We have rather complicated and supposedly ergonomically designed desk chairs at my work with a myriad of levers and adjusters underneath the seats. Yesterday I was trying to adjust one when I pulled the wrong lever, and the back of the chair flipped forward at an astounding velocity, slamming me square on the bridges of my nose and glasses.
I was slightly stunned. It really hurt. I was in the middle of an evaluation, so I just sucked it up and finished with the client. I then went to see our office manager/risk management person, and asked her if the cartilage in my nose should be so wobbly. She wasn’t sure, but she said it looked like I was getting a left black eye, and the bridge of my nose and my forehead just above my eyebrows looked puffy. She then sent the multitude of forms one fills out in these circumstances. She encouraged me to go to the occupational health clinic that assesses Workers Comp claims. I declined, as my self assessment suggested all I was going to have with this was a black eye and some bruising on my forehead.
I am going to a family funeral in Pipestone, MN on Thursday, and I do hope whatever bruising I have has dissipated by then. I am not hopeful. I haven’t seen these family members for a couple of years, and I imagine I will have to explain multiple times what happened. I should add that I own no makeup, and I have no intention of buying any to cover the bruises. I suppose I could make up some fantastical story of how I was injured, as being assaulted by a chair is kind of embarrassing.
What have been some of your prominent injuries? What have been some of your work injuries? Any Workers Comp stories?
Trail Baboon 
Rise and Shine Baboons,
Oh, Renee, that sounds so painful. Did it ruin your glasses? Your stoicism is remarkable when you suck it up and just finish the evaluation. Didn’t the client notice the broken nose?
I think the question today really is,”When at the funeral, what story should I tell?” Drawing on the post yesterday and Luna’s desire to get to the top of the curio, this is what happened:
“Luna eyed the Christmas doll at the top of the curio and jumped, destabilizing the curio cabinet. It fell and I jumped out of the way, but the edge hit my face and glasses. There was glass and curios everywhere. I called an ambulance so there were sirens and the entire neighborhood gathered around the ambulance that took me to the hospital,where they put ice on my face and gave me ibuprofen for a bill of $10,000. Luna ran away in fright.”
Or the ever popular, “My husband hit me,” but I don’t think anyone would ever believe that one given your lovely husband. A wild story is much better.
My most prominent injury was a broken wrist at age 19. I fell while ice skating. Now I think of that injury almost daily because there is arthritis in the wrist.
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“I walked into a door”. Then people WILL think it was Renee’s husband.
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Sounds painful and embarrassing, Renee. Brave of you to mention it. When I lose a battle with furniture, I usually sit on the story.
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Drum shot sound effect. Good one Steve.
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Snort!
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I suspect your shiner today is much more colorful than the header photo. Sorry this happened to you, Renee. Perhaps you should wear a Lone Ranger type mask, like the one Steve is sporting in his gravatar photo, for a while.
I believe I’ve told the story of my broken nose before on here. It was the result of falling off a teeter totter and landing, face first, on the metal pipe at the center of the pivot. In addition to a broken nose, I had the most colorful black eyes for weeks; an injury so obvious there was no ignoring it. It was during my freshman year at SIU, and I couldn’t just skip classes for the duration. One of my professors on seeing me in class said: “I know we’re all dying to know what happened, so why don’t you just tell us so we can get on with the class.” So I did, and we did, but I heard my fare share of stupid jokes for weeks. I consider myself lucky that I didn’t knock out all of my front teeth instead.
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Love that professor.
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Ouch, Renee! You’ll have to report back after you return from the funeral.
A kid ran into me on the playground in 5th grade, and I got a broken arm, had to write with left hand for a while, and got my cast signed by everyone… Missed a basement step on the way down and got a shiner when I landed on my face on cement floor (maybe 10 years ago)… Sprained ankle a couple of times… No work or Workers’ Comp that I can recall – guess I’ve been pretty lucky overall. Maybe something else will surface later today.
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I have a bunch of injury stories but will only relate a few. After a full day of downhill skiing out in Colorado, I took one last run, hit a small bump, fell forward over my skis, the bindings didn’t let go, and I ended up with a fractured tibia. At work I tripped on the feet of an IV pole, put out my left arm to break my fall but broke my wrist instead. That was a Workman’s Comp claim so all the bills were paid by them. My sister and I had taken her young daughters to Valleyfair. We were at the water park when it was time to go home. I called to Kristen but she didn’t hear me so I went into the shallow pool, stood behind her, bent over and said her name at the same time she decided to stand up. The top of her head connected with the bridge of my nose. There was a lot of blood but amazingly I never got a black eye. The most recent was my misadventure on a pickle ball court in Texas. I was running laterally to return a hit, tripped over my own feet, and fell directly on my left hip which resulted in a fracture. At the time I didn’t know I had osteoporosis – found out when the doc here had me get a DEXA scan. Because I was in pretty good shape, the fracture healed well and the hip is back to about 95% of normal.
It does sound like I am a klutz but really, I am not. Both my sisters are more accident prone than I am.
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I like the header photo; made me laugh out loud.
I think you can tell a, slightly altered, version of the truth. Make it sound more like the chairs fault and you had nothing to do with it. The hard part is figuring out why you had your head right down there in the first place. I know what you mean though. I’ve seen those chair backs flip forward like that.
Never had a black eye… just lucky that way.
Two years ago when I had cellulitis, at first I wasn’t sure what it was or what had caused it so I did report it to HR. Well, they totally botched that up before determining they weren’t responsible. Wrong pharmacies, wrong clinics. It got to the point I didn’t want their help even if they had covered it.
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I’ve had chronic back pain for years. It’s all work related. I can tell how bad an episode is going to be by how far down my right leg the pain goes. In varying degrees, these situations happen several times a year. Most of the time, ice alternated with heat won’t keep me off work. But on one occasion, I hurt myself on a Wednesday. The pain went to my ankle. Thursday was Thanksgiving, so a long weekend of recovery was possible. Come Monday I hadn’t improved much, so called off work, went to immediate care and got a prescription for pain. All this was routine for me including the Minnesota Workman’s Comp. But this was Ohio and my employer worked to deny benefits based on my late reporting the injury. I appealed and made an appearance before an arbiter and a company representative. After explaining the delay and physically demonstrating my posture that caused the injury (crawling for 45 minutes welding a very long seam in sheet vinyl), my claim was accepted. I was very irritated to have to do all this. After several years of good work experience with the same company, I didn’t expect such resistance. With previous injuries I always returned to work still hurting. Not this time. I determined that being completely pain free would be my return to work criteria. I learned that my month long absence made the company have to pay a lot extra to finish the job I was on. It might seem petty but revenge was sweet.
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This is one of the many reasons I’ve always preferred to work for actual people, small farmers for instance, rather than companies.
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I had to go into the office today to unpack the boxes in my new cube. Our division finally moved back to the building that had the fire two years ago. I was very very very careful about the chair and testing out the raising and lowering of the desk after reading your story Renee.
When I was a young married, we lived close to the Farmstead Lyndale park with the great hill behind the park building. One winter, late late at night we decided, on a lark, to take some pieces of cardboard and slide down the hill. On the very first trip. I hit a bump (or a mogul) and went flying. Wasband was very close behind me so we ended up in a heapAt the bottom of the hill. I’m pretty sure it was my knee that connected with my eye but I wouldn’t bet my life on that. It was every shade of the rainbow you could imagine for almost a week. This was back in the day when people didn’t ask you if you were “safe” when you showed up someplace with a black eye.
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My comment to Renee was obviously silly. I don’t actually have battles with furniture, or I don’t have more than most people. That collapsing chair at the Bix Beiderbecke festival . . . that was too short and violent to be called a battle. I’d say the same for that bed in New Orleans. Speaking carefully, I’d say I had only one battle with furniture. That involved a floor lamp in our bedroom the night of our honeymoon. My fuzzy recollection is that the floor lamp won, taking me directly to the floor. And as many of you have already deduced, as so many police reports conclude, “some alcohol was involved.”
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I once tripped over a wire from an invisible fence while working on a gardening job, and did a very sudden face plant into landscape rock. Had a very swollen lip, but felt lucky I didn’t lose any teeth. It happened so fast I couldn’t get my hands in position to break my fall.
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I was riding a 1961 Bonneville for a while,which 15 years before had been one of the classic “Rockers” machines in the sixties. The greatest glory to be got would have been to be killed on one in a high speed crash, preferably while illegally “racing on the highway”. Second best would be to be badly injured, and subsequently to have a legendary limp, or some such. High speed, dangerous antics were the required method for attaining legendary status. I did like to think I had a talent for looking, but not really being, wild and dangerous.
I was passing John Taylor’s farmyard one day, and remembered, too late, that John had been spreading slurry, and the spreaders had spilled a lot on the road. It was a dairy farm, you’ll gather what slurry consists of. The previous day, the slurry had been wet, and my tyres had cut through it with no incident. Now it was drying out and was greasy. I rapidly slowed, then released the brakes on entering the different coloured zone. Wasn’t going fast at all, not nearly fast enough to go down in history. I went down in slurry instead (just thought of that one). The back of the bike was still subject to inertia, trying to overtake the front. And it succeeded. I broke my collarbone at twenty mph on cowdung. My shot at Rocker glory.
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