Childhood injuries (as a result of games/playing)

[Paulus]

I had various injuries from park playground equipment, Witches hats, climbing frames, rocking boats. most including cuts to my head, skin left behind on the tarmac surface, you know the sort of thing. I did once burn my back quite badly one summer day on the big slide in the park, the slide part being lengths of brass sheeting screwed to the wooden base of the slide. On a hot day, it must of been 1967 or thereabouts I came down the slide with no shirt on and laid down on the slide as I had done many times before but normally with a tee shoot on. Many large blisters and quite a lot of skin left behind. It took quite a while to heal up.

 

[ThePainInSpain]

Er, I was once idly staring at a woman's bottom from close range and thinking how perfect it was (as you do!), when I noticed something strange just under the skin. With the aid of a magnifying glass, tweezers and a pin, I performed emergency buttock surgery and extracted an inch long splinter.

I find this intriguing...........

1) Did you know this woman ?
2) Where was this, in public ?
3) Did she not mind you approaching her and saying "Excuse me, but whilst admiring what a wonderful bottom you have, I couldn't help but notice you have a splinter. Do you mind if I pull it out. ?
4) How could you see a splinter through her clothing ?
5) was this a new 'chat up' line you were trying ?
6) Was it a new form of 'Australian' foreplay ?

I somehow don't think I'd be able to get away with this..........................

 

[ChrisKH]

1976 Firework went off in my face buring away my eyelashes, hair and top layer of skin on my face. Fortunately my eyes were ok.

That's the last time I looked for a dropped firework with a match.

 

[Melvil]

Not as bad as most of the tales of woe above, but when I was seven it was the middle of summer, very hot, so I only had a pair of shorts on.

Whilst cycling no hands (stupidly showing-off) down our lane I skidded, flipped and fell into a ditch............full of stinging nettles.

Pretty much 90% of me had nettle stings so whilst no gouges or cuts, it was vividly and memorably painful.

 

[ColinJ]

I find this intriguing...........

1) Did you know this woman ?
2) Where was this, in public ?
3) Did she not mind you approaching her and saying "Excuse me, but whilst admiring what a wonderful bottom you have, I couldn't help but notice you have a splinter. Do you mind if I pull it out. ?
4) How could you see a splinter through her clothing ?
5) was this a new 'chat up' line you were trying ?
6) Was it a new form of 'Australian' foreplay ?

I somehow don't think I'd be able to get away with this..........................

1) Very well!
2) It was in an upstairs room in my house.
3) I'd already done the approaching bit several years before. It took a bit of probing about to discover that it was a splinter. She was rather reluctant to let the surgery take place!
4) There wasn't any clothing in the way.
5) No. The time for chatting up was long past.
6) You've baffled me with that one! Must Google it... Ah!

Er, no - the splinter was a bit of a distraction!

 

[ThePainInSpain]

Well Colin J, I'm glad that's all cleared up then.....................


Pity really, I was hoping for a different outcome...............or is that my somewhat adolescent imagination working overtime.........

 

[ThePainInSpain]

Lost my front tooth aged 10 after stamping in a puddle to splash someone. Trouble was it was ice and over I went and broke half the tooth off. These day's it would probably have been saved. But in 1959, it was the mask over the face and out it came (still a big gap there)

Big scar on my left leg from slipping on a home-made ladder at age about 11, rusty nail went in right to the bone. Doc wouldn't stitch it for fear of infection.

Scar around a quarter of my abdomen following a spleenectony at age 17 following bad accident on motor scooter (I was a mod..........and still am). Plus numerous scars from that one. Also 'died' 4 times and was brought back and remember an outer body experience.............spooky.

 

[PBancroft]

As a nipper I once (entirely on purpose) trod on a rake, just to see if they do what they do in cartoons when Tom is chasing Jerry.

I can categorically state that they do.

 

[meenaghman]

I think the worst was the scar on back of head caused by a fight over sand. This was on a building site and the other kid just happened to pick up a stick with a nail on it, and whacked me over the back of the head.. I kept opening the same cut over the years from falling off swings, riding bikes etc..

Did some really stupid stuff.. eg.. was seeing how high i could do wheelies and stay on the bike.. had some concrete blocks which I used to measure my progress.. of course you can guess what happens when the incline is so great that the centre of gravity no longer falls perpendicular through the base, I get front bike wheel up on top of blocks and in slow motion keel backwards onto head.

Fell off Raleigh chopper and hit back of head (again) and rolled significant portion of skin off my back into a lump on my lower back.. still there.
Since then most still involve doing stupid things like thinking .. yep this will work (often with the help of alcohol0 sort of like here

View: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOU34VaYGsk

 

[ColinJ]

As a nipper I once (entirely on purpose) trod on a rake, just to see if they do what they do in cartoons when Tom is chasing Jerry.

I can categorically state that they do.

Ho ho!

My ex stood at the top of the stairs as a child, closed her eyes, and swayed about to see if she could keep her balance. She couldn't! She fell down the stairs but somehow managed to escape with just bruises.

I met a Norwegian man who told me that he had cycled off a ski jump as a kid! It was in the summer so there was no snow or ice about. He had to do it because his so-called mates dared him to! He spent over a year in hospital...

 

[PBancroft]

My ex stood at the top of the stairs as a child, closed her eyes, and swayed about to see if she could keep her balance. She couldn't! She fell down the stairs but somehow managed to escape with just bruises.

I've fallen down stairs on numerous occasions, which always ended badly as a kid as the floor at the bottom of the stairs was tiled. Had my head X-Rayed about five times in total because of falls alone... I've got a bald patch on my head from where I fractured my skull (aged 7) when I fell off some PE equipment at school. Again, I hit solid floor on that one as the teacher hadn't put any safety mats down - apparently she considered them to be dangerous.

In retrospect all these head injuries explain a lot.

 

[ChrisKH]

Ho ho!

My ex stood at the top of the stairs as a child, closed her eyes, and swayed about to see if she could keep her balance. She couldn't! She fell down the stairs but somehow managed to escape with just bruises.

I met a Norwegian man who told me that he had cycled off a ski jump as a kid! It was in the summer so there was no snow or ice about. He had to do it because his so-called mates dared him to! He spent over a year in hospital...

He must have had some balls. I've looked down one of those in the Summer; very scary. It was in Oslo or in Scandanavia somewhere.

 

[ColinJ]

He must have had some balls. I've looked down one of those in the Summer; very scary. It was in Oslo or in Scandanavia somewhere.

I think it was more a case of lack of imagination!

His bike disintegrated on landing and he slammed through the wreckage onto the landing slope. I can't remember the full list of injuries but it was a big list - broken arms, legs, pelvis, ribs, collar bone, fractured skull, perforated this, torn that...

It's amazing that he had been patched back together so well. No apparent brain damage, and he was walking about okay when I spoke to him.


Okay, you guys asked for it. Here's a copy of a post of mine on BikeRadar on the subject of childhood injuries:

My worst crash came during The Duncroft Avenue Sprint Time Trial in 1969. Don't bother trying to look it up though folks - it was only me and a bunch of teenage mates messing about...

We were bored of hanging about the local streets so someone suggested that we have a bike race. The trouble was, we only had one bike between us - my short-ars* mate's 5-speed/1-speed racer. It was 5-speed in the sense that it had 5 sprockets and a derailleur to change between them. 1-speed in the sense that the gear cable had broken and was wrapped round a seat stay and held in place by a clothes peg. Improvised British Engineering at its finest!

Anyway, the race was on but since we only had one bike, it had to be a time trial. Duncroft Avenue is slightly uphill and there is line-of-sight for a couple of hundred yards. The start line was at a lamppost at one end of the road, the finish line in front of a lamppost at the other end where stood both the starter and timekeeper (a single spotty oik with a wristwatch).

Each competitor would line up at the start and wait for the starter to wave him off. The starter transmogrified into the timekeeper by the time each competitor got to the finish.

The first few rounds were close-fought and eventually it all came down to one last race. I think I should have been awarded the win there and then because the bike was far too small for me. I'm pretty much like Big Mig, Sean Yates, and Tom Boonen - in height, just minus the muscles and talent on a bike. But no, we had to have one final round didn't we... !

My mates put up PBs and I was last off. I hurtled from the start at the kind of speed that only an over-sized teenager on an under-sized bike can manage. Surely the win was on? Well it might have been, but a minor rut in the road surface had other ideas... I hit the rut while powering at full-speed out of the saddle and felt a shockwave judder through the frame of the bike. It was all too much for the temporary clothes-peg gear-repair...

My memory of events goes into Sam Peckinpah slow-mo mode here ! The clothes-peg fell off and there was a twanging noise as the severed gear cable came loose. The chain lost tension as the rear derailleur went walkabout. My body became weightless for a few moments as I launched forwards. In mid-trajectory I smacked my right knee into the handlebar stem but ignored the pain of that because I was rather more concerned with where my helmetless-head was going. In fact it was destined for a close-encounter-of-the-tarmac-kind but fortunately I seem to have a thick skull. Emergency braking was now required so I dug my left shoulder down hard onto the road surface and that eventually did the trick. I actually slid across the finish line but the damn timekeeper was distracted by my screams and forgot to look at his watch. Drat - I could have had 'em all !

I was helped to my feet my mates. They were all looking at my shoulder in a "So that's what they're made of!" way which I found distracting so I took a look myself. Once I came out of the faint, my mates were kind enough to help me to my feet again and then... a strange wailing sound erupted from my body. It was pretty scary, I can tell you!

Being a fickle teenager, I'd completely lost interest in the results of our race by then. I decided instead to play a new game called Let's reduce a big strong 13 year old man to a lanky little boy crying for his mummy - I was good at that!

So there I was with my shirt ripped off and covered in blood. It would be a major understatement to call my injuries road rash. I looked like a specimen from The World's Most Gruesome Autopsies - Ever! A big flap of flesh was lolling to one side of my shoulder and revealing some white bits with sort of gory red stuff on them. I've no idea what all that was but it seemed like a good idea to frighten my mother with it so I ran home and got her to take a look. She was so impressed that she wanted to show it off to people at the local hospital's A & E (or Casualty Department as they used to call them in those days) but I told her that it wasn't necessary. She tried to persuade me to go but I didn't want to so she cleaned the wound out with hot water and sterilised it by tipping a bottle of iodine into it - would the fun never stop!

My shoulder hurt for months after that so I wouldn't be surprised if I'd actually cracked a bone or two as well. I've got some nice scars to show for it.

 

[ventoux50]

As a nipper, proudly rifding my new Raleigh Chopper, showing off in front of the girls, I came hurtling down a hill intending to jump over a ramp we had placed on the pavement - got to about 15 feet away and a woman walked out of her gate straight into my path

I grabbed the front brake and promptly went arse over tit landing on top of her and skittling her to the floor . . . . . . she got up ina right fluster and then fainted when she saw the 6" gash in my right hand where the brake lever had gone through !

I loved that bike !



Playing footie in the park with my mates (aged about 9), suddenly desperatley needed a pee, so I ran to the back of the nearest bush, unzipped, had a squirt and then in a frantic rush zipped back up . . . . . unfortunately I'd not completely replaced the pant python and ended up trapping the tip of my foreskin in the teeth of the zip.



This was of course pre mobile phone days, and my mates took great pleasure in running to get my mam and telling her all about it, I'll never forget the evil nurse who laughed at me at the hospital !

 

[CharlieB]

This thread is making me wince big-time.

Kids, eh? Totally indestructible!

Came off my tricycle at age three, over the bars and chin-first into the corner of our neighbour's brick gate post. A lot of gore and a completely smashed jaw meant I was wired up for a year and still have a mis-shapen jaw-bone.
I'd been taken to the park by our neighbours with their little girl Alison on a regular basis until it happened and then my mum wouldn't let them near me again because of their neglect in not supervising my rapid descent down the hill.

The wierdest thing was I ended up working with Alison 25 years later, and only found out quite late in our working relationship that she was the little girl I used to play in the park with.