How I Keep Injuring Myself in Progressively Lamer Ways

Someone gave me a diary when I was about six, and all through elementary school I would unlock it once a year or so to write another variation on “My brother is anoeeing when he trys to play with my freinds.”

Shortly after the entry on a possible monster with bloody eyes in the church basement, there’s a whole page dedicated to “I want a Broken arm or fott please.” This sentiment was inspired by numerous classmates who, unlike me, were awesome enough to arrive at school with day-glo casts for weeks at a stretch.

Broken limbs didn’t just get you special permission to sit in the rocking chair for story time; they also proved that you led a life of incredible daring.

I could not compete.

My childhood lack of grievous bodily harm has matured into a lifelong talent for injuring myself in spectacularly undramatic ways. I still get hurt occasionally; I just do it in the least interesting manner possible.

A Few Examples:

• I grew really fast one summer in middle school, which made my legs hurt a lot. I also spent half of 7th grade limping due to not damaging my knee in any discernable way.
• In high school I developed an ingrown toenail, and then I contracted a case of Persistent Wrist Pain Caused by Nothing.
• In college I strained my shoulder by reaching too enthusiastically for a salt shaker, and one morning I was physically unable to get out of bed because I had coughed all night and worn out my core muscles.

Given this history, I wasn’t too concerned a couple of weeks ago when my right arm developed a sudden enthusiasm for random, stabbing pains. Since I could still scoop ice cream, the problem wasn’t seriously affecting my way of life.

Pretty soon, though, my shoulder wouldn’t rotate much without expressing its rage. I started feeling like a poorly designed action figure—one where you try to activate the Kung Fu Grip, but his arm won’t come back all the way because his veiny bicep collides with his rippling pecs.

After a few days of using my left arm for everything, that hand started to hurt, too. A small part of my brain acknowledged what was logically happening, but the rest of it was busy panicking.

Finally, I woke up to a right arm that couldn’t even reach my face and the firm belief that every movement was sawing away at permanent nerve damage. My roommate found me on my bed waiting for the clinic to open, whimpering quietly and imagining the worst possible things that could happen.

When you arrive at Urgent Care with a case of “my arm hurts,” they smirk and send you to sit next to “I have the sniffles” for a couple of hours. My roommate sat patiently while I talked determinedly at her about anything except how I was probably dying.

When my frothing anxiety and I finally got to see the doctor, he revealed that I had an acute attack of tendinitis caused by something thrilling like typing wrong. In retrospect, I don’t know why I was worried. It’s probably not physically possible for me to be injured in any interesting and dramatic way. I’ve never even had strep throat—I’ve just had a lot of cases of, “Oops, never mind, it turns out that’s just another cold.”

I ended up with a sling, some low-end drugs, and a diagram of goofy-looking rotator cuff exercises.

This episode has been the crowning achievement of my lame injury history so far. I had an immediate visual representation of my suffering, but nothing good to back it up when people asked what happened.

I wore the sling for the better part of a week, and I spent most of that time trying to come up with a better story.

Also, it turns out that tendinitis sticks around for quite a while once you develop it. This means that I’m still putting the sling back on about once a week, and all the same sympathetically eager questions crop up again.

(P.S. If you were naming an affliction of the tendons, wouldn’t you spell it “tendonitis”? So would I.)

The Ghost Club

In second grade, I joined the Ghost Club started by two cooler girls from my class. We all watched Ghostwriter and read Goosebumps, so we were confident that we were the kind of savvy kids with whom all ghosts would prefer to work.

The three of us met at lunch and recess to compare paranormal encounters and think up ways to contact the spirit world.

The club disbanded in about two weeks. Sherry broke her leg and Jennifer broke her arm, which clearly indicated that we were getting too close to the ghosts and making them angry. The girls told me that we would have to stop meeting for my safety, and obviously the club could not go on without my wise input.

The next year, my friend Natasha and I formed the Chasing Those Floating Things You See In The Corner Of Your Eye Sometimes Club. Both of us kept all our limbs intact, but for some reason we were not invited to join any more recess clubs.

Sadly, Sherry and Jennifer both moved away before the student body’s most impressive brush with the unexplained.

My elementary school sat between two residential streets and a city park, so about twenty backyards housed small collections of escaped kickballs. We all avoided the dark green house at the very back of the school, though, because that’s where Captain Hook lived. Apparently his midlife crisis included a career change from chasing Peter Pan to terrorizing suburban school children.

No one ever saw Captain Hook, which was good because he hated kids and would kill you with his hook if you even looked at him. Once Natasha and I got really brave and snuck up to touch Captain Hook’s fence before shrieking in terror and running for our lives, but it was a very close call and for the rest of the day we just knew that he had seen us and would come hook our guts out during art.

Even though the Captain never showed himself, we had proof that he was really there because of the messages he sent. The school’s gigantic riding lawnmower spat up clods of grass with perfectly round holes in them, and these were clearly a secret code that our sinister neighbor had punched in with his hook.

My classmate Jan was the only person who could decode Hook’s messages. After she revealed this talent, the rest of us would bring her grass clods and she would examine them solemnly. Finally, she would whisper the horrible warnings she had read:

Now that I think of it, Jan would have been an asset to the Ghost Club.