June 9, 2023 | Eul Basa

When You Hurt Yourself Doing Something Stupid


Injuries are common but when one hurts themselves because of something stupid, that's just an unlucky setup for a world of pain. From dislocating a kneecap playing virtual golf to stabbing oneself in the foot with a bra's underwire, the foresight for these Redditors from their cringeworthy injuries came a bit late—and they have the scars to prove it.


1. Up The Ante

I went to flick an ant off my couch. Such a simple move but so destructive. I revved up my finger against my thumb with so much force that I managed to separate my finger from my knuckle. I tore the ligaments and all. I was in a full arm splint for an entire summer. My finger is still not the same. Needless to say—the ant got away.

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2. That Burns

It was winter and we had just got inside my friend's house from a snowstorm. We were sopping wet and cold so we took our clothes off and stood by the fire. I wanted to warm my socks up so my feet wouldn't be cold and wet for the rest of the evening. So I put my pair of damp socks on the edge of the wood stove, intending to leave them there for only a few seconds. A terrible idea.

Well, of course, they started to melt. The smell that arose from the melting socks alerted my friend to investigate. She didn't want the house to burn down. So she lifted the socks off the stove, but not wanting her hands to burn she immediately tossed them at me. I mentioned I was in my birthday suit, right?

Hot, melted socks landed on my manhood.

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3. Bad Call

I had been waiting for an important phone call all week. When I finally heard the phone ring on the landline, I ran for my life to try to get it before it hung up.

Now, it's important to note that the majority of our flooring is made of slate tiles. It's equally important to note that our kitchen skylight had recently broken due to a hailstorm. A large amount of water had formed on the floor below creating a huge puddle. It was a recipe for disaster.

Well, I ran so hard to catch the call that just before reaching the phone, I slipped on the puddle. I fell face-first. I tried to lessen the damage that I knew would come to my face by sticking my arm out—it didn't work. I ended up with two black eyes, six shattered teeth, and a broken wrist.

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4. Leave It Alone

When I was 18, I'd drank too much and was walking home around 1 am with a couple of sober friends. As we got onto my road, I noticed a small snake slithering into our neighbor's yard. We got closer to it and I expertly identified it as a copperhead. I realized I couldn't let it get into their yard because they had kids!

So I went up and grabbed its tail. This little critter was surprisingly calm and didn't really react. My friends offered no advice other than, “Man you're gonna get bit".

I told my friend who happened to live next door to the house we were at, to get me a box to put the snake in so I could take it down to the creek and let it go. He said that he didn't have a box, to which I replied, "Everyone has a box. Go get a dang box!"

So he went into his house, and left our other friend and me (holding this snake's tail) outside. He eventually came back out with a water bottle. I said, "A freaking water bottle?!"

"That's all I had!"

So I tried to get the little slithering friend to crawl in, but it quickly became apparent that it had no intention of doing so. I had only one option left—but it was incredibly risky. I just needed to quickly grab right behind its jaws and squeeze tightly enough so it couldn't turn and bite me.

I positioned my hand above its head, took a few deep breaths, and went for it. Well, right about the time I grabbed its head, it occurred to me that maybe I shouldn't be doing this and should abort the mission. So I hesitated, loosened my grip, and the little serpent turned and bit my index finger on my left hand.

I quickly got it off of me, but I had a little hole in my finger with a single drop of blood coming out. I said, “Dang, it bit me! I gotta go home”. My friends left and I when I got home, I woke my mom up and told her that I got bit by a copperhead and she had to take me to the hospital.

I read that copperhead bites are usually nothing serious, and often don't even require a hospital visit. Plus, it only got me with one fang, so I only got half a dose of venom. Well, I guess young snakes can't control the amount of venom they give, because the consequences were horrific.

I spent the next three days in the hospital. My left hand and arm swelled up to their normal size. I ended up with horrible blisters and tissue damage, and had to go to physical therapy for several months. My friends felt no pity for me.

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5. Icy Joke

As I was walking into work, there was a tiny sliver of ice at the rear bumper of my car. I slipped on it while wearing slip-resistant shoes, and landed on my left arm/shoulder. I was sore and bruised for the entire day.

Twenty-four hours later, I couldn't move my arm at all. I went to the ER and without touching me or giving me an x-ray, they told me that it was nothing. Three weeks later, the pain got worse, so I demanded to get another opinion.

I ended up spending the next five months in physical therapy because I had royally messed up my shoulder and the first diagnosis missed it. The most common joke I now hear about that fall was "at least you got ice on it right away".

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6. Beeline For Pain

I was 11 years old at the time and was watching TV in my room while sitting in a swing chair that was attached to the ceiling. At some point in my brilliance, I decided that I should wear roller skates while watching TV, so that my bare feet wouldn't have to endure the friction from having them rubbed on the floor while swinging.

That night, while sitting on the hanging chair and watching TV, I wanted to switch to another program. The remote, however, was on the table in the middle of my room. So I decided that the best course of action was to skate over to the remote and then skate back to the chair.

I got off the chair easily and got the remote. As I started to skate back, my skate got jammed on the carpet. I tried to keep myself from falling and grabbed the first thing nearest to me—which happened to be the swinging chair. Well, the worst happened. I fell—backward. My foot was still stuck in the carpet.

I ended up kicking myself in the knee and broke my tibia. The X-rays showed that it was a perfect spiral all the way down the bone. I would've seriously injured myself if I had tried to stand on it.

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7. This Is Battle

When I was a kid, my brother and I were playing battle in the garage. It mainly consisted of throwing anything we could get our hands on at each others' heads. A headshot would restart the game from opposite sides of the playing field.

Game three started and I, in my infinite wisdom, grabbed a bat to defend myself from projectiles—no, I did not throw the bat at my brother. After a couple of objects were thrown my way and destroyed by the bat, a basketball entered the scene.

My brother threw the ball like a baseball with a wind-up and everything! My six-year-old self swung for all I was worth, connecting with the basketball perfectly and propelling it back at my brother with crazy speed and pretty good aim. I almost hit him.

That's what I remember thinking before I made a horrifying realization. My six-year-old self did not have the strength to stop the recoil of the bat bouncing off the ball and coming straight for my head.

I did all I could to stop it but that bat hit me straight in the eye brow and busted my head open. I should mention here that it was a metal bat. I had a black eye for months, about nine stitches, and still have a permanent scar. My mom was livid.

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8. Painful Visit

My mom was visiting from out of town and had borrowed a friend's truck. It was one of those giant, heavy-duty Ford F-350's, but unfortunately, the passenger door lock was finicky.

We were at Tim Horton's grabbing some coffee on the way home. As we were heading back to the truck, we realized that the remote wasn't unlocking the passenger door. So my mom threw the keys over the truck for me to unlock the door manually. Unfortunately, she didn't throw it far enough and they landed on the roof.

I thought that it was no problem to just jump high enough to grab the keys instead of the obvious—to just stand on the side skirt and reach up. I missed the keys and landed awkwardly on the way back down. I thought nothing of it at the time and tried again.

This time, I grabbed the keys but I was in considerable pain when I landed. I figured the pain would eventually go away overnight, so we headed home. When I woke up the next morning, the pain had gotten worse. At the hospital, I discovered that I had broken four toes on my right foot.

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9. Lucky Dummy

I was seven years old at the time and was playing outside with my cousins. I had a broomstick with me. I saw a small pickup truck approaching and I had the clever idea of laying down the broomstick to "trip" the vehicle—like you would a person.

When the truck went over the stick, I heard a sickening crunch. It crushed my fingers—which were holding the stick—flat. It was insanely painful. Luckily, I walked away with only some bruising and scratches. I was really fortunate as it could have seriously caused some permanent damage.

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10. Futile Exercise

I was sitting at home alone, waiting for a couple of friends being driven by an older brother to pick me up to go to the movies. I was in eighth grade at the time.

While I was waiting, I decided to get a little pumped while watching Scooby-Doo on TV. So I started doing bicep curls with a resistance band. I used one foot to step on the plastic handles of the band, anchoring it in place while curling with the other.

I laughed at one part in Scooby Doo, and let up pressure on the anchor handle. It flew up and nailed me high up on my forehead. I wasn't prepared for the gruesome consequences. Blood started pouring out everywhere, and I was freaking out.

I called my parents but neither answered their phones, so I called my friends down the street. Their mom rushed over and took me to the emergency room, where I got staples. While she took me to the hospital, their kind dad decided to clean up some of the copious amounts of blood around my house.

When my dad got home from work, he found my friend's dad cleaning up all this blood, and was like, "What in god's name happened here?!" Luckily a quick explanation sufficed.

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11. In Stitches

I had just been to the hospital to have stitches removed from my chin. As I was walking down the hospital stairs after the appointment, I tripped, slammed my chin against the railing, and had to go straight back up to the same doctor to get new stitches put in.

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12. That Didn't Fly

One Saturday morning, I was flipping through the channels and came across the Wide World of Sports. That day, they were featuring top fuel dragsters. When they crossed the finish line they deployed drogue chutes, which nine-year-old me thought was the coolest thing EVER.

I set out to the garage to construct my own version. We had this old giant, half-deflated playground ball—about three feet in diameter that had been sitting around our garage for a while. I poked a hole in it and cut it in half with my trusty pocket cutter. Then I grabbed some clothesline (I was always cutting down my mom's clothesline for my little "projects", so she just started buying extra and leaving it in the garage).

I poked some holes around the edge of the "parachute," threaded the pieces of clothesline through the holes, and tied them off. Then I tied the other ends of the clotheslines to my belt loops and jammed the "parachute" into my back pocket. I got on my bike and took off down the street as fast as I could.

When I was sure I had reached top speed, I reached back, grabbed the edge of the parachute, and flung it out behind me. I heard a satisfying whooompf as the parachute filled with air. I thought to myself, it worked! I'm a genius! NOPE. I was actually an idiot.

That elation lasted only a split second before the bicycle was ripped out of my hands due to the rapid decrease in my forward momentum. I seemed to have hovered in the air for a few seconds, before crashing to the pavement and executing a series of rather inelegant barrel rolls followed by excruciating pain.

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13. Say “Cheese”!

I used a serrated cutter to open a string cheese package I couldn't manage to unseal. So I used the cutter to penetrate just the top of the package just above the cheese. The blade went in fine but when I pulled it out, my finger was too close and it sliced the tip off.

My finger wouldn't stop bleeding for close to an hour even after I wrapped it up. The tip was still there but just barely. I kept it bandaged but it started to smell funny and the remainder of the tip started to turn black, so I plucked it off and just dealt with it.

The tip of my finger eventually grew back and it's fine now. The worst part was that I never got the darn cheese open.

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14. Risky Moves

Remember that dance move called "threading the needle?" It was popular in the early Vanilla Ice, 90s era. It's a move where you grab one foot with the opposite hand (creating sort of the number four with your legs) and then jump through the resulting hole created with the leg you're standing on.

So here I was, plastered, with three friends one night. I decided to give this dance move a try. For context, one of the friends I was with named Reganomics, was this sloppy, wiry guy who used to do this dance move intoxicated on a regular basis, with roughly 50% success-to-failure ratio.

He had, on this night, actually successfully landed threading the needle. Encouraged, I decided it was my time to try it. I went from standing there with my right foot in my left hand saying, "I got this, I got this" to looking up at Reganomics and the two girls we were with from a supine vantage point on the ground—flat on my back.

I was confused, and couldn't remember the last few moments of what happened. They hoisted me up—but what I left behind was chilling. Where my head had been, there was a large pool of blood.

Apparently, upon attempting the jump, I immediately failed and slipped and bashed the back of my head on the corner of a table and proceeded to fall to the ground. My friends wanted to take me to the hospital, but apparently, I kept saying, "No hospital, I just wanna go home, sleep, and bleed til I'm lifeless".

Thankfully, my friends applied pressure for fifteen minutes but the blood didn't stop, so they took me to the local hospital. In my inebriated state, I was apparently doing all kinds of ridiculous stuff.

I was thanking them profusely but with all sorts of expletives thrown in, and putting "I banged my freaking head" on my intake forms as my reason for the visit and so on. I got a staple in my head and spent the night there till about 7 am and then they let me go home. I'll never thread the needle again.

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15. Dumb Ax

When I was 15, I was chopping wood with one hand, as my other hand had a cast on it—which was broken due to another stupid thing that I had done to myself about a month earlier. When I lost control of the ax, it bounced off the side of another tree and hit me in the head.

Fortunately, it wasn't the blade that hit me, it was the corner end. However, it was still sharp and hard enough to gouge my head open and give me a mild concussion. I'll never forget the look on my mom's face when I came running up to the house with blood pouring down my face.

When she asked what happened, I told her that I hit myself in the head with an ax. She nearly passed out.

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16. Bad Move

Last fall, while I was helping my sister move into her new office, I got bored. I started gliding and playing around on the rolling chairs. I somehow got the genius idea to up the ante. So I stood on the top of one of the chairs as I "surfed" across the room.

Things were going well until I let my hands-free to stand up straight. BAD decision. The back of the chair was broken and when I stood up, it bent over and sent me flying forward. Now this is where it gets ugly.

I was cognizant of the fact that I was making a beeline for pain but unfortunately I also somehow had the clarity to realize that I was heading directly for a stack of paintings that my sister had inherited from family and friends—"special" stuff, as she called it.

So realizing this, I decided that I couldn't throw out my arms to save my face because that would destroy her precious mementos. Instead, I flew face-first into the corner of the stack. I spent the next twenty minutes laughing hysterically even though it hurt like mad!

I gave myself my first black eye, bruised my eyebrow, and gashed the heck out of my nose. I still have a scar on the bridge of my nose to remind myself of my stupidity.

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17. Scarred For Life

When steaming the wallpaper off the wall in my hallway, I decided to spray one of my friends who was helping me. Of course, he did not take to that kindly and told me it was hot.

So I decided to spray myself. Holding the nozzle about a foot and a half away from my arm, I steamed myself, but it wasn't hot at all. My friend told me it was because the steamer was too far away. So I did the dumbest thing possible. I moved the nozzle literally millimeters from my arm and pulled the trigger.

Needless to say, I had my arm under cold water for a good 20 minutes, and even hours after having burned myself, my skin was still bubbling. I did get a scar out of it.

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18. Slippery Fingers

One day, my mom made grilled cheese. When I was done eating, I ran outside, jumped on the trampoline, and grabbed the swing set bar. My hands were so greasy from the grilled cheese that I slipped right off the bar and broke my arm.

Dumbest Ways People Have Injured ThemselvesWallpaper Flare

19. Don't Repeat That

When I was a teen, I had a bird cage that sat on my dresser, for my parakeet. It was just a regular cage with a door on the front that had hooks on the end so you could lift, unhook and lower the door and then close it, lift and hook it back up.

One day, I was standing in front of the birdcage cleaning it, with the door open. I was standing on one of those throw rugs—the ones that slip all the time. Anyway, I reached for something at the back of the dresser, and the rug slipped out from under me. I fell straight onto the open door of the birdcage. Chaos ensued.

One of the hooks went right up my nose and literally hooked up and over the upper cartilage. I screamed and my parents came running to see what had happened. My father had to cut the door off of the cage, and I had to go into the ER with the birdcage still attached to my nose.

A doctor had to give me a local anesthetic in order to be able to lift the hook up and off the cartilage because it was so painful. Luckily, I didn't get any scars, other than still being able to remember the humiliation.

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20. Lesson In Anger Management

While watching a basketball team on TV, I got mad and punched the floor really hard. I somehow managed to break a few bones in my wrist and had a few detached ligaments. I needed to go to a hand specialist for surgery, was put in a cast where I couldn't bend my elbow for three months, and needed about 3-4 months of painful physical therapy.

After the cast was removed, they needed to remove some five-inch long pins from my wrist without any pain medication.

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21. Fallen Behind

When I was six or seven years old, I had the bright idea of trying to ride my scooter backward. Instead of testing this idea on flat ground or a small hill, I decided that it would be best tried on the biggest hill in my neighborhood.

I made it about 10 yards before realizing that I had made the biggest mistake—and at that point, I lost control. I somehow made it most of the way down the hill but as I neared the bottom, I got a bit too close to a mailbox. I hit the mailbox with my arm and that was just enough disturbance for me to fall.

I ended up breaking my collarbone and lost a good bit of skin off my back.

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22. Moving Fiasco

While rearranging tables at work with another server, I didn't notice that one of the tables had a leg over an air vent on the floor. The little rubber foot on the bottom of that table leg had become stuck in the vent.

As we lifted up the table, it took the vent cover up with it. I then proceeded to put my foot in the newly uncovered hole in the floor. My leg crashed through the duct, disconnecting it from the ceiling in the basement below. My right leg bent down at such a weird angle, my behind ended up resting on my right heel.

Fortunately, instead of panicking, I was able to pull myself up and step out of the hole before the shock wore off. I say fortunately because my leg had actually jammed itself into a circular hole that was smaller than my thigh which meant I would have been stuck with my right leg contorted underneath me.

I managed to hobble back to the kitchen on my own volition but in the five minutes it took the owner to come downstairs, both my legs had already begun to swell up. But there was also an embarrassing twist to all this. To make matters worse, I busted the seat of my shorts completely out and was wearing what looked more like a skirt.

The swelling had become so severe that I was unable to change into new pants because my thighs no longer fit into my jeans. I was able to avoid any long-term serious damage but was laid out for a week with legs that were swollen and covered in rainbow-colored contusions.

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23. Marching Disaster

I was in a marching band in tenth grade. Practice was held in a parking lot next to the football field. The football team didn't want the band messing up the football field more than once a week.

There was a brief rain shower late in the afternoon just before practice. As I was marching in formation, there was a speed bump underneath me. This is a high school parking lot after all. As I turned sharply, my ankle rolled under me, and snap—there went my ankle—broken.

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24. In Hot Water

I have a wicked scar on my shin that looks like it could be a cartridge wound. In reality, this past winter, which was particularly cold, I got into the habit of filling a hot water bottle with boiling water. I would always wrap the hot water bottle in a flannel pillow case and stick it in my bed. It was heavenly.

One morning, I woke up with a slight red mark on my leg. As it turned out, the water bottle hadn't been wrapped all the way around and it burned my leg all night as I slept. I managed to sleep through the scalding and it took about a month to heal.

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25. Boogie No More

I went to the snowy mountains for a trip with my family. When we got there, I was all excited and rushed out with my kids. I grabbed their boogie board and said, "Hey kids! watch this!" as I tried to "surf" down the mountain. Famous last words.

Unfortunately, the boogie board got caught in the snow. I tucked my elbows in and tried to roll with the fall but instead, my elbow slammed into my ribs, breaking two of them. Before my wife had even stepped foot on the snow, I had already ruined the day.

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26. Sew No More

My grandmother had a treadle sewing machine. It's a mechanical sewing machine with a baking-sheet-sized pedal. The treadle under it powers the needle. You can move the needle with the treadle or by hand turning the large wheel on the right-hand side of the machine. The treadle has bars and pulleys and belts so that each step on the treadle cycles the needle several times.

When I was four years old, I put my finger under the needle and slowly brought down the needle on my fingernail by turning the wheel. When I turned the wheel, my pink fingernail turned white. When I turned it back, my fingernail turned pink again. Pink—white—pink—white. It was fascinating. I took a step forward to get a better look. Instead, I stepped on the treadle.

I felt white hot searing pain as the needle plunged, bone-deep, into my finger. My finger bounced up and down to the whishing sound of the sewing machine. I screamed. My reptilian brain pulled my hand back as hard as it could, which only made things worse. My finger was still stuck to the needle, and now I was trying to rip off my own fingernail.

After what felt like an eternity, my mom materialized next to me. She grasped the situation, and slowly pulled my finger off the needle. It's been almost forty years, but the sensation of the needle pulling out of my bone, then out of my fingernail, is still very vivid.

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27. Right Back At You

I work in the back room of a grocery store where bottles of ICE water are kept. All night long, they kept falling down because they were poorly stacked.

I was so annoyed when a case fell that I ended up grabbing one of the bottles and said, "I hate this dang ICE!" and threw it at the pallet. Somehow, the bottle managed to sail through the three-inch gap between the pallet and the girder, hit the back wall hard enough to bounce back, and broke open just enough for a little extra propulsion. It then flew back and hit me square in the face.

My managers, the caring people that they are, were in tears laughing for ten minutes. When one eventually stopped laughing long enough to speak, quipped, "I guess the ICE hates you too!" They laughed for fifteen minutes while I tried to stop my nosebleed.

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28. Shot Up The Back Side

When I was about 10 years old, I was doing my homework while watching soccer on TV. I went out to the kitchen to get something to eat and left my pencil balancing upright between two cushions on the couch.

While I was gone, somebody scored a goal. I ran back in and jumped down on the couch, and completely forgot about the pencil. Well, you can imagine what happened next—the pencil got stuck in my right buttock cheek and I had to go to the doctor to have it pulled out.

I had to get a tetanus shot so I got jabbed in the behind twice that day.

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29. Record Jump

When I was a kid, I had a strange-looking bunk bed in my room. It had a bed on the top, and a bed on the bottom in an L-shape.

One day, I decided to have fun by jumping from the top bed to the bottom. This went on for a while until a kid who was staying at our house convinced me to try to get further each time. So I jumped farther than I ever had—right through the closed window, down two stories, and landed on my back.

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30. Brace Yourself

When I was young, around the seventh grade, I was dancing at a wedding and being generally silly as children are. I tried to do a splits-type thing but instead hit my knee on the hardwood floor. I instantly felt terrible pain and had to be carried off the dance floor.

The next morning, my knee was incredibly swollen. After several X-rays and an MRI, it turns out that I had chipped a huge chunk off the knee joint part of my tibia. After months in a brace and having lots of fluid draining, it finally healed without needing surgery. But it didn't end there.

Fast forward to my twenties and I managed to have re-injured my knee dancing at weddings three more times—including my own. I now have to wear a knee brace for pretty basic physical activities.

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31. Slippery Lesson

I don't have a lot of experience with snow, but for some reason, that day, I decided it would be a good idea to hop down six stairs to begin my morning commute in the snow.

Almost immediately, I slipped on the ice on my porch and tumbled down the stairs. I lay there for a few minutes thinking about how stupid I was. I got some pretty nasty bruises. I've now learned not to get all happy-go-lucky in the morning when there's ice around.

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32. Not The Brightest Idea

I once had a lamp in my room that had no lampshade. One day, I decided the light was too bright so I put a black shot glass over the light bulb. It worked great until two hours later, I decided I needed more light and nonchalantly grabbed the shot glass from on top of the bulb. I'm lucky to still have fingerprints on those fingers.

Pain from burns is the worst.

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33. Final Task

I was getting ready to frame a poster-sized drawing in my high school art class. The final task was to polish the big sheet of glass. The glass was flat on the table and I was using a bunch of brown paper towels to get the glass perfect.

At some point, my hand holding the towel slipped off and then back over the edge of the glass. It must have been razor sharp so I didn't feel a thing. The glass felt slippery so I looked down only to see that it was smeared with blood. The edge of the glass had shaved off the skin from my palm like a slice of ham at the deli.

I nearly fainted. I tried to get to the nurse's office by feeling along the walls because my vision started to gray out. I was also too shocked to speak or ask for any help. Eventually, somebody asked why I was so pale and saw all the blood.

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34. Curiosity Gets You In Trouble

When I first figured out that my car had power windows, I was probably only three or four years old. I started rolling it up and down because I was so intrigued.

I stuck my arm out because I always saw people doing it while I was in the car and I thought they were so dang cool. I started to roll the window up and I was still naive and thought I could pull it out in time. Instead, I caught my wrist and fractured it.

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35. Birthday Bashed

At 16, I was at a friend's birthday party in the woods. We were paintballing. I thought it would be funny to draw a target on my chest and back, drop my pistol, and take a shot for the birthday boy. It started off with three single shots. Then the dad started firing at me and then everyone started firing at me. I went into survival mode and ran into the woods.

They kept firing until I clotheslined myself on a low-hanging branch. Everyone thought I was lifeless for a minute. Instead, I was just knocked out from a tree. After a minute or so, I got up, all concussed and enraged. I refused to see a doctor, until 10 hours later when my parents took me by force.

I got 10 x-rays and a few rides in the CT scanner. The diagnosis was awful. Turns out, I broke the top three vertebrae in my neck and had to wear a neck brace for nine months.

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36. Painful Descent

As I was running up a couple flights of wet cement steps to catch up with my ex-boyfriend and our friend, I slipped and fell. I caught myself on the way down the flight by hooking my leg around one of the railing posts. But the momentum ended up tearing my back and leg muscles when the rest of my body kept going.

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37. Stabbing Pain

Just last night I jabbed myself in the foot with my bra. Yes, that did happen. Just before getting in the shower, I threw my bra on the floor. The underwire had been sticking out. When I stepped out halfway to reach for a rag—ouch! It bled profusely and was in between my gosh darn third and fourth toe.

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38. Visionless And Accident-Prone

I was about ten minutes from home after seeing the eye doctor. Despite having been given eye drops that make your pupils dilate, it was also a very sunny day. So I couldn't see properly and I'm extremely prone to rolling on my ankles. Well, this combination led to a terrible accident.

I managed to step on the edge of the sidewalk right where there was a slight drop off the side and rolled my ankle so badly, I broke it.

Dumbest Ways People Have Injured ThemselvesShutterstock

39. Cringy Ninja Move

I was walking my dog in this small forested area near my house. She was off the lead and went off to do her thing. I got a bit bored and decided to swing the lead that I had around my neck. I wasn't really paying attention when the lead wrapped around this little branch after a full ninja swing.

The metal clip bit freaking annihilated my left eye. I stood there in total silence except for my dog's panting and the odd wheezing noise I was making whilst cradling my face in utter pain and stupidity.

Humiliation Stories factsPxfuel

40. Don't Bite That

I was seven or eight years old and sitting on my dad's lap in the front seat as we were driving through an animal park. I had animal food in a bag in my lap with my arm resting on it. That wasn't a good plan. I got bitten by a camel and ended up with a hematoma in my right arm. I had to go to the ER, where they didn't believe our story—neither did the insurance company.

Cops Ridiculous Excuses factsPixabay

41. Tastes Like Pain

When I was six years old, I decided I wanted to know what the power connector on my Atari 2600 tasted like. It was plugged in at the time.

It tasted like a world of pain.

Dumbest Ways People Have Injured ThemselvesWikimedia Commons

42. High Five That

I was at a Friday night "Fun Night" dance at school. The DJ offered a dollar to anyone who could identify the song “Time Warp” and tell him what movie it was from—The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I ran across the gymnasium in a panic to answer him and was the winner. A friend saw what happened and gave me a high five so hard that it fractured my middle finger.

Memorable Stranger FactsShutterstock

43. Time To Get Up

I woke up one morning and tried to reach for my phone which was plugged into the opposite side of the wall. It was too far away, so I slid my torso off the bed for a farther reach. While my left hand reached for the phone, I used my right arm to hold me up. I only needed to slide another foot off the bed to reach it, however, my right arm gave out and twisted back when I fell on it.

I ended up on the floor with my arm behind my back and my phone fell even farther away. I was in so much pain. I should've just gotten out of bed like a normal person.

Stupid hurtShutterstock

44. Virtually Inconceivable

While playing Wii golf, I managed to dislocate my kneecap, shearing off the cartilage. I didn't do anything out of the ordinary. Just the act of pivoting when chipping in on the final green caused a crazy amount of damage.

Two surgeries and half a year of rehab later, I have only recently started playing Wii golf again.

A Wendy's" Moments factsPixabay

45. No Cracking Joke

I was four years old at the time. As I walked into the kitchen, I realized that I had forgotten something in my living room so I spun around on my heel only to go head-first into a chair. I cracked my head open and needed about eight stitches.

Dumbest Ways People Have Injured ThemselvesShutterstock

46. A Cut Above

In high school, I had long curly hair, even for a guy. One day, I decided to trim my bangs. It was crooked. I trimmed them again. Still crooked.

I got on the bus with six-inch curls on the sides and one-inch bangs. Oh, but that wasn't the worst part. It was picture day. It was bad enough that one kid just looked at me and said, "I would get off the bus right now if I were you and go get that fixed".

I kept that haircut for two or three weeks. The amount of respect I lost from that was incredible. My friends occasionally still laugh about it and it happened six years ago.

The Worst Christmas Gift Ever!Pxhere

47. Bad Move

After laying out by the pool drinking adult beverages all afternoon, I decided to cook some grits to go with some fish I intended to fry later that evening. So I went inside to put the grits on to boil before heading back out to continue enjoying my beverages.

When I went back in the house, dripping wet from the pool to stir the boiling grits, my feet decided that standing up was too much trouble. As I fell, I grabbed the handle of the pot full of hot grits, possibly for stability. Bad move. Boiling grits and I ended up all over the floor.

Grits are like napalm—they just stick and burn away. I calmly got up, went, and jumped back into the pool to get them off. I had another drink before cleaning up the mess.

I ended up with second-degree burns on one arm, and odd burns on various other body parts. The burn on the arm got infected with MRSA and made a lovely scar that nobody believes was grits-induced. To this day, I still eat grits but I respect them now.

Medical UnprofessionalsPexels

48. Incredible Fall

I tripped on a blanket when I was totally sober. When I tried to regain my footing, I stumbled forward into the corner of a table with my face. The table and my front tooth went through my lower lip in different spots. I had over 100 stitches. They had to stitch all the way through my gums under my teeth to re-attach the buttress to my gums.

Dumbest Ways People Have Injured ThemselvesShutterstock

49. World Of Pain

A friend and I decided (out of sheer boredom and stupidity) to hit a basketball back and forth to one another with a baseball bat, as if playing catch. He threw the basketball to me and I wound up for a strong hit and swung into the ball.

Basic physics says that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction!! Well, the bat came flying back into my head just as hard and knocked me out. When I woke up, I had a massive contusion on my forehead, a cut over my eye, a broken eye socket, and half my face covered in blood. Oh, but that wasn't the craziest part.

Later, as I was waiting for stitches in the hospital, someone saw me lying on the gurney with such damage to my head, thought I was deceased, and proceeded to cover me completely with a sheet!

Teacher firedUnsplash

50. Not My Calling

I am not an athletic person, but my parents were very encouraging when I was a child. They were hopeful that eventually, I would find a sport that I would be good at. We decided it was not going to be t-ball.

I swung that bat at the ball so hard that it missed the ball, came around, hit my head, and I knocked myself out cold.

Dumbest Ways People Have Injured ThemselvesShutterstock

Sources: Reddit,


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