Most Painful Casual Injuries

Break out the Flintstone Band-Aids because these are some injuries for pussies.

Papercuts

The paper cut is the quintessential workplace injury for wusses. They are that gash on your finger that doesn’t even measure a nanometer but hurts like nothing else you’ve ever felt. Most of your body’s nerve endings are at its extremities; seeing as paper cuts are most often obtained on your fingertips from handling paper, the injury is usually pretty damn painful. Peeling oranges with a paper cut is the only thing possibly more painful than just a paper cut. Although it might hurt like hell, your injury isn’t really anything to worry about and a Flintstones band-aid will probably be overkill. You should maybe do one of the following things to take your mind off of your papercut.

Slammed Fingers

Slamming a finger in the door instantaneously requires the affected person to grab the affected hand with the non-affected hand and jump around with both of them in their crotch for two minutes. Everyone else in the room then proceeds to point and laugh at the poor bastard with the big red finger. I know of people that have lost thumbnails to doorjambs, well that might be a lie but you’d never know if I didn’t just admit to lying. For the most part though, extremities slammed in doors won’t require much more medical attention than a kiss from your mum so quit your whining.

Leaning on a Hot Stove

It’s a classic maneuver that you are bound to pull at at least one house party. You are going to be talking to the hottest girl you’ve ever seen actin’ all sly in the kitchen when you decide it’s a good idea to go in for the stove lean. Unfortunately, somebody left the element on after they made their Kraft Dinner and you now both look like an idiot and have some fierce red concentric circles on your hand. If you are lucky, you’ll make it out of there with a first-degree burn. You’ll want to wrap it up with some gauze and get some aloe on that sucker regardless of the intensity of the burn and get back to drinking. Let your soberest friend make the decision on whether or not you should go to the hospital but keep drinking to numb the pain. Forget about the girl, you’ve failed. Miserably.

Rug Rash or Floor Burn

Whether you’re diving to catch a dodge-ball or doing a radical air guitar power-slide, the resulting rug burn or road rash is something that will stick around for weeks. I was just a young boy when track pants became all the rage. I remember because they were the cause of one of the most disgusting injuries I think I’ve ever had to look at. The incident involved me playing volleyball in my elementary school’s gymnasium. The hardwood floor had been buffed just the day before and I was pumped to do some awesome knee slides on the freshly waxed flooring. So, if you will, put a 100-and-some-odd pound mass on top of a kneecap separated from a hardwood floor only by a thin layer of flesh and weird nylon-polyester hybrid. Imagine then, that mass moving across the floor at just under one meter per second and if you don’t have melted track pants in a gross bloody burn wound combination, you’re imagining it wrong. But I digress. I spent ten minutes picking the weird melty plastic out of my wound and vowed to never again wear track pants. I have never looked back.

Biting Your Tongue

It takes up a lot of real estate in your mouth so I guess it’s pretty impressive that you don’t bite your tongue more often. But when you do, it seems that there is nothing more painful and you try to express your pain in words but you can’t and that just makes it worse… And then you taste the blood. This has to be one of the worst feelings in the world so try and spit the blood rather than swallow it. Luckily, your tongue will heal really quickly but it will be a pain in your ass for a couple days. Murphy’s law says that if it can happen, it will and people have been documented biting off their own tongues. Voluntarily or not, biting your tongue off yields a lot of bleeding and maybe not so much dying. If you’re eating a rare steak, your tongue feels very much the same so it’s no wonder more people don’t develop serious injuries from a bitten tongue.

Stapled Fingers

Stapling a finger is something all students and office temps are going to experience at one point or another. Most often, fingers tend to get stapled due to an overzealous staple fight wherein somebody loses control and holds the stapler a little too high. The one time it happened to me it was because I wasn’t paying attention whilst operating a heavy duty 20 sheet plus paper stapler. The lesson: always pay attention whilst operating a heavy duty 20 sheet plus paper stapler. As a result of my carelessness, I had a rather long piece of metal protruding from my middle finger. Luckily, and I say that as conservatively as possible, the staple didn’t manage to break through the nail on the other side but did manage to hit the bone. I figured this was as good a time as any to make my first trip to the hospital for a self inflicted wound.

Hammering Your Thumb

Hitting your thumb with a hammer seems too cliche to actually ever happen. When you’re holding that nail still with your thumb and index finger you know there’s always a chance you’ll miss, but you never really expect you’re going to; until you do. A hammer smashed thumb can really be quite painful and seriously gross but it’s still one of those injuries that you don’t really want to tell your friends about. Instead, make something up like… “Somebody else hit my thumb with a hammer”. Yes, rather ingenious if I do say so myself. All kidding aside, you can lose fingernails to hammers and they are a rather serious matter. An infection is always a possibility and if you do lose a fingernail, you will scare away any potential suitors therefore, I deem the hammer on the thumb actually quite a painful and unpleasant casual injury.

Stubbing Your Toe

Whether you are walking over a threshold, around a table, or up the stairs, stubbing your toe is another one of those incredibly-painful-at-the-time injuries that never seems to last more than a couple minutes. There are, however, some extreme cases that require a good deal of toenail reattachment and prevention against infection. For the most part though, stubbed toes just really smart. At the time, it feels like the world is going to end and you don’t give a shit about how ridiculous you look dancing around with one foot in both your hands. You can’t help it; it’s like when the tears come falling after some swift trauma to the nose. All you really want to do is yelp and do the stupid one footed hopping dance. This is one of those injuries that will pretty easy to judge whether or not it requires medical attention. If it doesn’t hurt in two minutes, you’re fine. If it’s gigantic and purple, you should probably see somebody.

Getting Caught in Your Zipper

There might be 51% of the population that has never had to deal with the prospect of getting your junk caught in the zipper and they should be thankful. Whoever had the idea to hide my most precious organ behind 50-some-odd vicious metal teeth is a nutcase. Every male in the entire world is very apprehensive about how he does up his fly after the few shakes it takes to rid it of the pee that for some reason just wants to hang on. Sometimes though, because you’re drunk or simply not paying attention, you can get the frank and beans all caught up in there and need to be taken out on a stretcher. It only needed to happen one time, but as a result of my scrotum’s encounter with what I now consider to be the worst use of metal mankind has ever devised, I have only since purchased jeans with button flies. My incident involved no blood and was more of a close call than anything else but I imagine somebody who is in a hurry could do some serious damage.

Goose Eggs

Bonking your noggin happens to some of us more than others, but everybody does it. Being six feet four inches tall, I tend to smash my head on doorways, roofs, and those bars before parkades that make sure no big trucks come in. If you’re running prior to being abruptly stopped by a blunt object at head level, the resulting trauma can, and probably will send you to the hospital. Cracked skulls and concussions are possible so if somebody’s acting weird, make sure they seek medical attention. I’ve never had to deal with the hospital due to head trauma but I have gotten some incredibly excruciating headaches. ­­­­­