When I was around 8, a neighborhood kid was swinging around a light pole, just a plain metal pole but it had the wirenut box attached to the side about a foot from the ground, which he was standing on while spinning.
His foot slipped, the corner of this box ripped his ankle open, cut right up from the top of the shoe about 6 inches into his lower calf/ankle.
He screamed and ran home, blood pouring everywhere. Saw him a few days later with massive stitches and bruising all over his leg. Wasn’t as bad as it looked, but fuck me it still makes me wince thinking of my ankle being sliced by a dull metal corner by weight and gravity alone.
Well, honestly, probably one of two of my own. I’ve posted about both on lemmy before, but:
When I was seven, I broke the radius and ulna in my right arm. This resulted in what the doctor called, IIRC, a “swan neck break.” I don’t know if it’s a widespread phrase - looking it up online returns a deformity rather than an injury. However, essentially my arm extended normally until maybe a third of the way up my forearm, then curved in a shallow U, then continued normally. I don’t really understand how it supported itself in that shape (other than very painfully), but it did. It was back in the nineties and, as mentioned, I was seven; so there are no pictures and my memory of the event may be exaggerating how dramatic the curve was. This mostly no longer has an impact on my life, but if I run my finger down the side of my arm now, around thirty years later, I can still feel where it broke and pressing on the spot causes tingles further down my arm. Also, fun fact: the doctor who treated my arm called me a crybaby.
The other one was much more recent, three years ago. I slipped on some ice on my front porch and broke my ankle. Because I have a history of joint dislocations and the foot was pointed ninety degrees to the right, I thought it was just dislocated, not broken. I twisted it back to the correct orientation and tried to stand on it … Twice. I told the EMT’s that and I guess the story got around, because once I got to the ER, every single member of staff with whom I interacted asked me some form of “did you really do that?!” The doctor who treated me for this had a much better bedside manner than the one who did my arm, but apparently messed up the repair, according to my current orthopedic doctor, so I’m still enjoying the impact to this day.
Dude, I’ve broken my ankle just by stepping off a 1" ledge wrong. It sucks. I bet yours sucked a lot more.
That’s okay - there’s no need for it to be a competition! I’m sorry you broke your ankle. Did it heal okay? What was your recovery process like?
I remember, as I was waiting for the EMT’s, I thought to myself “this isn’t so bad - eventually it will be over.” It isn’t yet and sometimes that depresses me, but maybe someday it still will be.
As they were rolling me to the OR, I remember one of the nurses said approximately “I broke both of my ankles a few years ago. In six months you won’t even think about it.” Her bedside manner was good, but she was wrong, heh.
Thank you for the empathy!
edit: OR, not ER.