Top 5 Most Ignorant Injuries

Every one gets hurt sometime. I'm not talking mentally hurt, but physically hurt. Broken bones, twisted ankles, hit in the face by a football (Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!!)...but we heal. We regain our strength, and we soldier on. Most of the time, injuries are legitimate injuries. Like the football to the face. Some injuries occur due to, what I call, ignorance. Here, for you my friends, are:

Tony's Top Five Most Ignorant Injuries

Yes, kids, it is a fact that I am prone to injuring myself in ways that just shouldn't happen. Here are some of the ways, so that you can get a good laugh at my ignorance.

5. Bruised Dreams

Injuries should never result from sleeping. However, #5 brings you a boner-fided sleep injury. I went to bed as I would any other normal night. I must have fallen asleep with my elbow bent so that my forearm was resting on my bicep. To make matters worse, I must have had that arm (my left one) under me when I fell asleep. Well, if you can't picture this, let me cut to the chase. When I woke up, my left forearm was pressed so tightly against my bicep that when I un-crushed it, my bicep screamed with pain. I tried to move my arm back and forth, to and fro...but nothing helped. My bicep was in pain for a solid week.

4. Impressing the Ladies

In volleyball, what is the one thing that a guy can do to gain honor amoung other players, and make the ladies swoon? No, being a setter isn't the answer! Of course, I am talking about crushing the ball with a massive, straight down, bounced off the backboard spike. Well, I was never a jumper, but I could, in my heyday, put the hurt on a ball...especially on a woman's net.

A men's net is 7'11 5/8". A woman's...7'4 1/8"...quite the size difference. One night, I was reffing volleyball in the Burg (Women's League) and a few of my fellow guy players were there watching their wives play. We had some time between games, so we decided to hit a few balls...impress the ladies. We took turns smokin' a few balls. Oohs and Aahs quickly filled the gym. I decided to hit one more and get the games going.

Big mistake.

I jumped and swung at the ball, and hit it ok. But on the follow through, my extended right thumb jammed so far into my thigh that if I give a thumbs up even now, my thumb makes what looks like a lower case r. The pain was so bad, that I could barely concentrate on blowing the whistle for the serve. What a mo-ron!!

3. Dumb Thumb #2

What is it about me and thumbs? I already have a disfigured right thumb, what else could happen? I found out at the beginning of summer. My left thumb was the injured this time, if you can really call it an injury.

Body Part: Left Thumb
The Problem: Hangnail
The Solution: What do most people do with hangnails? I guess you have a few options.

1. Let it grow out. Who does this? It's annoying and you have to get rid of it, STAT!

2. Take a pair of clippers, gently pulling back the hang nail, clip it at it's lowest point, thus ensuring words words words words words, whatever.

3. Grab that sucker with you teeth and rip it out.

I went with option #3. And I will never do it again!! First, I had the general hangnail pain. Ouch, it hurts...whine whine whine. Then, that moved to a more sensitive pain...when the nail got infected. Of course, I didn't know it was infected, but I kept pouring peroxide on it, before goobing on the Neosporin and adding a band-aid. Spiderman was my band aid of choice, cause he can shoot webs from his wrists, and...oh, sorry about that.

After a week of this pain, I was asked about the band aid by a co-worker. I proceeded to take the band aid off and show her the wound (cause that's what people like to see, right? A big infected thumb?) Only this time, the injury looked new to me. At the base of my thumb nail, a ball was forming. It had cracked through my nail and looked like...it was nasty, I'll leave it at that.

My first thought was that it was some gook from the Neosporin and such. So I grabbed a piece of paper and tried to scrape it off. AYE AYE YI!! That was pure pain. Ouch, it hurts thinking about it. So, to make a long story short (I know, too late) I had to go to the doctor.

She told me it was infection sprouting out. I had to take Anti-biotics. My nail is still, 3 months later, only half there, half gone. And what do I tell people when they ask what's wrong with my thumb? War wound. No, of course I bow my head and mutter...hang nail.

2. Fairy Dancer

In USA Volleyball, you have three divisions. B, which is what we play, is for the skilled players who have volleyball experience, but aren't Olympic caliber. BB, which is for the slightly more skilled players. And A which is for the College/Olympic type players. Don't get me wrong, B isn't backyard...but it's no A.

One year, we decided we would try our hand at a BB tournament, just to see how we would fair. The problem with the USA league is that what usually happens is there aren't enough teams who sign up for A, so the true A players play BB, and the BB players...not wanting to continously get their aces kicked by the A players...play B. Well, there we were, B players playing against borderline A players.

Is everyone following this? All these letters make me feel like I am a Trig teacher or something. A=BB minus B to the square root of Pony...can you tell I never took Trig?

Anyway, we were getting our ass smoked by this team. Big time. I wasn't even trying anymore. Well, they crushed one down on us (One? ha!!) and it rolled to the back wall. Me, not caring about the game anymore, and feeling in a carefree, jaded mood, started to prance back to the ball. Prance you may ask? You know, I was kinda skip-hop-jump back there like a fat ballerina.

Well, I did one of those big spilts jumps and landed right on the side of my right ankle. Instead of rolling and lessining the blow, I came down with all my weight on my leg bone I guess. I took a step like that and caught myself with my left foot. My ankle ballooned immediately. I had twisted several ankles in my day, but never quite like this. To make matters worse, because I am a fool, I finished the match pretty much on one foot.

After the tournament, we went to eat, and one of my buddies who was perpetually trying to hook me up, brought someone for me to meet. Yeah, my ankle is damn near broken and I'm going to be charming? That didn't work out so well. I went home and layed in bed. When I woke up, I tried to stand up and collapsed in pain. I was living with my cousin, Scott, at the time, and he put me back into bed and gave me some Ibprohen...it was the first time in 10 years that I had taken any kind of pain medication.

For those of you wondering...it wasn't broken. It was close, but it wasn't broken.

1. "Would you like knee pain with that?"

A couple weeks ago, after reffing the ladies, I decided to make a run for the boarder...Taco Bell. First, let me just say, in order to get "full" from the value menu, you have to eat more than one burrito...well, I do anyway. Isn't that false advertising or something? Ok, back to the story.

I pulled into the parking lot, and reached for my wallet in my back pocket. I couldn't pull it out, so I took off my seat belt...no luck. I extended my legs full out and pressed against the floorboard with my feet in order to left my butt off the seat, so that I could reach around and extract the wallet. When I did, my left kneecap felt like it popped. What a bonehead!! Hurt driving through a drive thru!! My knee cap hurt for about 5 days. I finally allieviated the pain by jiggling my knee cap around. Sounds fun, right?

So there you have it. 5 completely moronic ways to hurt yourself. If you have a nice, dumb injury, please feel free to comment...but please don't make fun of me cause I am sensitive, and my ego bruises like a peach.