FOCUS Gruesome injuries, either that happened to you or that you saw I was at a bar the other night, and there was a guy that was very drunk. He went to get off his bar stool, but stumbled and ended up falling. He basically tackled the bar stool, hitting his cheek on the corner of the bar in the process, before falling face first onto the concrete floor. He had a gash where his face his the bar, and a badly broken nose from hitting the floor. He was also knocked out for a few seconds. Lots of blood. Another time, I was umpiring adult slow pitch softball. An infielder went out to catch a pop fly, stepped in a hole or something, and broke his ankle badly. His foot was basically at a right angle to his leg. All of his teammates were gathered around him, and he seemed to be doing ok. That is until I got out there, as he said he was doing fine until he saw the look on my face when I saw his ankle.
Being a cautious fellow, I have thankfully avoided major injuries to my person thus far. An invisible compression fracture to my wrist in grade school healed quite nicely and with little fanfare. However, the human body can withstand much more. Pictures appreciated, of course. Anyone with experience with botflies, doubly appreciated.
When I was about 12 years old I fell off the monkey bars in my backyard and faceplanted the ladder leading up to them. I'd say it was about an 8ft free fall and ended up splitting my lip wide open. I bled everywhere for about 20 minutes, but by the time I got to the hospital, it clotted up and I could stick my tongue through the hole. I ended up getting about 18 stitches inside and out, and today I have about an inch scar on my bottom lip. That was really the only gruesome injury I've ever had. I hope it goes without saying, but if you have pics, please 'spoiler' tag them so we don't have to see the bloody horror/snapped bones that you may have seen.
Back when I was younger, I was a big wrestling fan. My buddies and I would even fake wrestle in the back yard on a trampoline. Then I saw this: Spoiler Yeah, fuck. As for real life, the worst injury I've ever had was when I was a kid, and I got a long cut on my hand, right below my index finger. It was really deep, and I could see down to the bone. My mom remained calm (I have two older brothers, she'd been used to injuries by now) and took me to the doctor to get stitched up. I was small, so it was only two stitches, but I still have a scar some 20 years later.
In the early 90's I was tackled in a bizarre way during a rugby match and dislocated my knee by about 6", severing a major nerve and ripping 3 of the 4 major knee ligaments in half. Lost my aircrew medical. Took me 3 surgeries and 2 years of rehab before I could walk semi-normally again. All the neurosurgeons said I was fucked, and the nerves wouldn't regenerate, and my right leg would be dead from the knee down. Luckily they were wrong, and three years later I could wiggle my big toe. That was huge, and I've regained probably 95% of my muscle use and functionality since then. There's still some minor muscle atrophy, and every now and then my leg will "short out" for about 1/4 a second and I'll lose muscle control. That's a ton of fun when on a ladder, let me tell you. Still, I never really notice it, and nobody that knows me would ever think anything was wrong, until they see the scar on my leg. Hell, sometimes I wake up in the morning thinking my knee is sore, only to realize it's my "good" knee that's sore.
I have been in situations where I should have come out with serious injuries, but came out fine. Most of these incidents occurred while skiing. I once skied right off a ledge into a parking lot with a 10ft drop onto concrete. I came out fine. My most absurd accident was when I went off a ski jump, not a big one mind you, 7 ft ramp max. I had some nice speed going in, and as I hit the top, my bindings were too loose, and caused my boots to detach from them. In mid air. I lost my skis as I went into the air. My friend's dad who was watching me described it at dinner that night: "You were going up the jump, it all looked great, and then you were airborne, and things went wrong quick. Your skis detached from your feet like the SRBs on the Space Shuttle. One went left one went right. And you just kept going forward. But then you faceplanted." Luckily I dropped my ski poles before I hit, or I would have broken my arms.
Story One Grade Seven, Ms. McCaulley's class. We were in gym, and since it was nice outside we took a baseball game outdoors. Rather than playing on the school field, we played in the soccer/baseball fields well behind the school playground; we were very far away from the actual building. My team was at bat, and one of the kids hit the ball and took off running, throwing the bat in the process. The teacher saw this and stopped the game and told everyone to get out from behind home plate (there was no cage, we were all sitting back and behind the hitter). We all moved except for one kid (there's always one, isn't there?), Michael B. Ryan C - a gifted athlete, even as a kid - was at bat and I was talking to a friend. I turned my head just as I heard Ryan make contact with the ball, only to get this crystal clear image: The bat pinwheeled around like a maple leaf key falling from a tree. It circled perfectly, and with complete accuracy the sweet spot on the bat smacked Michael right square in the mouth. It was one of those hits that brings even twelve year old kids to complete silence. Everything froze, and then Michael started to scream. Blood pouring everywhere as chaos broke out. Ms. M. sent two kids ahead for the long trek back to the school to let them know there had been a health problem and, as Murphy's law would have it, they got to the principal's office just as the principal himself was droning on with morning announcements. Shawn (another classmate) burst into the office and screamed, "Emergency! Emergency!" and of course it broadcast throughout all the rooms. The principal stammered something like, "Uhh...that will be all for now." Michael had to go to the hospital and lost some of his front teeth. Thankfully his jaw wasn't broken, but there was enough blood and upset to put me off playing baseball pretty much forever. Story Two Same school, but Grade Three this time. I was in a split class (Grade 3/4), and for French the Grade Fours would go next door to a different building. For some reason - probably an oversight that I imagine a teacher later caught hell for - the ten or so Grade Threes were left alone because our French teacher was running late. Evan R. started chasing Jamie M. around the room, Jamie slipped, fell and made a big show about rolling around on the floor and moaning. None of us took him seriously - he was a bit of a pussy - until he moved his hands and it was revealed that he'd hit his head on a desk on the way down. We knew this had happened because all of the flesh on his forehead was peeled back to reveal the grayish colour of his skull beneath. Evan and I took off out the door (we were in a portable) and ran over to the main building. Evan was ahead of me and as he ran through the doors he literally crashed right into the biggest battleax teacher of them all, Mrs. Lappointe. If anything impresses on a nine-year-old the seriousness of a situation, it is a 200lb teacher in strappy high heels running across the asphalt to get to a kid. Good times in small-town Ontario grade school.
Not nearly so gruesome as the others, but nasty in its own right: I managed to damage a nerve in my shoulder a few years ago. It's mostly healed, but every so often I'll move in a way that the joint doesn't like. The result is sharp pain and what's almost a seizure. My arm will literally lock in an unnatural position, for example like I'm trying to act like a chicken, and jerk around uncontrollably. The best is when this has happened at work, and people just stop whatever they're doing to watch my arm seize uncontrollably. They pale a little more when I just tell them it'll stop when it's done.
While in football class (technically it was for college PE credit, but it was just an awesome class anyway. I took it like 4 times), I sustained a mouth injury. It happened as most football injuries do; with a collision. I went up high for an interception, the receiver went up high for a reception, and since I've got hops, the top of his head went directly into my mouth. I spat out a bit of blood, and was ready to get back on the field, when the coach informed me that since I was still bleeding, I would have to go to student health. Apparently they have a rule about attending official classes with dripping orifices. So the receiver and I went to Student Health where we filled out a bunch of paperwork and waited to be seen. Since it was first come, first serve, I was behind a motley crew of snifflers, snufflers and vaginal mufflers. Finally, I was seen by a nurse, who remarked that I must have bitten both sides of my lip. After cleaning my top lip a bit, she realized she was wrong; my top lip had gotten caught between my teeth and the receiver's head and gone ENTIRELY through. I suppose it's a good thing that I didn't keep playing with a hole in my lip. I had to get stitches in both sides of the lip, and it got so swollen that not only could I not drink, it WOBBLED while I walked. My lips were pretty full anyway, but this was downright ridiculous. I got a prescription for vicodin, which I never bothered to get filled because I'm not really into painkillers.
This reminded me of a couple more of injuries I saw. One of the guys I played baseball with was really good. His dad played in the minors, and pushed his kid hard. This was the kind of kid no one wanted to play catch with, because he threw so hard it'd hurt your hand. He was both a pitcher and a catcher. As a catcher, he threw everyone out and was a fantastic hitter. As a pitcher, he threw ungodly hard, but didn't have any kind of a curve (his dad pushed him to be a pitcher anyway). He had all his own equipment, and even a batting cage in his garage: bottom line, he was "that guy" on the baseball team that was so into the game that it wouldn't surprise me to see him coaching and playing later in life. Well, he was about 20 or so and was playing on a hard pitch team. He was on first base and took off to steal second. He made one of the most cardinal mistakes a baseball player can make when stealing second: He slid in right foot first, facing the plate. The catcher threw a one-hopper directly into this kid's face. Lots of blood, knocked out a couple of teeth, bruised like mad. Moral of the story, kids? If stealing a base in baseball, always, ALWAYS slide with your face away from the catcher. The other awful one I saw was in high school. We were outside playing soccer. "Mike" was a soccer player, and as such, tended to hog the ball when we played in class. "Eric" wasn't a soccer player and didn't play any sports, but was built like a brick shithouse. He was about 5'6" of pure muscle, but never really cared about sports (he was also one of the most shockingly nice guys in the class). I'm running along the side, and I look over just Mike was running with the ball. He let it get kind of in front of him, and Eric, on the other team, went to boot it as hard as he could. Eric absolutely crushed the ball, directly into Mike's crotch, from no more than 3 feet away. Now, this was a gym class, which meant no jock straps and no cups (hell, we didn't even have shin guards). Just those sad little gym shorts and shirts. Mike fell down like a sack of bricks, and was just down. Not talking, not even moaning, just clutching his balls and in the fetal position. The teacher wasn't sure how to react, and we thought Mike actually passed out from the pain, so he just sent the entire class in as the period was coming to an end. We didn't worry much, as the teacher was also the athletic trainer, so if anyone knew how to deal with an injury, that guy did. No one saw Mike the rest of the day, and it wasn't necessarily bloody, but it was one of those injuries where every single guy in the class cringed and even felt a ting of sympathy pain.
My mother describes this incident as one of the most painful things that she has ever gone through as a mother. I am 1 of 6, so that's saying something. When I was two, I somehow managed to pull on the cord of a clothes iron that was cooling above me. It landed on my hand, burning my hand very, very severely. I was so young that I don't remember the incident; however, I do remember the repeated applications of Silvadene Cream, and the plastic bags over my hand when it came time for baths. Here is my hand now. The scar has lightened up considerably as I've grown older. In grade school it was easy to see. Now that I am 22, it is just a faint rippling of the skin that people don't notice unless the topic comes up and I point it out. I may have suffered a deep 2nd degree burn on my hand as a toddler, but my father endured much worse at the time of my birth. Through a combination of ladder, chainsaw, and oak tree, he managed to fall off the ladder with his feet caught in the rungs and the limb on top of him. Result? Both of his ankles were completely fractured with the bones sticking out. With every heartbeat, blood squirted out. After surgeries and skin grafts, his ankles were repaired. My father's dogged determination allowed him to aggressively complete home physical therapy several times a day in order to regain range of movement and general usage of his legs. Today, he has complete use of his legs and feet. He is still left with a plate in each leg though, complete with bolts that you can feel through the skin. I also find it amusing that the skin they grafted from the inside of his thigh looks like dead chicken skin on his ankle because of the hair follicle pattern and bumpiness on his ankles. (Funny story as an aside: Since his accident took place only about a month before my birth, my mom had to drive herself to the hospital, while in labor, while my dad had his legs propped up above his heartline on the dash of the car. When she rolled up next to the drop off point of the hospital, there was some confusion by the orderly about who needed to be seated in the wheelchair. In the end, they took my dad while my mom parked about a quarter mile away and walked back up to the hospital to give birth)
There was a patient a few years ago that lost 2 fingers when he tried to stop a a blade with his hand. The doctor managed to reattach them, but the picturs where gruesome.
I blew out my MCL, LCL, PCL and posterolateral corner playing basketball. It took 3 surgeries over four years to fix. But, I'm 38, white and can still dunk, so get some! As far as gruesome to watch, here ya go:
Pictures from my high tibial osteotomy, where they took a bone from my iliac crest and inserted it into a section of my tibia. Good shit. The metal plate is what held the bone graft in place. Spoiler
When I fell and broke my wrist in 8/09, my hand was at a reverse 90 degree angle from my arm and both the ulna and radius bones were tented against the skin--as close to a compound fracture as you can get. I went into shock from the pain, but I think i was more freaked out by the mere appearance of my arm/wrist/hand. The surgeon saw the x-rays before he actually saw me and was certain I was either thrown from a motorcycle or smashed it against a car windshield and said it was by far the worst broken wrist he had ever seen. When I was spending some time with my parents after my dad had surgery to have a tumor removed, my mom decided to go up in their partially-floored attic to get out Christmas decorations. She's frail, has OA in both knees, and brittle skin. She lost her footing and fell, and when she did, one leg hit the rough plywood of the floor area before falling through an unfloored area where the leg busted through insulation and the downstairs ceiling. She was also on bloodthinners. When I got her leg out of the hole she had a gash so deep I could actually see her bone. Blood and insulation were everywhere. Thank God I was there. My father just stood there in shock and couldn't move as I'm covering the wound and making a tourniquet (sp?) and telling him to call 911. She's had 3 surgeries to reconstruct arteries in the leg. All because of Christmas decorations.
Damn, guess I'll share another gruesome climbing story. Unlike in the Imminent Danger thread, this one didn't happen to me. I was climbing one time in Rumney, NH, and watched a guy take a 15ish-foot fall onto his gear. Meaning, his rope caught him on one of the pieces of protection he'd placed. He was well off the ground. This happens all the time, and good climbers pushing their limits can fall 10-15 times or more while working on a route. So I watched the fall, then looked away. Thought it was over. Until the screaming started. It didn't even register at first as coming from a human; if pure unbridled pain was a sound, that was what I was hearing. Then I noticed the blood, cascading down this guy's left arm in volumes I'd never before seen. Apparently prior to his fall, he'd placed a quickdraw (pic below) on a bolt and was reaching to clip the rope into the bottom carabiner. That's kind of speculation on my part -- the important thing is his forearm was slightly above the bottom carabiner, and he didn't have the rope clipped yet, because he fell onto a quickdraw placed lower. Most carabiners are very blunt, but some models are sharper than others, and some become sharp as they wear down. As I said, his fall took place while his forearm was extended above the bottom carabiner. As he passed it, the gate opened and the newly exposed "point" of the carabiner dug into his forearm. Deep. Like, an inch deep. It lacerated him from about the elbow down to, thankfully, not quite the artery in his wrist. I hope. Last I saw he was holding a completely bloodsoaked T-shirt to his arm as his buddies hustled him down to their distant car to drive to an even more distant hospital. Rumney's kind of in the middle of nowhere. Yikes. This accident was such a fluke it's unbelievable. As I said, most carabiners are blunt, and it had to be wedged against a rock or something to hold in place firmly enough to cut into flesh. I don't think this accident could be replicated even if a team of crack scientists tried. It was a perfect storm of fuck.
Two years ago I was bartending at a huge event the Phoenix Open (now the waste management open) it was a plated 1500 person meal with hundreds of people working as staff. Part of the entertainment was acrobats swinging on ropes and chains at the top of the tent, about 50 feet in the air with no nets underneath. About an hour into the event one of the performers was doing his thing on these two chains and winds himself up to the top of the chain and then unwinds himself like he is falling to the ground, he made a mistake when he started and did not properly hook up the stop and fell headfirst onto cement from about 40 feet and instantly broke his neck and crushed his skull, there was blood coming out of every hole in his head. The group instantly went quiet as they worked on the guy until they could get him out on a stretcher and he died on the way to the hospital 20 minutes later. Event cancelled.
In HS after gym class some guy ran up behind the German foreign exchange student and jumped on his back as a joke and the guy crumpled to the ground with a shattered leg. As he's sitting on the ground holding his leg in obvious shock, someone tries to pick him up to carry him to the nurses office and as he's lifting him up the lower half of his leg stays on the ground and looked a lot like the leg in that picture. Why there shouldn't be carts in the endzone. Spoiler
The funniest injury I have ever seen anyone sustain was in grade 4 or 5, I don't remember which. We had this mean bitch of a teacher who was easily 300 lbs. One day before classes started, we were all sitting around near the parking lot when her shitty car pulled in. She opens the door, puts her first hoof out, and as she's putting all of her weight on said hoof to get out of her car, she buckles. Now we're kind of confused. We just se her in a heap, mooing on the ground for no reason. Queue several teachers running over to her and an ambulance following shortly after. It took all of the paramedics and teachers on hand to lift her onto the stretcher. It turns out that her leg snapped under the weight. Think about that, she was so fucking heavy, putting her weight on one leg was enough to snap it in half. One of the most gruesome injuries I've seen was here in Halifax a while back. There was some poor lady who got smeared into a fine paste onto the road by a dump truck early one morning. I happened to be on the other side of the street, waiting to cross and sipping on a coffee. She was walking out of a Tim Hortons on an intersection, talking on her phone and started to cross the street when she wasn't supposed to. By this time the dump truck was already in the middle of the intersection and because it was so high, the driver couldn't see her underneath. As I'm watching this, I'm thinking "hmm, well thats not goo- oh... well fuck... I wonder if she's ok. Yeah she must be fine, she stopped screaming." But then everyone in the Tim Hortons is glued to the windows, screaming and crying. After a bit the police and paramedics get there, do their thing and the truck is moved. Then they start to wash away the remains of the lady with a hose. Gruesome is right. It was so bad, Tim Hortons was giving out free coffee and sandwiches for the rest of the day to the people who were in the store at the time.