RGBP Friday Five: Falling Up The Stairs...

This weeks Friday Five is about injuries. Such a topic plays to my constant night visions of falling down the two flights of stairs in the dorm. Excellent! Let's get started;

1) Are you a baby about small injuries? Nah, I tend to be the grin and bear it type. Sometimes it's fun to show off injuries, but I do it more to increase my level of coolness than to gain pity.

2) What's the silliest way you have ever hurt yourself? Maybe this isn't funny, but it was rather bizarre: One Sunday afternoon, circa summer 1995, I was jogging from my friend's car into my house to grab something we had forgotten and suddenly, without warning I felt a shooting pain in my ankle/foot. There was no visible cause of injury, but within a few hours my foot was bruised and swollen and I walked with a limp for the next two months or so. Conveniently, it was the day I was getting dunked in my Baptist church. Getting into the pool was quite a task with a painful foot.

3) Who took care of your boo-boos when you were a child? My Marvelous Mom!

4) Are you a good nurse when others have boo-boos? I'm much better with children who have boo-boos that with adults who have injuries and are acting like babies about it.

5) What's the worst accidental injury you've suffered? Did it require a trip to the Emergency Room? When I was five, my brother built a fort using old wood from a barn in our backyard. The floorboards of the fort had rusty nails through then that were sticking up from the floor. Within this fort, my big brother constructed a rickety "throne" out of some rotten wood and a lawn chair so that I could be a princess. Well, my wiggly, excited five-year old self quickly upset the throne and as I fell, two rusty nails stuck directly into my knee. It didn't bleed, so my mom thought I was lying about how badly my knee hurt. A few hours later, after my knee had swollen to about three times its normal size, we headed to the ER. The doctors eventually determined that nothing was really wrong, but I still couldn't walk for a few weeks and had to miss my first field trip ever. To this day, I have a scar on my knee that I like to introduce to people as my "snake bite."

UPDATE: See the comments section for an account of another of my worst accidental injuries. When I wrote this post, I completely forgot about my seemingly serious childhood head injury. Perhaps it did more damage than any of us thought...

5 comments:

Rhiannon said...

Snake bite, love that! A friend who was in a car wreck has a large moon-shaped scar all the way down her right calf. She tells folks she was bitten by a shark.

Kate said...

That's fantastic! A shark bite is nearly 10 points higher on the coolness scale than a snake bite...

Anonymous said...

The "snake bite" story is making me woozy!
I'm such a baby!

Kate said...

Haha! Stuff like that makes my mother woozy as well.

Another time, maybe a year earlier than the snake bite incident, I was trying to get a band-aid (to cover a practically non-existent cut) from the top shelf of an unsteady cabinet while standing on a wobbly stool. I began falling, tried to grab the cabinet to steady myself and instead pulled it forward far enough to dislodge two large glass ashtrays from the top shelf, which fell out of the cabinet, collided in midair and broke and landed on my little head. I went to my mother, she took one look at my bleeding noggin and...


ran to the neighbor's house.

Fortunately, our neighbor was the head of pediatric nursing at the local hospital. She had to slap my mother in order to get her to calm down enough to tell the nurse that she'd left her bleeding-from-the-head four-year old at home. Neighbor Nurse got me all fixed up and was able to do so without a visit to the hospital, where they most definitely would have shaved my hair, which was long enough that I sat on it...

Anonymous said...

OK everyone... So I'm a wimp. The neighbor didn't slap me but really close to it when Kate walked into her house. What a day that was!