Accidents and Near-death Experiences (not part of a contest) Part 2

Last time I told you about how I almost got squished by a tractor and how I fell on my face from a gate. Today I will continue on this line.

Always Wear Safety Boots

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A large amount of the scars I have come from working at my uncle's engineering workshop. We specialised in producing agricultural equipment, like implements and wagons. One day I was busy cutting out flanges from a sheet of 10mm (0.40”) mild steel with the cutting torch. The interesting thing about cutting circles out of a sheet is you end up with a lot of waste, in the form of triangle-shaped pieces (on the edge) and rectangular pieces from in between the circles.

As I was busy melting a path through the sheet, one of the triangular off-cuts was about to fall off. The actual thought that went through my head at that moment was "Well it would be funny if it fell on my boot, because the safety boot would protect me."

Famous last words.

The off-cut fell off, made a 180 degree flip in mid air, and fell right into the side of by boot (melted side first). Luckily, it first melted its way through a fold in my work pants before settling in the boot. I managed to tug at the leg of my pants and dislodge the still-yellow, hot piece of metal from inside my boot out onto the ground.

This melted part of the off-cut ended up melting a large area of my sock into the flesh of my ankle. My ankle was medium-to-well-done and, barring the melted sock, would have been ready to serve with a side-dish of fries and salad. I took my boot and sock (what was left of it) off and put my ankle under running water. This was practically futile and did nothing. I had to go home and get it bandaged so I could go back to work and finish the flanges. I still have a rather large scar on my ankle from this incident.

##The Uppercut

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Ever seen those uppercuts that make the guy receiving it fly through the air in cartoons? Looks really cool and totally unrealistic. Well, at least, that was what I thought. This story begins two weeks before the accident--when I went to get my wisdom teeth cut out. They were growing skew and the roots made it impossible to extract with conventional means so I had to have an operation. After telling the surgeon and the anesthesiologist that I am resistant to anesthesia and both assuring me they will not botch it, they put me under and started the operation. Apparently they had to call in the anesthesiologist again to dose me once more--I was starting to wake up in the middle of the procedure.

After they finished, and as they rolled me into the recovery room, I woke up. Not dazed or disoriented like some. Properly awake. The first words out of my mouth when my dad came in to see how I was doing was: "I am starving, I need something to eat ASAP." So we checked me out of the hospital. On the way home we stopped at a fast-food place and I ordered a large burger and fries. Keep in mind that I just had surgery in my mouth. So I started eating the fries, leaving the burger for last. By the time I got to the burger, my jaw was so sore I could no longer chew. I sat in the car for two hours drooling over my burger and in serious pain.

When we got home, I went straight for the blender and threw in that burger, determined to eat it. That is pretty much how I had to eat anything for the next two weeks. Then finally after 15 days of sucking food through a straw, I could chew again!

Actually looking forward to lunch for a change, I went to work. By mid-morning my uncle called me outside, to a pile of I-beams that were used as pillars in a large shed. We had to move a few of them so I could clean and respray them.

There we were, me on the pile with a very large crowbar wedging at one end and my uncle in his Land Cruiser pulling the beam with a chain. I should add that the I-beams weighed around 800kg (1760bls) each. One beam got stuck in the pile and I went to wedge it free so it could be pulled off like the others. As I stuck the bar in, it jammed and my uncle pulled on his end. The beam came loose and slid down.

The crow bar connected with me--under the chin--and I literally flew through the air, landing a few meters behind the pile. When I hit the ground I immediately got up and then fell over. I seemed okay at this point, except for a slight dizziness from the uppercut. I was told to sit down and take a break for a while to recover. I got bored doing nothing and took out my lunchbox to eat. Guess what I could not do... Chew.

Not wanting to waste the day, I got up and started working on something else. My uncle's secretary came to check on me. That is when I stopped making sense when I tried to say anything. Concussion. A major one at that. She phoned my mom to come take me home, as I was in no condition to drive.

I had to eat from the blender for another two weeks after that. The spot the crowbar hit me under my chin was exactly in the right spot. 10mm to either side would have either split my jaw in half and probably killed me in the process, or broken my jaw off and probably would have killed me, too. All I got was a hairline crack in my skull from the jaw socket to the ear which is the cause of my cluster headaches (like a migraine, but apparently worse).

Flying through the air from an uppercut is really cool in a cartoon. Not so much in real life.

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There will be a part three coming soon-ish, so stay tuned for more.