A chainsaw scar? Although of course some scars stand out more than others in the memory.
I had been estranged from my father for a few years already, but I was still living in the same general area. I had graduated, but had not yet left for the USAF. He was still a more or less functional alcoholic and spent most days in a declining logging operation (softwood, mostly pine for the paper industry) with his father and brother. Grandad really should have stopped logging by down by then, but he was stubborn. (Hey, I came by this trait honestly!)
Anyway, I got a call one day from my aunt saying that dad was in the hospital and I should probably go visit him. I was hesitant because a lot of things were still very fresh in my mind, but then she said heād gotten cut across his abdomen with a chainsaw. Huh. Okay, so probably not just a ploy for attention, then. I visited him in the hospital and though I was still reluctant to talk with him, we did visit alone for a little while.
Grandpa was cutting a tree down when the chainsaw got stuck. Now he had been logging a long time, so he really should have known better, but instead of shutting it off and getting help to free it, he started pulling on it trying to get the blade out of the trunk. Dad was coming up to help, but grandpa was very hard of hearing at that point (possibly from decades of operating a chainsaw while often neglecting to use the safety gear) and didnāt hear him. That was about the time he managed to yank the blade free and it roared back to life as the momentum of that yank spun him back and swiping my dad across the abdomen, missing his liver by a depth of less than a centimeter.
I really wish I could say he got the help he needed for his alcoholism shortly after that, but that was still several years in the future. This may be far too serious for Random Silly Grins, so Iām going to move it to its own topic.
TL;DR - a chainsaw across the abdomen doesnāt actually leave as bad a scar as you might expect, but itās certainly noticeable!
I got a scar involving teeth too; but not chainsaw ones.
As a kid, I was at a school trip at a hotel in the Wyre Forest. We were playing cards after lights out, and one card went under a single bed. I slid underneath, and was just stretching out to get the card with my right hand. Another kid, on the top of some bunk beds next to the bed I was under, jumped off. He hit the bed I was under. The bed hit my head. My head, open-mouthed and resting just on the back of my left hand, was rammed, teeth first, in to my soft, fungus-white flesh.
Much blood and puncture wound scars which took years to fade.
Other than that, most of my injuries have been accidentally self-inflicted with modelling knives.
You just opened a memory door. I was 10 and horsing around with a friend at his house. Somewhere in the midst of it, I grabbed his arm while he was in an upholstered āeasy chair.ā I pulled while his arm was across the top of the back of the chair, and a nail was sticking up. He yelped, but ended up with a 3-inch-long gash in his bicep. I donāt remember if he needed stitches, but I do remember no longer being allowed to be a friend of his. I was banished.
Ironic I suppose that a few years later, I saw him bragging to a bunch of guys about the awesome scar he had on his bicep.
I moved this to a new topic because it didnāt seem quite right for Random Silly Grins, but I think a topic to share unfortunate encounters with inanimate objects might be useful.
When I was two years old, we had friends over and we were playing in the yard with a garden hose (swimsuits, etc.) One of us had the idea to swing the hose above our heads in a circle so that water would spray in every direction. This was one of those older-style hoses that had a brass nozzle on the end. During one of the swings, I was struck in the head and had to go to the hospital. I received seven stitches in my scalp, but was otherwise unaffected. It is impossible for me to know whether this is a actual memory, or just a reconstruction based on what others have told me. I suspect there may still be a scar, but I wouldnāt know how to find it, or maybe it was superficial enough and it has been long enough that it has healed beyond recognition.
2
When I was younger, around 9 or 10, I was playing on a device called a Roller Racer:
Thatās not me, but that is both an accurate picture of the device as well as its intended use case. I was not using it correctly. Instead, I was kneeling on it and leaning forward, which allowed it to go much faster. Unfortunately, I hit a bump in the pavement and was sent forward, scraping my chin on the textured concrete. No stitches, but I can still feel the scar from that one.
3
When I was a teenager, I hosted a LAN party at my house. To handle the networking, I had a full sized, rack-mountable 16-port 10/100 Ethernet hub(not switch) on my desk. At some point during that weekend, I ended up sleeping on the floor (no idea, honestly) and when I woke up the next morning, I caught my arm in some of the cables and pulled the hub down, hitting myself in the temple with one of the corners. It hurt mightily, and left a mark that persisted for many years. I think it is mostly faded now.
I tend to think about having a pretty uneventful childhood, but when I put things together like that, it starts to feel much more exiting.
Hereās a Weezer song that does a pretty good job of summing up my feeling about my childhood sometimes:
This topic reminds me of an idea Iāve had rolling around in my head for a while. I think that everyone has some interesting stories from their life, and it would be interesting to create a topic that is expressly for sharing those. Weād probably want that to be TL2 or above, though, just to avoid indexing and drive-by AI scraping.
Although of course some scars stand out more than others in the memory.
