Inspired by this good tweet—
—the Deadspin idiots and our idiot friends share the stories of our dumbest injuries:
Giri Nathan: My parents were cleaning out the slats of our grill and had them laid out in the backyard. Walking around like the idiot 9-year old I was, at some point I stepped backwards—right onto a slat. The rusty metal cut clean through the “fat pad” on the sole of my right foot, and had it gone a few more millimeters, my toes would not be doing a whole lot of moving today.
Megan Greenwell: In 2013, I read this story in the New York Times food section and thought it was the dumbest trend story ever, so dumb that I ranted to several friends about how stupid you had to be to cause serious injury to yourself with an immersion blender. Not three months later, I nearly took my finger off in exactly this way. (I also had to throw out an entire batch of soup because there was too much blood in it.)
Barry Petchesky: I cut my tongue deeply when I licked the knife after making a PB&J. I bled for hours, sitting there with a dish towel in my mouth while my then-girlfriend googled to see if stitches are a thing you can get in your tongue.
Laura Wagner: Mine is breaking my toe by kicking a wall while angrily trying to kick a pile of my sister’s clothes out of the bathroom where she had left them once again in a heap on the floor instead of putting them in the hamper!!
Lauren Theisen: I own one pair of shoes, and they’re like the black canvas Vans kind that provide no support and are basically like a second pair of socks more than anything. And those are what I’m wearing when my friend visits New York one weekend, which we spend walking all around Manhattan doing all the big touristy stuff. So on Sunday we’re in Central Park and with no warning I suddenly feel a sharp pain in like the arch of my foot. But since two decades of masculine socialization apparently fucked me up beyond repair, I ignore it and just kind of awkwardly limp for the rest of the day. Turns out it was a stress fracture and I blogged from my bed the whole following week.
Drew Magary: You already know mine.
Dvora Meyers: I once gave myself a black eye in the dumbest way. I was in eighth grade (I think!) spending Shabbos at a friend’s house. There was a group of us and we had a lot of time to kill since there were a lot of hours to go until sundown when we could watch TV so we decided to play a game of hide and seek. I hid under a desk because I’m unimaginative and then I noticed dust bunnies and I was like, “I’ve got allergies. I must get out of here!” I used the desk chair to boost myself up. I didn’t know that the chair was kind of broken and the back of it swung forward and hit me in the face.
Albert Burneko: I was slicing a lime for taco purposes, when some juice squirted into my eye. Without thinking, because it stung, I reached up to wipe it away... with fingers that had been handling sliced habaneros just a few minutes before but hadn’t been washed yet. What I said to my wife, from across the house, was “Oh shit I think THAT WAS A MISTAKE.”
Billy Haisley: When I was a kid, my dad got me and my little brother one of those Red Ryder BB guns. We’d take it to our grandparents’ house out in the country and try to shoot birds and squirrels with it. We never were able to hit anything, which was infuriating and greatly limited the toy’s usage lifespan. One of the last times we took it out to our grandparents’ place, we ran out of bullets. My brother and one of my cousins started filling the thing with tiny pits from the berries that grew all around. It didn’t work well, but the gun would fire them, so that was good enough.
Back in suburbia sometime later, I was playing with the BB gun in our garage by myself. Just running around, pretending to shoot imaginary enemies. Somehow I got the idea that it would be cool to do shoot myself with it. I was pretty confident the gun wasn’t loaded, since we hadn’t used it or bought any BBs in a long time. To make sure, I cocked and fired the thing a few times to make sure nothing came out. I even put my hand in front of it and fired and it was fine.
Assured of the gun’s emptiness, I proceeded. I cocked the gun, turned it up, rested my chin on the barrel, said some cinematic line about how I was going to off myself, and fired. Either the blast of air that came from the gun as it sat flush against my chin, or, as I suspect was really the case, one of the berry pits my brother had put in there finally fell into the chamber when i upended the gun, because I felt a hell of a bite in my chin when I pulled the trigger. My neck had a bruise there for a few days and there was a small circular imprint of the air/berry that shot through a couple layers of skin there. The injury hurt, but not too badly. I was mainly confused about how the BB gun I’d been playing with for a good half-hour or so had magically loaded all of the sudden until I remembered the berry thing, and dismayed at how incredibly dumb I was to even do that in the first place, since I was probably like 14 years old and definitely old enough to have known how stupid that was.
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: When I was 32 I dislocated my elbow trying to vogue. It popped out of my skin. (I fell in heels and caught myself with my taut arm, which was too much for one arm.)
Tim Marchman: This one time I rode out with some of my cycling pals to a Chicago Fire game in the suburbs and got extremely drunk. I then had to ride back home to Hyde Park. Being very aware that cycling while drunk is an irresponsible thing to do that put my fellow road users and my family in a bad position, I sobered up and successfully rode the 10 miles or so home with clarity and focus, having determined that I was in a state to get straight and ride clearly. A block from my house, congratulating myself over my successful conquest of this ride, all my drunkenness crashed in on me at once and I proved unable to unclip my bike shoe, which made me tip over on my side and break my wrist because all my weight landed on it. I refused to go to the doctor over it and told my wife that I had accurately diagnosed it as a sprain; to this day my wrist doesn’t quite work and I can loudly pop it as a party trick.
Diana Moskovitz: My dumbest injury ever involves Corelle. You know Corelle, even if you don’t recognize the name, as the thin but sneakily durable dinnerware that’s nearly impossible to break. But not totally impossible, it turns out.
One day I dropped a Corelle dish. Or maybe it was a bowl. I don’t remember and what it was doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I dropped it onto a hard kitchen floor at the magical angle at which Corelle does break and, when that happens, Corelle shatters into millions of little pieces. For half a second, I honestly felt special. Not just anyone can shatter Corelle.
And then I saw the blood gushing out of my foot.
There wasn’t even a tiny piece of Corelle in my foot but one of those millions of pieces had grazed my foot just enough to cut it. It was a very small cut, maybe two inches but it would not stop gushing. I grabbed some paper towels and used them to at apply pressure and at least get the blood gushing to slow down. But I’d lost enough blood that my kitchen looked like a horror movie set.
My mind next went to thinking I gotta clean this up before my husband gets home because this will look really bad. I barely had taken a few hobbled steps before he came home, and I blurted out something like, “I’m fine, I’m fine, it looks so much worse than it is.” You know, what every spouse wants to hear when they come home and their spouse is on one foot while clenching the other with a bloody paper towel and there’s blood and tiny shards of dinnerware everywhere.
He did not freak out, but he wisely said that I should probably get my bleeding foot looked at. He cleaned up the mess while I researched what my options were to get my foot checked out because it still was bleeding a bit. I found a walk in clinic nearby (it was cheaper than using my insurance, figures), where the doctor explained to me that feet usually bleed a lot when they get small cuts, and I didn’t even need a stitch just lots of pressure and a tetanus shot just in case. I can’t even find any scar or mark from where it happened, except for psychologically knowing that I am the person who can break anything, even Corelle.
Jon Eiseman: The dumbest way I’ve ever injured myself has to be the time I ran my bike into a parked car at the age of 11. If I had more details on how this actually happened I would share them, but in addition to chipping my two front teeth, I also gave myself a concussion and have pretty much no recollection of the event. The lack of real front teeth came back to bite me in the ass a few years later, when I somehow knocked the fake part of my teeth out of my mouth with a solo cup while trying to make out with a girl at a party.
Jorge Corona: When Kiran and I were in L.A. shooting the Olympians Rank Things videos, the car rental at LAX gave us a Dodge Challenger because they were out of cars not featured in the Fast and the Furious series I guess. I wasn’t used to the weight of the doors of a muscle car. One day we go back to our hotel, and we park at a slight slope. As I get out of the car, I hold on to the edge of the door with my fingers, but the heavy doors close really fast with the added slant of the slope we’re on and I do not let go fast enough. I smash the tip of my index and middle fingers, which immediately get all purple under my nails. I jumped repeatedly in the parking lot. The surface area of hurt was so small for the astounding pain it caused! It hurt really bad for a long while, but we had to shoot things so I carried tripods and cameras with my injured digits like the trooper I like to make people think I am. My middle finger nail fell off some months after, and has only now completely regrown. Please check out all the videos on our site.
Megan Reynolds: A knife fell on top of my right foot because my ex-boyfriend put the knife in the dish drainer wrong—something that I have thought was his fault for years, but I realize now was mine for not looking where I was putting the dishes on top of said knife. The cut eventually became infected with staph because I wrapped my foot in a plastic bag to “keep it out of the water” at the pool. Now the scar looks like a vagina.
Dom Cosentino: Was washing dishes in college and broke a glass. It was one of those chintzy old McDonald’s glasses, and this one—I’ll never forget it—featured Grimace. Anyway, one of the shards gashed the knuckle below the index finger on my right hand. I couldn’t get the bleeding to stop, so I walked over to the hospital, where I got three stitches. My dad was less than thrilled when he got a random hospital bill weeks later. I couldn’t even make up a cool story about getting into a fight. There’s still a scar on the knuckle. I still hate Grimace.
Chris Thompson: When I was maybe 13 I rode rollerblades for the first time. Being a dumb idiot, I elected to ride these borrowed rollerblades all the way home from school, which was like a four mile trip we usually did by bus. We lived on a very steep hill at the time, and approached home from the top of it. I have no idea why I thought this was an okay idea, but about halfway down the hill, just fucking bombing downhill with no control at all, a car passed close by and I panicked and flinched. I have no memory of landing, just of waking up back on my feet, covered in wounds and blood. I trailed blood from my face and elbows and knees all the way to my house. the kitchen where I entered was like a fucking slaughterhouse. I had to get stitches on my chin and went to school the following week bound up like a mummy. [Ed. note: Chris sent seven stories of dumb injuries and told me to “pick one.”]
What was your stupidest injury? Share in the comments.