Injuries I’ve known…

[fbhjr]

Perhaps it is the kid in our sword troupe hurting his finger at practice, but I’ve been thinking about various injuries I’ve had over the years.
The winter seems to be the time I am most likely to get them.

I don’t remember it happening as a kid. But, through high school I was on the swim team over the winter and that kept me busy. Maybe that helped me avoid injury, I don’t know.

My first year in engineering school I was working in the campus dish room loading dirty dishes into the washer.
One day a rack of silverware I had loaded slipped and slide back against the stop at the front of the machine. Rather than stop it, the stop broke off and it and the load of silverware dropped onto my foot.
Between the stop and the silverware it was about 10kg of stainless steel from a meter up. I didn’t have any kind of safety shoes, just sneakers. The edge of the stop landed on my big toe like a big blade.
They took me to the infirmary and said they were going to send me to the hospital for X-rays to see if my toe was broken.
“What if it is?” I asked.
“Nothing. We can’t do anything about it.”
“Why should I pay for the X-ray?”
“So you’ll know if you broke it or not.”
“But, the treatment is the same?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t go.

The next year was when I fell on my face while drunk, broke 4 teeth and needed stitches as I split my chin open. (I’ve mentioned how I don’t drink any more…)

The year after that was the worst. I had learned from previous years and now worked the dish room wearing steel toed boots.
I was cleaning up after dinner at the campus kitchen. We had been serving corn chowder for dinner that night and it had not been popular. So, there was quite a bit of it left.
I was carrying the big pot back to the dish room to dump it, when the cord from the pot fell and caught on something.
The pot tipped and the 5-6 liters of near boiling chowder poured into my boot. The boot trapped the liquid against my foot and made it very hard to untie it to get it off.
I still have scars on my foot from that chowder 35 years ago…
That’s the high point of what I’ve experienced in terms of pain. I hope to never exceed it.
It is the only time in any of these issues where I used crutches to get around as bending my foot caused such bad pain as my skin moved.

The good news was, for a while, I had no other winter injuries.

Around the turn of the millennium it happened again.
The first one was we had gone to a winter party at a home on top of a hill. It began to snow quite hard, so we left to go home. As we prepared to descend the hill in the snow, we saw someone else trying to drive up and getting stuck. I knew it would be very hard to get past them on the narrow road, with a curve, in the snow, so I got out to help them.
My foot hit a half frozen puddle and I fell sideways. As I fell, I tried to recover and not put my weight sideways on my ankle.
My wife says that viewing this from the car it looked like I suddenly jumped up in the air, spun around horizontally, landed on my face and slide face first down the hill at the oncoming car. They parked and walked up the hill.
It happened again two months later as I was telling someone to watch out for it happening and repeated my mistake.
When getting it X-rayed they said “Yeah, it’s broken. And, it looks like about 20 years ago you broke your big toe too…”
So, at least I knew.

Last year I fell down visiting a customer site for work and really, hurt my arms. The pain was the biggest since the soup 30 years before.
I had trouble sword fighting for more than 3 months due to that damage.

So, I feel bad for the kid and his finger at practice.
I hope I have not passed on a weird winter injury curse of some kind.
But, part of me doesn’t want to go through it any more myself either…