else, and walked out of the forest. A trip to ER, internal and external stitches, x-ray scans to make sure no pieces of bone got dislodged, then back home to walk it off.
That’s the worst physical injury I’ve ever suffered, sadly, my near death experiences having left me rather unscathed.
NON-Wiggins POST:
I think sometimes you forget DaveB that as AuDHDies, we’re a bit more Neuro-plastic than Normies. I’d wager than your experience with ‘forgetting’ is at least 1 Standard Deviation, if not 2, from the Norm.
That said, yeah, “you’d be surprised what people can forget” is a horror Trope for a reason.
WIGGINS POST:
In 6th grade, I was doing chores for the daycare/babysitter/friend’s-parents and accidentally dropped one of those round 1 Gallon goldfish bowls as I stepped down into a sunken livingroom. The damn thing caught the edge of the single step, and shattered, and one of the pieces flew back up into my hand, which was, of course, attempting to catch damn thing. The shard went into my left middle finger, leaving a jagged 3 inch cut, completely severing the first tendon, and partially severing the second tendon.
Lots of blood, a fair bit of pain, probably some screaming. Like you said, after, ye gods, 33 years? it’s less a movie reel of action and more a set of viginettes.
The bowl slipping. That frozen oh f*ck moment when I knew this was going to be bad.
*time skip*
Shawna looking at.
*time skip*
My pediatrician looking at it. I have no clue how we got into Randy that quickly, but we did.
*time skip*
The ER doctor telling me and my parents about the cut.
*time skip*
Laying down on the operating table, listening to the anesthesiologist telling me to count down from 100.
Hearing the anesthesiologist say “OK, he’s under now”.
Laying on an altar of stone on a pentagonal pedestal on a pentagonal room with towering walls of glass, covered by vines and creepers, looking down on myself as my consciousness spirals up into the sky.
Waking up in a panic because I was not, in fact, under now. Realizing the cheetah is on the TV and it’s a nature show.
—
That is literally a single stream of conscious thought. In my mind, both then and now, those 3 distinct realities were literal seconds of ticking time. And they’re forever burned into my mind for obvious reasons.
—
*very long time skip*
Being told I have to shower at summer camp.
*time skip*
Being teased/scolded by my father because 7 days in the Red Clay dust at Camp 49er has left me looking like a different race. This is the early 90s, and to put it nicely my family had Generals in the Confederate Army, so these are probably not the sorts of things you can say anymore.
*time skip*
Being hosed down in the front yard like one of those prison intake scenes
*time skip*
Staring at my atrophied arm after the cast is removed, thinking “this must be what Jews in the Camp looked like”
—
So yeah, to this day I still can’t really bend that finger properly, and I can’t bowl more than 2 games in a row without the scar starting to throb painfully. But on the upside I no longer confuse my left and my right because I can flick my thumb over my middle finger to feel for the scar, and know that’s the left. An act I’ve actually done twice while typing this out to remember which side the wound was on…
Um…. how is that first panel not a vote incentive?
How is the 7th panel not? WE GOT BUSH!
Are we certain that’s not just a continuation of an elaborate tattoo?
As for injuries… I’ve been told I got my left arm broken when I was 2 years old, but obviously, I have no memories of that. I don’t even know if it was the upper or lower arm.
While not an “injury” I had a hernia surgery around 1970 to supposedly correct an undescended testicle, so I have an impressive scare in the lower right abdominal/groin region. (I’ve occasionally wondered if they preemptively removed my appendix at the same time.)
And while I suffered no real injury beyond some peeled kin upon the middle segment of my right middle finger, had my center of gravity been just a tad higher, I would have likely sailed through the windshield of my father’s Delta 88 Olds around 1973 rather than being thrown into the floorwell when we “T-boned” another car racing along at, I don’t know, maybe 45 to 50 mph upon a rain slicked highway. We both religiously started to wear our seat-belts after that!
A collection of bruises (though no broken bones or ruptured organs) in 1990 when I hit an edge pavement pothole coming around a curve at maybe 40 mph, resulting in a head-on with another car. Yes, I had my belt on, but this was still before airbags.
Possibly a broken toe when I blinded myself with a bathroom light and recoiling from the sudden brightness I spun an slammed my :ring: toe of my right foot into the door frame. I say maybe because I didn’t have it examined, but the tissue turned disturbingly blue/purple for several days.
And finally, a sudden abscess that resulted in an emergency root canal. I was scheduled for an appointment already that morning, but the tissues inflamed the previous night, When I entered the dentist office, he was like, “So, how are we do…OHMYGAWDWHATHAPPENEDTOYOU??!!!” He jumped on the phone to reach the proper oral surgeon who was an hour’s drive away across the state line. And I had to make the trip myself, nobody to drive me. Then came the “boring out” of the root… Even with the numbing juice, that was probably the most intense pain I can readily recall! Brr…!
I have addressed this comment section before about the time I was hit with a truck by an irate drunk driver who could not stand the concept of sharing a road with a bicycle riding with traffic on the opposite side of a divided stroad with a 45 MPH speed limit and hitting me from behind at 60 MPH. I won’t bore you again with the catalog of injuries, just suffice it to say there wasn’t much holding my lower leg on.
Opus, the Author mentioned you BY NAME in the commentary. Today is the PERFECT day to regale us all with a very detailed rundown of the incident and any anecdotes of the recovery.
Prose or poetry, either is fine.
Most gruesome injury I’ve had? Hit my head on the corner of a big trash bin and peeled two inches of my scalp from my skull. Bled massively, had to be stapled and stitches back on. Only result? Totally minor scar. And lasting memories of blood everywhere. Also the time I had to get a stitch THROUGH MY THUMBNAIL. That was worst pain ever.
Does quadruple cardiac bypass count? The healing up after having my sternum snipped open and the ribs shoved apart, then shoved back together and wired shut was, not fun. Took a while for the leg they pulled the vein out of to heal up, too, still have some numb spots on it. Fortunately getting the rerouted heart plumbing to take was okay, not so much pain just weakness and lack of energy until I worked it back over the past two years. Now I can walk several miles at a time, did a 9 mile day in Japan a couple months ago.
I don’t know if this counts as a grievous bodily injury story since it was entirely intentional, but it was pretty intense for me regardless.
Getting bottom surgery as a trans woman certainly was a adjustment period for me both physically and mentally. Took me a while to get used to having brand new anatomy, and it was exceedingly painful for the first year while it healed. The phantom limb syndrome is quite real and lasted for about a year before my brain adjusted, and several years before it finally stopped showing during in my dreams. 18 years later I can’t even remember what my old anatomy actually felt like. I don’t even remember how it looked either.
I’ve experienced first hand how much the brains plasticity can adapt as I also had the same situation happen with my voice, I don’t remember my old male voice or have any idea what it used to sound like anymore since I haven’t used it for decades. Now when I attempt to sound like a guy out of curiosity it just sounds like a woman imitating a man instead. Our minds are kind of amazing given how much they can completely readjust to any changes we go through in life.
If you do one calf at a time you don’t need to do things like hang 45s on the handles. It’s a lot easier on the shoulders and spine, too.
Hmm…I guess I only have three things that -might- qualify as “grievous bodily injury stories.”
When I was 5, I was playing with friends in their backyard. There was a squabble over something (probably inconsequential). My feelings got hurt, and I got up and ran away crying. After rounding the corner of the house, I turned to yell something over my shoulder (possibly a “you’re not my friends anymore!” type thing), and when I looked back forward, I slammed into a metal fence post. I don’t really remember much after that. My parents told me that the friend whose house that was freaked out, and her parents brought me back home. My mom said that was bleeding from my forehead, but I didn’t really react until my dad made a crack about being able to see my brain. I vaguely recall being in the emergency room and being asked if I wanted needle & thread stitches or butterfly stitches, and me, being a fairly typical little girl, chose the latter, because butterflies.
The next instance wasn’t until I was an adult. It was during the huge snow/ice storm the year that Dallas hosted the Superbowl (2011?). At that time, my office’s “bad weather” policy was that we had to call in and check our voicemail the day of to see if we were opening late or actually closing due to inclement weather, and they were very reluctant to declare office closures. They always told us to do what we thought was safest for ourselves, but that if the office opened and we chose not to drive to work for our safety, it would cost us a PTO day. When I checked in, the office was still opening late, and I knew that even though I didn’t live far away, it would take me AGES to drive my car in that mess (it’s Texas…even small amounts of white equates to scary driving, and this was big white), so I planned to leave about an hour and a half earlier than I needed to. I made it safely down the stairs of my apartment building, took two steps on the sidewalk, and slipped on the ice. I did a cartoon-style fall…literal feet up, head down…landed on my head on concrete. It hurt. It took me a bit to find my keys (they’d fallen into the snow off the sidewalk, and the snow had collapsed around them to hide the entry point), but I did the first thing I could think of as a grown woman living alone who had just fallen and hit her head. I called my mom. She convinced me to go back to my apartment and call my boss to say that I wasn’t coming in due to having fallen. Then she kept checking on me every 15-20 minutes, and when my speech started slowing down, she made me call for an ambulance because I might be concussed (I was). The annoying part of the story was that my office sent out the message that they were closing due to the icy road conditions about 15 minutes after I fell. The embarrassing part is that my boss told the head of the office what had happened (my mother called her on my phone from the emergency room to let her know that my fall had resulted in a concussion), and it got brought up at a company dinner later that year. The good news is that what happened to me caused them to rethink how they managed inclement weather planning and communications, so there wouldn’t be any chance of people making poor decisions in the name of “I can’t afford to use my PTO if the office doesn’t close.”
The most recent one has a little more “ick” factor and isn’t a standard injury scenario. I started getting cysts in one of my bartholin glands when I was in college. You can look that gland up if you want, but suffice it to say, when the cyst got too big, it made some things, including sitting, a little less comfortable. The first time it was treated with a surgical procedure called “marsupialization,” meaning they opened up my skin (kind of like a pouch) so the cyst could drain out the hole. While the cyst did come back a few years later, it didn’t get big again until I was in my early 30’s. I had a different doctor by then, and she suggested that I should have the gland removed if the cyst returned/reformed to this extent after being drained. My ex-husband said “if it’s not medically necessary, let’s not spend the money on this because we don’t really have the budget for a surgical procedure.” My doctor confirmed it wasn’t technically medically necessary yet, but did say she was concerned it would be a bigger problem if it did become medically necessary. I yielded to my ex-husband (which I didn’t want to do, but I hadn’t figured out how to stand up to him). Fast forward a few months to me sitting at my desk at work and feeling a sudden, sharp, incredibly intense pain…that didn’t fade or stop. I’d never experienced anything like it. It was searing to the point of affecting my vision, making it hard to walk and talk…I needed to go to the ER. I called my ex-husband to let him know what was happening and where he could meet me (the ER closest to my office). He convinced me that I should drive home first, so he could meet me there and drive me to an ER close to our house. I drove a standard (still do to this day), and as I said, walking was difficult, so I’m not sure how I managed the 20 mile drive home in traffic while my vision kept fading, but I did…and I waited for him to change clothes, and we went to a standalone ER. Turns out that my cyst had gotten infected, so the ER doctor had to lance it (second time I’ve been lanced) and put in a catheter to help it finish draining all the pus. I called my doctor to let her know what happened, and she said that we’d reached the point of medical necessity, but now that the cyst had drained, the gland would be too small to remove, so we’d have to wait for the cyst to reform again before we could schedule the surgery. My ex was suddenly very accommodating and helpful as I tried to manage the recovery process, but that incident was my wake-up call to all of the times he’d manipulated me into saying no to something that I should have said yes to…and all of the ways he’d made me make myself smaller. So I left him, which is unrelated, but feels good to say even a decade later. Anyhow, my body rejected the catheter, which led to more infection (when your doctor is surprised and yucked out to the point of forgetting to be professionally detached, you know it’s bad), so that had to be removed so things could heal up as best it could. Then a few days later, before that had finished healing, a new cyst formed and burst out the catheter hole while I was staying with a friend (more yuck, but without a doctor’s help). Finally, three months after that, I was able to get emergency surgery scheduled because another cyst formed, and we needed to remove the gland while it was stretched but before the cyst burst or got infected again. THEN, some months later, I followed up with my doctor because I was still experiencing intense pain in that region even though there wasn’t a gland and there weren’t any cysts anymore. Turns out my flesh had healed weird after the surgery and was receding into the site, so I had to have another surgery (called a partial vulvectomy) to fix things. I don’t experience pain at random anymore, but my nerves in that region…well…let’s just say they are now hardwired to experience almost all sensations as intense pain after all that trauma. Whee!
I haven’t been damaged nearly as badly as some people here. I’d say my worst injury was a green stick fracture of the tibia? fibula? The larger of the two bones in the lower leg when I got hit by a car at low speed while walking back to campus from a trip into the local college town.
My worst bodily harm was major abdominal surgery due to some (thankfully not cancerous) fibroid growths. Weirdly, when I woke up in the recovery room post-op, the thing that hurt most wasn’t the incision; it was my lower back from the complete lack of support I got from the stretcher I was lying on. I could NOT get the nurse to understand that.
Personal worst was actually two separate injuries over two days with the 2nd both compounding and in a way negating the 1st.
Incident one, next to last day of school, 4th grade, teachers held a cookout for mine and a few other classes. was playing tag and wound up smacking my left forearm on to the searing hot lid of the propane grill. 2nd degree burn taking up around 3/4 of that side of my forearm.
incident two, next day stayed home from school, was riding around the neighborhood on my bike, decide to race another kid, something happens, I lose control of the bike and go flying and hit the asphalt, landing on the burned arm…
when i woke up next to the curb, ALL of the burned skin was gone! replaced with road rash. helped up and worried over by some adults that saw me go down, I limped myself and the bike back home. mom took a look at the arm, did some quick calculation and decided that it’d be better for HER to pick the gravel out of my arm, with tweezers and hydrogen peroxide over the bathtub, than to haul me to the ER to have a doctor do it. which would probably let it swell and start to scab over before anyone got to me.
so yeah, Burn left arm then 24hrs later leave said burned skin on a freshly paved road as a grease streak.
Weird experiment from 1990s. They asked a person to wear glasses that made flipped their vision (top to bottom) until they could function as well as they could before. Took awhile before they were riding a bicycle again. And when they stopped wearing the glasses, it only took them a couple hours to get used to normal vision again.
We saw a short movie about that in elementary school in (IIRC) the late 1960’s.
Maybe they remade it in the 90’s? Kids in the 90’s would probably not be much interested in a B&W 1950’s-style informational flick.
I’m just too careful, usually, unless you put a bike under me. Worst injury was probably the partial decapitation, no that never happened, but I did go over the handlebars of my bike one time doing an emergency stop and broke my elbow (the bike was OK). First time to break a bone, and it hurt badly enough I fainted from it when I tried to “walk it off.” Woke up to a guy calling 911. Thing is the Xray didn’t show anything dramatic, though the doc knew it right away. Compression fracture. Arm in a brace for a few weeks. I still remember which arm, but that’s because I play violin, and that arm is still a little stiff almost ten years later in spite of several weeks of pt.
All the joy of all natural parts.
I have loose kneecaps that dislocate if I twist my leg much. First time was in 6th grade when I kicked a soccer ball that another kid was dribbling, but it happened several times after that. Once was on a hiking trip and I had to hike up a small mountain the next day. I did it, but it took two months to stop hurting when usually it would only take one. Straightening my leg pops the kneecap back in, but the dislocating stretches the ligament and a couple times tore off a piece of bone or cartilage that the ligament was attached to. Those would then float around in there, sometimes getting lodged behind the kneecap or in the joint, and I’d have to wiggle my kneecap around to dislodge it. In college I finally got surgery to remove the bits of bone and they tightened the ligaments while they were in there so the kneecap doesn’t fully dislocate anymore, just pops partway out and back in as long as I clench my quads fast enough if I feel it popping out, which I do reflexively now. I can’t play sports and have to be careful when doing any heavy lifting and turning at the same time. On the upside(?), it’s pretty much impossible for me to injure my ankles because my knee will give out first.
I once got caught in a rockfall while camping and had to gnaw off my own head in order to escape.
Art style critique:
Panel seven, some of the proportions of the drawing seems a bit off. I know the point is you’re not seeing EVERYthing, but it’s drawn is such a way that prompt a question of “why AREN’T you seeing ‘everything’?” (Along with her left thigh looking a little off.)
I love that goofy little face in panel 6.
Ok… Just because this is such a long list, I’m going to go for the more “bullet point” format on most of it. This is not necessarily in chronological order. (Nor is it a complete list. Let’s just say that I’ve lead a rather interesting life.)
– I’ve broken four different toes in four different incidents in the last 30 years. (The latest one I walked on for a few days before happening to see my bare foot and noticing that one of the toes had turned purple around the middle.)
– Almost broke my nose with a shopping cart.
– Accidentally shot myself in the arm with a bow and arrow in my early 20s.
– Fell out of a tree house as a kid and landed 20 feet down to the ground, in a thorn bush, on a rock covered slope, on my back… I was out cold for at least a minute.
– Came close to shattering my kneecap (fortunately there didn’t end up being even a fracture, which amazed the doctors from the description of the incident) in a workplace accident when I was 18 and working in a restaurant kitchen. Ended up needing over a year to fully recover because while nothing was torn or broken, the cartilage basically turned to very firm Jello.
– We had an electric fence when we had goats. Brushing one with your hand is like a bad sting. Accidentally brushing it with your ribcage just below the armpit will have you flat out on the ground six feet away wondering how the hell you got there and why the sky is so sparkly.
– Outpatient surgery on three different ingrown toenails. Since then I actually have done home surgery on over a dozen more. (My nurse practitioner looked at the last one I did and was impressed, stating “You do very good work.”)
– Performed emergency field surgery on my own foot when it turned out I’d been walking for the prior three days with a couple of pieces of 12g wire about 1/4″ long in the ball of my foot.
– Was in an auto accident where we were broad-sided right behind my seat. Was fine for a week and then sat down on my bed… suddenly finding myself on the floor in pain from my lower back. The clinic did x-rays and both found out that I have an extra bone in my lower back, but part of it has a spur that got damaged in the accident.
– Was in another accident where I ended up with a herniated disk in my neck. Was ok for a few years and then saw a chiropractor for my back. He said that he could easily alleviate the herniated disk. A month later I’m going into emergency surgery to have three disks removed from my neck so that the pressure on the nerves wouldn’t cause me to permanently lose the use of my left arm (I’m left-handed). The pain after the surgery was massive because of how much of my trachea they had to move to the side. I now have a titanium plate and eight screws reinforcing the 2/3 of my neck that’s fused into one piece now.
– I’ve passed over a dozen kidney stones (that I know of) in the past 30 years. Three of them put me in the hospital. The very first one I actually passed at work when I was a bank teller. For the last three, I’ve actually worked in my current job while actively having them move from the kidney to the bladder.
– I get liquid nitrogen skin treatment (moles, skin tags, warts, any new blemishes) a couple of times a year. This is a third degree frostbite chemical burn at multiple points on your body. I barely flinch anymore.
– I am highly resistant to local anesthetics, to the point where a recent cystectomy on my back required my nurse practitioner to inject 3-4 times the normal amount to get the painkilling effect. (I could still feel everything he was doing, it just didn’t hurt.) About two years ago I had to get a cardiac catheterization to check my heart. They injected the normal amount of lidocaine, but that doesn’t work on me. I was too high on the versed and fentanyl they give you in the IV to mention it. I started screaming bloody murder and swearing so bad that Sergeant Hartman (from Full Metal Jacket) would have told me to tone it down because I could feel the doctor cutting her way down wo the radial artery in my right arm.
Ok… The two most memorable ones I’ve had so far… and they both involve the same area of anatomy:
The first one was when I was training as a heavy fighter in the SCA. I was taking part in an exhibition series of fights at one of the local universities in my early 20s. Everything was going well, and I’d been through a few matches, I lost most of them because I was learning and the others were mostly experienced fighters. The swords are basically 1.5″ pieces of rattan. I was fighting using a heater shield, and was moving to block a “slot shot” (a strike right down the vertical mid-line of your body). I had brought my shield in and started to lean back, but my shield drifted just enough… I don’t remember the next minute or so after that. I suddenly took in a deep breath of air and opened my eyes while hearing one of the other fighters screaming at me to breathe. He checked me over because he was a paramedic, and told me he had been about ten seconds from cutting me out of my armor and starting CPR. It turns out that the tip of my opponent’s sword hit my cup at full speed, pretty much literally hitting the “reboot” button on my brain and sending me into shock. I had dropped like a marionette with its strings cut and had even completely stopped breathing because of the sudden blast of pain. (If I hadn’t been wearing the protective cup, the hit could have literally killed me… and not just from shock.) I walked funny, when I even could walk, for a couple of days after that.
Many years later, I almost ended up with a penile fracture during “an intimate encounter” with the Wife. It fortunately only ended up being a severe sprain, but “Mr. Not-So-Happy-At-The-Time” pretty much folded in half. When it happened I grabbed protectively at myself and was writhing in such agony I fell off the bed (on my back, fortunately… sort of). For the next two weeks while it was healing, any time there was “increased blood flow down below”, it was agonizingly painful. I didn’t need an alarm to wake up during that time because my “morning glory” would wake me up with me practically screaming in pain. (If you’ve never sprained that part of your body… when it “goes to full mast” it feels like someone has laid it out on a table and then let Eddie “the Beast” Hall slam a 2″x4″ onto it as hard as he can.)
I was ten or so, riding my bike like a maniac. hit a pothole and started to lose control and tumpt over. to prevent myself from a face plant in to a ditch, I leaned i stuck my hand out as i was tumping over which came right down on a broken glass bottle, lots of blood but not a lot of pain after removing the glass. since were all pretty self reliant in the mid 70s I wrapped my hand in a death grip around the handle and rode the few miles back home. 4 stitches and a tetanus shot but no ligament damage. can still see the scar though.
First, I was mowing with a push mower on a hillside that did not LOOK wet. I slipped and ended up doing a one-legger down the hill, throwing the push mower away with all the strength I had, and crashed to a stop in a split-rail fence. I had turned my left foot almost completely backwards, shearing off both the downward bones in the twist. I had no cellphone on me, and no one else was home. I reset my broken ankle against the fencepost, and walked the 50 or so yards back around the house to the unlocked door. Along the way I dazedly retrieved the mower and put it out of the rain, which my wife still scolds me for. Called a family member, rode to the ER. Surgery and overnight stay, two pins, seven screws, and a steel plate later, brand new ankle will forever be bigger than the undamaged one. Doctors, etc, all amazed that I reset it by wrenching it back into position against the fence post and WALKED back to the house phone. At the time, I had no choice, so I just did what I thought I had to. (I was 6’8″, 400 lbs, descended from Scottish/Viking ancestry. The surgeon had never worked on an ankle joint so large before, he told my family in the waiting room that it was like operating on a horse.)
I woke up and reached out for my glasses every single morning for an entire year after my Lasik surgery took me from 20/800 to 20/20 vision after 20+ years of nearsightedness.
Also, the injections to numb my toe for the surgery to correct my ingrown toenail hurt more than anything I’d ever felt up to that point, actually quite similar to the gout I’ve had once or twice, like liquid fire burning inside your toe.
Since then I’ve passed multiple kidney stones, which has entirely recalibrated my pain threshold to new and exciting levels of “why am I still conscious? I’d have thought this much pain would knock a person out… I’d very much *prefer* to be unconscious right now.”
All good fun.
Things that should have killed me, you say?
I have been stabbed, mauled, shot at, hit by a truck, fell 3 stories, & struck by freaking lightning. The only thing that did lasting damage was a heat stroke that was unrelated to the boiling.
sounds like you should play the lottery
I remember when you said you couldn’t draw butts. You’ve improved considerably.
As for old habits, I chew mostly on one side of my mouth and avoid certain types of candy, due to a busted wisdom tooth that was not fixed for a few years. As for almost died/bad pain, my appendix almost killed me. From what the doctors said, there was a minor rupture that nobody caught, I was just very sick for a week or so. Then however long later, it goes full south, gangrene and peritonitis. Worst pain ever, they said I was like 12 hours away from dead and left a huge scar compared to other appendix scars I’ve seen.
Before my heart surgery my ruptured appendix was the worst, I waited till it had popped before going to the ER.
God damn. I’m not usually one for tattoos, especially on women because I’m of the opinion they’re beautiful enough without them. But… god damn does Peni’s canvas look good.
I’m generally the same for make-up but the skill to just “shapeshift” as some women do is impressives so I’m less hardline on that.
had a couple moments.
Playing a game of freeze, coming down the side of the house, saw my brother in the window of the neighbor’s house opposite me about to come around the corner. I jumped around the corner to surprise him… just as he jumped forward. He smashed his head just below my nose, split open my lip inside, and knocked me out cold. i didn’t remember anything until I was stumbling home to be taken to the ER for stitches.
Several years before that, we were up camping, and I made the mistake of commenting how the sticks my dad was chopping up for kindling weren’t very thin. well, that naturally meant it was my turn to do that, and being a kid handed a hatchet with a thin piece of wound, I naturally brought the blade down on the back of my own hand.
It was twenty miles to the nearest hospital, my sister sat next to me holding the cut closed, and you could see the tendons clearly through the cut. I was lucky not to have lost all power in my fingers.
Traumatic but not strictly painful was the allergy testing. Ever been through that? They lay you on a mat, prick your back with about forty different allergens, and then read the map of your reactions to find out what you are allergic to.
It also itches with terrifying sharpness.
To complement that, they wheel out a dozen syringes on each side of you, and then rat, tat, tat, start plunging them into your arms. Yeah, I got two dozen needles stuck into me while I was staring in shock and horror, and haven’t forgotten it, because I’ve never been afraid of needles since.
Is it weird that in your story which sounds genuinely gruesome and traumatic, the part I am going to ask about is ‘What is freeze?’
And yes I’ve had allergy testing too – RECENTLY (my hand puffed up and it huuuuuurt). It sucked a lot.