When I was around seven or eight, I climbed an old, dry, dead tree and the branch I was standing on broke. I fell and ended up slamming into the trunk, right into another short, stubby branch which punctured my left eyelid and forced my eye out of its socket. Then I hit the ground on my side and dislocated my shoulder. I ended up having to get tendon grafts in surgery later to fix my eyelid, and to make them even it was done to both eyelids. So now I sleep with my eyes partially open because the tendons came from my knee, which I also have a gnarly scar for, and I still have the scar on my eyelid. It was pretty cool though because I got to wear an eye patch for a few months, which made me feel like a pirate. Arrr!
The gnarly scar on my knee from the story above comes from the sutures later ripping apart, which in turn tore some of the flesh open. The tear was so grim that I couldn't get it re-stitched and I had to instead get it completely taped over. That sucked, because I wasn't allowed to do anything strenuous for months until it healed up. My eye got better faster than my leg did, which is pretty messed up if you think about it.
About a year later, my sister hit me in the face with a plastic My Little Pony lunchbox. It ended up breaking my nose and it really mucked up the cartilage. Because the break was head on and not from the side, you can't tell that my nose was broken just from looking at it, but my cartilage is all wacky so you can still feel how it was all torn up.
When I was around ten or eleven, I broke my right ankle in three places. I had to get a cast, which totally sucked, and crutches, which sucked slightly less than the cast did. It happened when I was running outside during PE class; I tripped on something and it twisted my ankle up like whoah. The thing I remember most was having to sit in the hospital for hours waiting to get seen because some horrific car accident or something was taking up everyone's attention.
When I was thirteen, someone hit me straight on the forehead with a baseball bat. It cracked my skull something fierce and I had to get a bunch of stitches. I now have a scar that's around an inch or so long on my forehead, but the crack in my skull was a teeny bit longer so you can feel a slight ridge in the bone under the skin.
Those are just the big injuries that I can remember. I've also had a dislocated jaw (got it in a fight), hairline crack in my soft temple (falling off of a wall), a cracked patella (falling off of a different wall), a cracked eye socket (bad roller blading crash), a dislocated thumb (I don't even remember how it happened, all I remember is that it hurt like hell)…and probably some other junk that I can't remember. I was a really accident prone kid. I'm somewhat less accident prone now, though I did manage to nearly cut my right thumb off last year while sharpening knives. It now has an almost inch long diagonal scar just above the knuckle.
~ jj ~