Day 8: This is what it’s come to…

Here we are on Day 8 of my “30 consecutive days of blogging,” and I’m already reduced to telling old war stories. This is what happens when you wait until 10:30 pm to try and come up with a subject, I guess.

I don’t injure myself often, but when I do, it seems to happen in a spectacularly weird fashion. Twist an ankle skiing? Nah…Hit my thumb with a hammer? Not me! Here are just a few of the ways I’ve injured myself (or in at least one case, been injured by someone else) over the years:

• The dog gave me a black eye. This was the most recent injury, and is represented in the photo above. Rollo and I were down on the beach this summer, and he was off-leash. I bent over to pull the no-slip (big effing joke!) sock out of my shoe for the 17th time, and he – for whatever twisted doggie reason – chose that moment to run past me, bashing me in the face with his rock-hard head as he went. My glasses flew off, and I saw stars. The black eye didn’t actually show up until later that night, though, when I decided that my face didn’t really hurt that much, so it would probably be ok to work out. It wasn’t.
• The cat dislocated my shoulder. Several years ago, I needed to take my 24-pound black cat, Dillon, to the vet. (Yes, you heard me right. 24 pounds. He was a big boy.) He didn’t fit in the carrier that I had, so I needed to improvise. I put him in a cardboard box and draped a towel over the top, hoping that he wouldn’t figure out that there wasn’t really anything holding him in. Critical error. I made it down the stairs from my apartment, but halfway to the car felt him starting to climb up one corner of the box under the towel. I tried to tilt the box towards me to keep him in, and somehow, my left shoulder dislocated. Next thing I knew, I was on my knees on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building, my left arm hanging, numb and useless, at my side. The cat didn’t even try to run off…he just sat down on the sidewalk next to me.
• Improper sizing dislocated it again. A few months later, I was in the fitting room in Dress Barn trying on clothes. I started to put a blouse on over my head, but realized that the sleeves were too tight before I’d gotten it all the way on. When I reversed the motion to remove the blouse, that pesky left shoulder dislocated again, with my arms up over my head, basically in nothing but my bra from neck to waist. My left arm was stuck up over my head – I couldn’t get the blouse on or off, and couldn’t lower my arm.
• I split my lip assembling Ikea furniture. Imagine the scene: a large, heavy box containing a mostly-particleboard desk (probably Hemnes or Klimpen) sitting on the laminate floor of my living room. Me: kneeling on a blanket to cushion my knees on the floor. I needed to move the box, so I leaned all of my weight against it and pushed…and instead of the box moving forward, my knees on the blanket slid backward, causing me to face-plant on the corner of the box. Brilliant.
• I was hit in the throat with a hockey stick. Ok, so this one is almost a “normal” sort of injury in that it was actually sports-related. We were learning field hockey in gym class in middle school, and I got hit in the throat. What gets me, though, is that I am 5′ 7″, and the person who hit me was never penalized for high-sticking. (You’re not supposed to raise the stick above your waist.)
• I broke a toe baking cookies. When I was 11 or 12, I discovered that I like to bake chocolate chip cookies from scratch….mostly because I really like the raw cookie dough, and I get to sample it occasionally while I’m baking. A side effect of this, though, is that you tend to get thirsty, and on the day in question, I kept going back in to the refrigerator to get the water pitcher to refill my glass. The last time I opened the refrigerator door, a family-size glass bottle of ketchup fell out of the fridge and on to my little toe, breaking it. (My toe…not the bottle.)
• I was kicked in the face on the playground. One of my earlier injuries, I was in the 1st grade and we were on the playground at recess. I had skipped kindergarten, *and* had a January birthday, so here I was this scrawny little 5-year old with all of these older kids. Apparently I was walking just a little too close to the swing set, and some kid on one of the swings kicked me in the face as I walked by. The next thing I remember, I was sitting in our classroom with a bag of ice on my face…with no recollection of getting there.
• I was born with water on the brain. At least that’s what the doctor told my parents on the day I was born. I had water on the brain, and would be brain damaged. Turns out that this was a major misdiagnosis (though some of you may beg to differ) and there wasn’t actually anything wrong with me…but it just goes to show that the weird stuff started from Day 1.

How about you? What’s the weirdest injury you’ve ever had? Tell me about it in the comments!