on placement in A&E......
I walked in to resus at about 7 one winters morning and was promptly asked if i was busy and would fancy doing a job. And me being the keen eager student nurse i am leapt at the chance to show my keeness.

Anywho, i'm taken over to mrs H who had fallen in the night and had a severed an artery in her scalp. The wound was stitched up and she felt fine, but her hair was matted with blood. I was handed a comb and told it was my job to get it out.

Now she'd been sitting there with a lot of blood in her hair for a good four hours and most of it had clotted and tanged in her hair with a nice layer of blood jelly forming over her scalp.
So i got my apron and my gloves on and began to comb. And of course, i combed towards myself.

When i walked out that cubicle, i was splattered with small drops of blood. It didn't seem quite so bad until i took the apron off and you could very clearly see the outline of the apron against my uniform.

I still find it difficult to go in to a butchers, because her hair (and me afterwards) smelt like raw meat.
(minsh, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 21:57, Reply)

My kidneys
"You have far too much blood in your urine for a woman of your age," said the urologist.

Eh? What? Exactly how much blood is acceptable in my urine? Because, really, y'know, I was thinking "none".

( crackhouseceilidhband Fuck off back to Mumsnet, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 21:47, 3 replies)

Rude awakening
When I was a kid and still now, I got/get nosebleeds a lot. Not so much now but when I was little it was like every other day and REALLY big ones.

Anyway, I used to have a "bed-tent", like one of these

www.jacksons-camping.co.uk/kidstuff/images/carbed.jpg

but just like a tent on a bed, with no windows, light blue, and really 80's.

One night I had a massive nosebleed while having a nightmare and only noticed when my mum came to wake me in the morning and found blood-stained hand-prints and swathes of gore plastered on the inside of the bed-tent, clearly visible from the outside.

She thought I'd been butchered or something. Her scream woke me up, only to find myself covered in blood which made ME scream which wasn't a good idea since it made my mum go even more mental.
(Mr.Dog was in love again on, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 21:46, Reply)

Bag o' blood
There are various problems that seem to arise in inbred populations. Multiple heads, missing fingers, extra fingers and staggeringly low IQ are the favourites, but what happens when your community selectively breeds for intelligence over a couple of thousand years?

Tay Sachs is what happens. A terrible genetic condition whereby a beautiful blue-eyed blonde-haired child is born to you, develops healthily and happily for the first few months, then regresses into an unresponsive mentally eroded twitching vegetable until death at around the age of four or five.

So most Jewish secondary schools regularly have people who come round, and in the same way as you would've had your BCG jab, they test all the kids for Tay Sachs. Not to see if they have it of course (they'd be rather dead by then) but if they're a carrier. It's useful information for finding partners you'd consider marrying etc. Now I didn't go to a Jewish school, but I had found someone I wanted to marry. I'd have to go and arrange the testing myself. Luckily for me, the NHS does the testing, and Barnet General did regular blood test every Thursday.

The next Thursday I could, I hauled myself out to the arse-end of the Northern Line and walked to the hospital. Once inside, it took me a long time to find out where I was meant to be going, but I eventually reached an open lobby area where people were waiting for blood tests. It was rather odd, as the tests were done in a series of small tent-like rooms at the front of the foyer, and all kinds of tests were being done. I sat down and after an hour of waiting started to drift off, drowsily wondering if they'd give me a biscuit afterwards like they did when you donated blood...

...and jolted awake as the number on my ticket was called. I was starting to get a bit nervous. After all, this was something that could be devastating if we were both carriers. I entered the blood tent.

"Uh, I'm having a Tay Sachs test..." I said helpfully to the nurse who sat me down and turned round to get the needles.
"Yes dear" she replied "Now hold still, this is going to sting a bit."

It's always a lie - it bloody burt, but because I was nervous the blood flowed fairly quickly and soon three small glass vials were full. The nurse withdrew the needle, dabbed, patched and put the vials into a little ziploc bag.

"Here you go dear"
"Oh! Um, thank you"

I left the tent clutching the ziploc bag of my own, rapidly cooling blood. Ten seconds later I re-entered the tent.

"I'm terribly sorry, but, uh, where do I take my blood?"
"To the blood clinic dear, it's on the third floor."
"Ok, thanks...silly me"

I hadn't anticipated spending my next hour wandering a hospital carrying a baggie with my blood in it. It was worth it in the end though - it all came through clear - yay! Too bad I have absolutely no interest in having kids...
( Hampster Squared has stuff at www.tilla.co.uk, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 21:34, 2 replies)

Unfortunate
Once my ex-girlfriend decided cut off my dick with a knife and then plough into my chest with a chainsaw.
That's sort of put me off kinky sex, I prefer the missionary position now.
(SSSSS, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 21:13, 3 replies)

Swords and scars
Aged about eight, I and my then-best-friend Peter decided to play swords with some big bits of metal we found in the local scrapheap otherwise known as the back of his parents garage.

Having (then, as now) the reaction times and physical coordination of a blind orang-utang on barbiturates, this resulted in me getting twatted on the face. Blood all over, rivers of it.

This made me happy - everyone at school had a nosebleed, and now I had one too. Result! So proudly off to Peters mother...who called my mother...who to my bemusement turned up in the car (despite it being only 100m from our house)...because of course I hadn't got a nosebleed, I had sliced open my upper lip and it was flapping in the breeze.

A number of stiches at the time, and, despite 30+ (..eep...) years having passed, I still have a very handsome scar. Particularly visible if suntanned or unshaven. I like to think it makes me dangerously attractive.

Which is only one of a number of scars accumulated over the years, due to said lack of co-ordination and reaction - which really ought to have taught me to try more appropriate hobbies, but never has.

Second place of honour in my personal blood-everywhere competition was when I sliced open my knee during a fall when on a climbing trip in the Alps. In those balmy pre-mobile phone times (remember those?) getting help would have required a wait of fuck-knows-how-many hours whilst someone took themselves off the mountain....so I allowed my mate, who fancied himself as a paramedic, to stitch it up on the spot with the suture kit he just happened to have with him. Funnily enough, of all the times I have been stitched up, this hurt the least - as in not at all.
(FailedScientist, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 21:11, Reply)

Window 1. Big D 0
Some moons ago a younger and significantly hairier Big D was sent downstairs to collect some binbags from the messengers. An easy job, possibilties for harm fairly minimal, or so you'd think.
In short: Got there, spotted bags, thought "Excellent. I shall avail myself of an armful and return in triumph." and bent over to grab them.
Unfortunately I completly failed to notice that said bags were under a window. Which was open.
When I straightened up the top of my head met the bottom of the windowframe. Hard.

Ow. Fuck.

Then I put my hand up to investigate the sore spot and it came away red with my very lifeblood.

Oh Fuck.

I'm quite proud of the way I wandered back to the office, blood trickling down my neck, and calmly announced that I'd had a "bit of a mishap."
Not only was my favourite shirt ruined but I was brushing dried blood out of my hair for about a week afterwards.
Nutting inanimate objects seems to be a family trait come to think of it.
So, erm, if I ever think of a witty punchline I'll edit in later.
(Big D, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 21:07, Reply)

My cousin.
I've mentioned this before, but my cousin has a good party trick: He can tell when it's about to rain, up to a minute in advance.
How?

His nose starts pouring blood.

I don't fully know the science behind it. but it has something to do with the change in air pressure which happens prior to rain.

It's quite fun to watch, and always useful if your having a BBQ.
( OneSullenBrit *air sandwiches*, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 21:00, 5 replies)

hospital tales
I look after a lot of alcoholics at work. One of the things that happens to chronic alcoholics is that their blood clotting goes all to pot and they're very prone to internal bleeds. One young lady had come in losing blood from both ends and was extremely poorly. She was vomiting what looked like pints of fresh blood and had managed to get it all over her face and down her front so she looked pretty gory already. Because of the amount of blood she was losing she had to have an emergency transfusion and we had two bags of blood going into two separate cannulae in her arms. To get it in as fast as we could we were squeezing the bags (can you see where this is headed?). The young doctor on the other side of the patient got a bit keen with the squeezing and the bag burst all over him and the patient. Luckily it was probably less than half full by then but it looks like an awful lot more when it's splattered all over the place.

She died by the way. Don't drink, kids.
(Mary Mandolin still had it on, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 20:54, Reply)

Blood & Brownies
Just before I was about to start my 2nd Year of college the ex-girlfriend was at our house having lunch with us. She had just had a dental brace fitted so couldn't eat food that was too hard and my mum remarked that we had some chocolate brownies in the cupboard. Being the gent I am, I offered to get said brownies from the kitchen which prompted my mother to jump up and proclaim that she would get them because I "would eat them all as soon as I got hold of the tin". As is usual in our house a mad 5 mins of wrestling for control ensued and much laughter and merriment was had until my mother made a dash for the kitchen with me in hot pursuit.

As she ran through the glass door she caught it slightly so it swung closed. I put my hand out to push it back open and simply went straight through it. Mum turns round to find me standing there with blood spurting out my head. I'm ushered to a chair and my step-dad sits with a towel pressed to the wound as mum checks me over and finds more cuts...in all my left wrist, forearm and elbow were all sliced deeply as well as a gash on my head which was down to the skull. The kitchen resembled a crime scene with glass strewn across the floor and my blood coagualating in pools all over the place. I'm told that my mum lifted the towel off my head to check the damage and simply said "oh fuck, we're gonna have to call an ambulance"

One trip to A&E later and I had 8 stitches in my head, 6 in my forearm and 6 in my elbow plus steristrips on my wrist. Oh and in the ambulance they questioned my ex because they thought it was a domestic and she'd done it...I put them straight though as I told them it wasn't her, it was my mother

...oh and when I got back from hospital I got to eat all the brownies I wanted
(Freak on a Leash is jerking off to centre himself on, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 20:43, Reply)

Ceramics
First day back at school after the summer holidays and it was PE for the first 'lesson'. As we all waited outside to be let inside for some ritual humiliation in shorts, I and a fellow pupil thought it would be funny to throw some bits of a broken plate at each other.

They were tiny bits, really. But when one of them went wide and hit Suzanne Rook (whose mother said she couldn't wear a bra until she was 17 even though she had norks like basketballs), we realised that a tiny piece of plate is sharper than it looks. Razor sharp, in fact. Especially when it hits you in the forehead where all of those blood vessels are close to the surface.

Well, it was like that scene from Carrie. Poor 'Rooky' was jetting blood from her forehead and it was running down her face in numerous streams like she'd been scalped. It was all over her clothes, and her expression was generally one of unspeakable gore. Other girls started screaming that she was going to die and one thing was clear - I was in the shit.

What I remember most clearly, however, is that as I stood in front of the apoplectic headmaster he asked me if my brains were made of pease pudding.

Under the circumstances, the best answer would have been a mumbled "Yes, sir" or "No, sir" - either which would have sufficed. What I shouldn't have done under any circumstances was ask him what pease pudding was... and then crack up laughing with a suicidal abandon. I just couldn't stop. Even as his face empurpled and I saw the mother of all bollockings approach, I couldn't stop thinking about the ridiculous notion of pease pudding in my head.

He screamed at me so loudly that I lost my hearing for a while.
(frankspencer, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 20:39, 2 replies)

I am not fine with blood.
Needles? I can cope with needles. Give me an intra-muscular injection all you want, medical types, I won't shy away, but mention veins, arteries or b..b..b..b..blood, and you'll have a very limp, very unconscious me on your floor.

I did not know this, however, until I was the grand old age of 20. Whilst working in a local sweet factory, I developed what the doctor thought was bronchiitis, and got a smashing 6 weeks paid holidays from work. The abtibiotics didn't seem to work all that well as I hacked up lungfulls of white gloop from my aching bellows, but after about 6 weeks it started to clear, and I reluctantly returned to work. (As a side note, I've had a sporradic cough ever since, which is nice).

Now. All was well until about six months later when my cousin, sporting some lovely freshly cracked ribs, came to my house. It turned out that he had cracked his ribs coughing, and the doctor had done some tests which concluded he had whooping cough. The doctor had asked that I go along for tests too, just to find out if I had also had the bug. by then it was acadmic, but I was curious so I went along.

At the time, this doctor was not my regular doc. He took me in and proceeded to take the blood..... no real problems, nothing major. He drew two little vials of blood from my arm, then waved one of them around in front of me as he explained about how long the results would take. I remember wondering why his voice was echoing like that. "Meh" thinks I, and I leave the unusually busy doctors surgery.

I walked across the gravel outside and noticed that it sounded as though the gravel was inside my head. There were lovely purple spots in front of my eyes as I reached my car, and I discovered my right arm wasn't working. I tried to open the car door with my left hand only to feel something hit me hard on the side of the head. It was the pavement. Not knowing how I had ended up on the floor or why (and admittedly my brain wasn't running at 100% capacity here) I struggled, groaning, to my feet and resumed the effort of getting into the car. I heard a voice and turned to see, through the haze, a blonde person approaching me. "That's lucky!" I thought, thinking it was my then fiance, but no, it was a mate of mine's mum, who thought I was drunk and trying to drive home. She had to hold me up against a wall as I slurred "Blood.... doc-torr.... need to.... sit...." When she realised what was happening, she tried to take me into the aforementioned PACKED waiting room. Incoherent and half unconscious I may have been, but I was already plenty embarrassed as it was and there were about 20 people in that room. I clamped on to the wall with what dwindling strength I had and tried to beg her to let me lay down in my car. Fortunately, my cousin (it just struck me the irony, it was the same cousin) drove past and stopped to take me home.

I have since had blood taken and despite the docs best efforts, it happened again. Only way to beat it is to let me lay down until it passes, which would be roughly 20 seconds if only they would listen but I usually have to spend 5 minutes half unconscious with my head between my legs before they'll listen to me. Knowitalls.
( baw__bag contains traces of nuts on, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 20:29, 2 replies)

I'm in a pub one evening
with an ex and her new girlfriend. Copious pints later we're back at mine and all end up in bed together. After the fun had been had they went to sleep in the spare room, leaving me in my bed.

Fast forward to the morning. I get woken by my ex. "Are you ok? Neither of us are on and we both woke up covered in blood." I peel back the duvet to reveal what looks like a murder scene - blood everywhere; all over me, all over the sheet, all over the duvet. There was so much blood it had soaked through the sheet, through the mattress protector and stained the mattress.

It turns out that at some point during the fun night before I'd got a small cut on the side of my cock, a little under my helmet. It wasn't big, but it was deep and by fuck did it bleed.
( CowJam, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 20:24, 2 replies)

Lifeguarding
When I was in high school I blagged a job as a lifeguard for a company that apartment complexes hired to provide community swimming pool management and lifeguarding.

I ended up a pool in a relatively ghetto apartment complex. Not horrible, but lower middle class folks.

What lifeguarding amounts to at a community pool is: well paid and trained baby-sitter. Parents would literally drop their kids off at the pool on their way to work in the morning and pick them up when they got home. So I got to know those kids pretty well.

I was a stickler for NO running on the pool deck. It was an order I shouted probably 20-40 times per day. Seriously. Kids are kids and they forget.

There was this one kid, Jerome. He was 11 I think, slightly taller than the rest of the kids, but still a kid. Excellent basketball player though (we had a court next to the pool, so when noone was swimming I'd grab a ball and go shoot some hoops).

So this one day he is running around on the pool deck (concrete) and I yelled at him THREE Times. I said "Jerome, seriously, next time I raise my voice for this, you're out of the pool for two days. PERIOD." He nodded petulantly.

Not five minutes later he takes off after another kid and JUST as I am standing up on the lifeguard chair to properly BELLOW the words "JEROME YOU ARE OUT OF HERE!", he slips.

He smacks his face into the hard concrete pool deck, right at the edge of the pool...and blood starts POURING from his lower lip. He had literally driven his teeth right through the lower lip and blood was GUSHING out of him into the pool.

Now, typically, blood diffuses pretty quickly in a large pool of water...this was not. It was a RAPIDLY growing dark red cloud in the deep end of the pool and it wasnt dissipating.

Not wanting to have to climb down and run around the pool, I dove off the stand and swam over to where he was laying, literally just staring at the accumulating blood in the pool, in shock. I was careful to avoid swimming through the red cloud and got up to see the lower lip was just hanging on his face.

It freaked me out. I hollered to the other guard and told her to call 911...she finished reading the chapter of the book she was reading before dialing, but the ambulance was there in a few minutes.

The entire time, Jerome didnt say a word. Just stared at me as I was trying to staunch the blood flow with gauze and pressure.

Three days later, he was released from the hospital after some SIGNIFICANT repair work. A week after that he was back at the pool. He wasnt there 15 minutes before I had to scream at him: "JEROME STOP THE GODDAMNED RUNNING!"

Some kids never learn.
( Citadel Because the world needs less morons, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 20:21, 5 replies)

I got food poisoning
really bad food poisoning.
really really bad food poisoning.
So bad the public health laboratory sent me a letter saying "you have a notifiable disease try and keep away from other people".

Initially the the give away that it wasn't due to mild bit of over indulgence was the blood. Lots of it.

To compound this, I was camping on dartmoor and trying to shit into a hole I had to dig for the purpose. The sight of my bloody shit made me puke, which was also distressingly red.

I decided to cut my loses and drive home, which felt like the longest journey to Chester ever, as I had to stop at every services on the M5 & M6 I passed.

I am often reminded of the episode when I have eaten beetroot...
( mazurka wants two's up on your mum., Thu 7 Aug 2008, 20:13, 4 replies)

I used to have trouble telling which wii mote was player one
Then we had a burglary, and I was playing no more heroes at the time, so I went after the bastard by punching through some double glazing. This was with the wiimote in my hand at the time.

I ended up with a few cool scars, my mum got a new laptop, and the wiimote for player one now has suspicious brown stains on the strap.

Edit: At one point one of these jumped out at me from the cupboard. It broke, but I got distracted and didn't clean it up. Later on I went back into the kitchen to get some toast, and trod in a large piece of the glass. It went into the centre of my foot, it went in about half a cm.

After I'd stopped hopping on the other foot, going "ow, ow, ow, ow." I pulled the piece of glass out, and walked upstairs to my parents and asked what I should do.

I'd ended up trailing blood all over the kitchen and up the stairs, and when I washed my foot in the shower (according to their orders) it did look quite psycho like. It was all quite fun though.

I've noticed glass does create the largest amount of blood with the smallest wound.
( Rev. Cleo still alive, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 20:10, 2 replies)

Dental horror; aged 6
When I was a nipper, my dental hygene wasn't it's best. I ate alot of sweets and sugar on an almost daily basis and this reached it's peak when one of my jaw teeth finally caved in and dissolved under the acid. There was the inevitable hole in the tooth and agony ensured.

So I turn up at the dentist screaming my head off; it felt like a red hot poker being doused into the side of my jaw with every whimper I made, so I sat there shaking and crying, as any other 6 year old would do. The dentist drags me into his office and I'm sat on the dentist's chair with this nurse glancing over. He gets his "implements" and starts prodding the hole with his metal scraper while saying "Does it hurt?" No doc, I'm in fucking heaven for fuck's sake. More screaming, and then he nods to the nurse. She comes over holding a mask with a pipe on it, and then suddenly everything goes black.

I wake up an hour later and all I see was the same nurse with a paper bucket full of my blood in front of me and me puking it up. I'm ushered outside wondering where the fuck am I and taken by me mum onto the bus home. Me face is swolen outwards so I look like a Channel 5 documentary and I never missed a day brushing me teeth for a good 15-20 years afterwards.

Fucking hate dentists, the gassing cunts.

PS true story, my wife's an ex-dental receptionist (and was working there when I met her).
( Jeccius Steam Borderlands 2 junkie, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 20:05, Reply)

Eric Bristow works at the NHS
Haven't read through the rest of the posts, so this is probably replicated elsewhere...

I occasionally give blood (voluntarily). The last (and probably THE last) time I donated was a nightmare. Nursey puts needle into arm. I feel initial resistance, then needle goes in smoothly. Only for me to then feel uncomfortable resistance again. Nursey asks if I can put my legs together - I did so, thinking it may increase the blood flow or something. No, it was so she could sit on the bed and push again, rather like a snooker player taking a trick shot. I feel rather uncomfortable, and she notes this. Then notices a small bruise forming around the needle entry point. Saying she cannot continue due to the bruise, she retracts the needle. And drops the blood bag, which is about a quarter full.

A small amount of blood goes a long way... Bag hit the floor and burst. The floor looked like the opening beach scene in Saving Private Ryan.

(The reason it felt odd was she had put the needle through the vein and out the other side. My arm went purple from the elbow to the hand, as the knackered vein was bleeding into my arm. And the holes opened up every time I did anything strenuous - rugby, gym, wanking...)
(animal252 last activated his kitten hammer on, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 20:00, 3 replies)

a tiny fountain of gore
I was about 15, on the bus home from school, in a short-sleeve shirt. Another kid was jabbing other kids with a pin, and he stuck it in the middle of my forearm, probably hitting an artery. A needle-thin stream of blood shot out of my arm, all the way to the roof of the bus.

It didn't hurt at all, and I was too fascinated by this to be upset, but I naturally clamped my hand down, putting pressure on the hole. When I removed my hand, a minute later, I couldn't find the hole at all. It had healed completely.

Did I twat the other kid upside the chin, or turn him in to a human pincushion? Nah, it was actually a cool thing to brag about later.
( bnt what, me worry?, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 19:49, 3 replies)

Clumsy child
Well, clumsy person full stop, that's me!

A couple that stand out from when I was younger. The first being when I was out riding my bike. I went down the hill behind our house and at the bottom were some steps straight ahead, or you could turn right and go around the side of the houses and back round to the front. When I got to the bottom, for some reason I decided (read: my brain decided without telling me) aganst turning right and I flew down over the steps into a rough gravel car port on my face. Yum.

Another was when doing my textiles homework one weekend. I used to put the needles in the carpet in my room cos I didn't have a fancy pin cushion. One of the needles was a lot thicker than the usual as it was used for threading wool. As a result, the eye-end was very thick. I was sitting on the floor and went to lean back on my hand. My hand wouldn't go down to the floor and I didn't realise why, so I just pressed my hand down further. I didn't feel any pain but I did hear a 'pop' where the fat end of the fat needle went into the palm of my hand. I stumbled down the stairs to my dad and just feebly held out my hand containing said needle before promptly passing out.

Another one I remember is playing frisbee outside with a friend and my little sister, who's nose would bleed if you so much a looked at it the wrong way. (You can see where this is going). After a few minutes of niceties, I threw the frisbee her way and I could just see it heading straight for her face. Now, being the lovely big sister I was (haha) I shouted "duck!" but the little dimwit just stood there as the frisbee hit her square on the nose and turned her pretty white socks a lovely shade of scarlet.

Oh, and a few months ago I was so drunk I was horrendously sick and was still throwing up the next day. I threw up so much I must've torn something because by the morning I was vomiting blood. Nice.
( El Lazarus is calm now, Ish,, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 19:44, Reply)

Many moons ago
When I was about 154 in cat years, possibly my 154th birthday weekend coming to think of it, I awoke at a friends house covered in blood naked with a similarly naked young lady with me.

As you do the first thing you do is make sure she's breathing.

Excellent, that's OK, and she's not got any obvious wounds (insert your own joke here).

Anyhoo - it is at this point I finally think "if it's not her then.."

Check the old boy and he's OK, big relief there.

Then i see this glistening, shiny, sparkling thing on the floor. I am transfixed, like Gollum staring at his precious. It is a ring, a silver ring.

i reach down and pick it up. I recognise the ring. It is mine.

Attached to it is half of my left nipple.

At this point I vomit.

All over naked young lady.

She is not impressed.

She never speaks to me again.

I still have a rather fetching scar as a reminder of that morning.

Fortunately, I do not remember the evening preceding it.

Cider rocks.
(magic the cat will someone please think of the kittens, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 19:44, 2 replies)

I do still have two eyes, but by all rights I shouldn't.
It was after we moved from NY to VA, so I think it was about eleven years ago. Certainly I was old enough to know better...

Being from the mountains of NY, one of the things that I used to do that I loved- and missed terribly- was to have a small outdoor fire at night. So one day I got hold of a load of rocks (around here it's called riprap and they use it to line ditches- ragged chunks of stone about six or eight inches across) and carted them to the back yard, where I constructed a medium sized fire pit with three walls and an open front- perfect for toasting marshmallows with the kids.

I had lots of trees around that dropped branches, so I never lacked for fuel. I had a round chunk of oak- a log I couldn't split- that I used for a chopping block, and would use it to chop some of the larger branches to chunks about a foot and a half long.

One Saturday afternoon in October I was busy cutting up stuff for the fire pit with an axe. I had a routine down- axe in one hand, branch in the other, do two smallish chops on one side, turn it over and hit it in the back side opposite the notch I had just made. The branch would crack and the chunk would fall off, and I'd just move the rest of the branch over to repeat it. Chop chop, turn, crack. Chop chop, turn, crack. The wood piled up.

My son came outside to talk to me as I was doing this- as I recall he was complaining about something his brother had done- so I was slightly distracted in my task. Chop chop, turn, CRACK- and the chunk whipped around and caught me, end first, on the right eyebrow.

"FUCK!"

I set down the axe and staggered toward the stairs to go into the kitchen. I held my hand over my eyebrow and felt the blood running down my forearm, dripping off of my elbow. I got a paper towel and folded it to hold it to my eyebrow. I walked down the hall, still dripping (followed by my son, who was now wiping up blood off the floor with a paper towel of his own) and called up to my wife, "I think I need to go with you to work."

"What!" She appeared at the top of the stairs, her hair half curled, wearing a bra and granny panties and a scowl. "What did you do?"

"I cut myself." (I would have thought this to be obvious from the bloody paper towel and the child wiping the floor next to me.) "I need to go, now."

"I'm not ready!" I heard her go stomping off through the bedroom and crashing as she slammed things around. "And what are we going to do with the kids? We can't take them with us- how are you going to get home?-"

"Call my sister. We can take them there and go to Nearby Hospital."

"No, you'll come to work with me at Faraway Hospital! I know the doctors there!" Crash, slam, stomp stomp stomp.

"Fine. Just hurry, please."

I heard her pick up the phone and call my sister. Lots of chattering, lots of nervous giggles, lots of omygods, more chatter, and all the while I'm still bleeding. Several minutes pass.

I called up the stairs again. "Please tell her you'll drop them off. I'll just drive myself to Nearby Hospital."

"No you won't!" This harpy screech was followed by her appearing in the doorway, in the same state as before and looking even less appealing than ever. "You're in no condition to drive!"

I snorted. "And you are?"

She whirled and stomped off again.

I sighed. "Look, just tape some gauze to it and I'll take care of it, okay?"

Slam, crash, slam, stomp stomp stomp and a stampede of musk oxen on the staircase and she was downstairs, an expression of rage on her face and tape in her hand. She folded the gauze and pressed it against my face, then put two pieces of tape on. "There!"

"Thank you. I'll be over at Nearby Hospital." And I drove myself there.

The Emergency Room was rather busy, but as I was bleeding they got me in pretty quickly. After a moment a doctor came over, peeled off the gauze and inspected me. "Okay, I have a couple of things I need to take care of right now. Can you hang on for about ten minutes?"

"Sure. But look, it's not that big a deal- you can have a nurse just put in a couple of stitches. It's not that bad."

He gave a grim smile. "That's one man's opinion. Sit tight, I'll be back."

I shrugged and sat back.

As he worked on me he explained that he had been a plastic surgeon in the military, so it was a little more complicated than just a couple of sutures. He spent about a half hour on me and put twenty three little teeny stitches on my face.

He was just finishing up as Nurse Ratched appeared. She informed me that the kids were at my sister's, and asked calmly if I was okay to drive home. I assured her I was fine, and she could go in to work. We finished up the paperwork and I left, put up with the inevitable piss-take from my sister, and took the kids home.

As we drove my son said, "It's okay that you said that bad word, Dad."

Thanks, kid.

Epilogue:

The wound looked nicely fierce for Halloween, and I had a doctor remove them (NOT Nurse Ratched, thankyouverymuch). It itched as it healed, but it also ached.

One day at work I went to the bathroom and inspected it- by now the ache should have eased, for chrissake. And then I noticed a dark spot that hadn't been there in my eyebrow before. A gentle exploration revealed that it was rough and very hard.

I thought for a moment, then carefully caught it between my fingernails. I then extracted a sliver a quarter inch long from my half-healed eyebrow- and fought off the urge to heave my stomach all over the walls.

It doesn't show much now, other than a couple of small hairs that seem slightly out of place on my right eyebrow.

I no longer use my axe for that job. I have less dangerous methods now...
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 7 Aug 2008, 19:43, 7 replies)

nose correction
When I was 16 I had to get my nose straightened , as it had become broken when I was 10 in a swimming pool accident (trying to swim up behind a friend underwater, when he kicked off to swim away and got me square in the face).

So they take me in to hospital and I ask, innocently, how they can straighten it now it had set? Does the surgeon just whack it with a big green surgical claw-happer, I asked (in mirth)?

My mirth rapidly faded away as I saw the nurse bite her lip and say RATHER TOO LOUD that the surgeon was very experienced with his tools and I shuldn't worry myself about it. My god, I thought, they ARE going to hammer my juvenile face back into shape with a rusty crowbar.

Anyway, they knock me out (count backwards from 100, he said- I made it to 97) and I wake up a bit later with my sinuses packed with cotton and a dull ache- to be expected, and am wheeled back into the ward. Awake and dopey, I can feel warm dripping blood going down the back of my nose and into my throat(it can't get out the front through the packing) so I had to swallow, hoping it would stop soon.

Three hours later of continuously swallowing snotty blood the surgeon came around for a post-op consult. Immediately he tutted and said- that packing is soaked through, we better replace it. Come to the treatment room and we'll tidy that up, ok?

Obediently I did while they started to unpack what looked like yards and yards of cotton tape, pulling it out of my nasal cavity like a magician's scarf trick. At one point though, a scab must have come off with the packing and the steady drip suddenly became a rapid stream, like a ketchup bottle had been squeezed hard.

The surgeon's movements took on a sudden burst of speed and he called a nurse in, then inserted a bulb on a tube up my nose and inflated it with air from a large syringe, applying direct presure to the source of the bleed - where the cauterisation had obviously failed - and it gave me an instant headache behind my eyes.

Probably only lost half a pint of blood but it does go a long way and looks like the aftermath of a slasher movie. Unsteadily I was led back to my bed in the ward, tube up my nose, streams of sticky blood all over my chest and dressing gown. They put me back to bed and sent for a technician to put in a line for a glucose drip.

Unortunately the chap that came put the needle in the vein in the back of my hand and managed to chuck it straight through a bundle of nerves which made my hand feel like it was being burned and electrocuted at the same time- I yelled and the guy quickly pulled it out and tried somewhere else. Exhausted, I passed out. Then they woke me up to give me an injection of valium to calm me down (calm me down? I was asleep!) which let me doped up to the eyeballs and oblivious to everything going on around me.

My folks turned up and were told the stock post-op blather about 'they may be slightly groggy and will have a bandage across the operation wound' except they came in to me covered in dried blood, a tube up my nose, a drip in my arm and me unable to be woken up.

My nose isn't properly straight either. Fucking excellent!
( Rotating Wobbly Hat That's not a banana. THIS is a banana., Thu 7 Aug 2008, 19:40, Reply)

still managed to do my job... sort of
My first ever job was a Saturday Job working in a camping shop, which basically envolved spending every saturday for two years of my life pretending I gave a crap about camping to extremley boring members of the public....

On one memorable occasion I was showing someone a leatherman tool (one of those that fold out in a 'v' shape and have about a million different tools attached so you can survive about any situation that could possibly arise on a two week family camping trip..) as I was folding the thing back I noticed the customers face slowly turning paler, unknown to me I hadnt quite folded it up properly and one of the stupidly sharp knife bits had dug into my thumb... it was so sharp I didnt feel it, it went right to the bone and as I looked at my hand it looked like Id dipped it up to the elbow in red paint, nice, anyway the the result was a trip to hospital and apparently he bought it! (well not that one)
(hickmonster hickmonster Because your worthless...., Thu 7 Aug 2008, 19:40, 1 reply)

Painting
Last year I lived in uni student halls with some randoms, one of who we shall call K.

K was a northern Scottish girl who was quite frankly weird. She was hyper as hell, appeared to have an entire language only her and a few friends could understand and was also prone to getting very, very drunk. Basically your average dance/performing arts student.

One night when we returned from a flat night out K was exceedingly drunk, as were we all, and we proceeded to go to the living room. After a short while I got too tired, sodded of to bed like a pansy and went to sleep (Ok I tell a lie, its me so I probably wanked like an enraged gibbon first).

The next morning I awoke, crawled from bed and went into the living room to sit and watch TV to be greeted by an amazing sight.

All the flat mates names.

On the wall.

In giant letters.

In BLOOD.

My reaction of course was shock, followed by the musings that maybe we should get a priest in to exorcise the place or something, there was also blood smeared all over and the like.

Anyway, as more people awoke I learned that K had been very drunk and dancing around with the obvious choice of dancing companion, 2 wine glasses. She managed to clash these together, cutting her finger open as the shards went everywere and in her drunken state thought it would be absolutely fucking hilarious to do a bit of painting.

In the end I got my own back, I managed to cut myself one day and drew one of them satanic stars in a circle on the wall as well as 666 in places, that got a wonderful reception. Wonder if I could have caught something from the wall?
(Guilt wants to get in your moist confines, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 19:26, Reply)

What's red and foolish?
A blood clot.

Sorry.

/coat
(onefishtwofish Redfishbluefish, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 19:22, 4 replies)

Many moons ago
when I was only wee my folks had gone out for the night leaving me in the care of the babysitter.

When my folks came home they found the house splattered in blood. It was across the floors, up the walls, on the furniture, curtains everywhere. To make matters worse it seemed one of the cats had walked though it all.

Fearing murder by the babysitter or passing axe wielding psychopath they ran into the front room to find the babysitter, covered in blood, near hysterical crying 'I didn't know what to do.'

My mother by this point was frantic to say the least. She ran up the stairs, also covered in blood convinced that I had been in some dreadful accident.

But no I was fast asleep.

Now, not knowing what to make of the situation she followed the trail of blood to the spare room.

Gingerly pushing open the door, expecting to find so madman, she found one of the cats.
A male neutered Siamese. This cat was the campest animal I have ever met. He looked and acted like Kenneth Williams.
He too was covered in blood. He took one look at my mother and lifted his paw and shook it. Blood spurted everywhere.
On closed inspection, and talking to the now calm sitter, it would seem that the cat had cut his paw. Being the big fairy he was he ran round the house shaking it trying to get attention.

Length etc.
( Mrs Entity is in hiding., Thu 7 Aug 2008, 19:05, 1 reply)

Ikea are entirely to blame.
"Lets go to Ikea" my sister said last week. I had little choice in the matter so off we went.
I dont like shopping.
I HATE crowds.
I DESPISE Ikea.

Things got off to a bad start. It was a sweltering day (30+degrees) and I missed the correct exit on the motorway. This meant I had to continue through tool booths and carry on till the next exit before I could turn round, pay the tolls again and return. Except there was no exit coming from that direction so we had to go to the next one, where we got horrifically lost in a massive inudstrial estate. Sweltering heat, a huffing sister, lost, lost and even more lost, My normally unflappable self was getting a tad stressed.
Got to the shop and it was the usual Hell in Blue and Yellow. Rammed to capacity, with air conditioning not really coping. Screaming kids, arguing couples...the works. The shop layout seems designed to aggrivate too....being dragged round the lighting displays where 200 jiggawatts of lighting raise the temperature further, then straight on to the scented candles and stuff where the sickly sweet smells make you want to hurl. I was not happy. Constant bonmbardment with questions like "will this match the decor in the kitchen?" "oooh, would Pauline like that for her lounge?" were irritating me more and more. Infact I was as stressed as I have been for a long time.
We went for lunch. The queue was huge, the seating was rammed, more screaming kids.... I picked at my metballs and jam while the kids nearby ran around and around the tables.

Something happened in my nose.

Stress? high blood pressure? Stigmata in the wrong place? I dont know, but "nosebleed" is not an accurate description.
It started with me suddenly thinking "oooh, runny nose" and doing the sly wipe with the index finger, only to find it tinted red. ah. Then it started pouring. then pouring some more.
The napkins were saturated in seconds.
All this time my sister is talking to me as if nothing is wrong, but others seated nearby were starting to notice. The flow increased and the blood also started going down the back of my throat. I was coughing and spluttering and it was going everywhere. I dumped out my drink and held the paper cup under my nose to catch the blood which was pouring out at a frankly frightening rate. People were pointing and commenting, and I was feeling a bit dizzy. My plate was covered in splodges of blood and there were splatters down my t-shirt. I got up and staggered to the bogs. In a cubicle, I tipped the now almost-full cup down the pan and stood there with my arms out, leaning over the pan. The blood was still pouring out my nose and going down my throat too, so every now and then I had to spit a gobfull of blood out, between coughing and spluttering.
I tried ramming toilet paper up my nose to stop the bleeding, but it just kindof backfilled and starting gushing down my throat, making me gag. eventually it slowed to a stop. I blew my nose and out came a massive, very dark red splodge of something unspeakable.
I flushed and turned to leave the cubicle, but had to do the Very Fast Sit Down Before I Fall trick, I was so light-headed. After a few minutes to recover, I cleand up as best I could and made my way shakilly back to the canteen. I told her to carry on alone if she wanted, I was going to sit in the car, which I did.

Thing is....my nose just hasnt felt right since. I get a lot more boogers than I used to, and the insides of my nostrils are sore. I cant help picking them at night, and now wake three or four times a night, and have to have a manical picking session to sort out the tickling, itching pain, which I just cant stop doing. Should go see a doc I suppose, but I havent been to a doc (aside from a couple of trips to casualty years back for minor accidents) for at least 12 years. I just know they will tell me I have something like face-ebola and need to have my head amputated, so Im not willing to run the risk.
(dave likes cheese, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 19:02, 4 replies)

It was a question of scale, really.
Once upon a time I used to do flood and fire restoration. It was interesting work in that it almost never got routine, but we found that we would dip into ever stranger avenues of "cleanup". Like body jobs.

Not that we removed the bodies mind you, we were there to clean up the mess they invariably made. Suicides, overdoes, or just granny's bowels relaxing... these were the sorts of jobs we'd get, although I should mention that they're the sorts of jobs I'd get, since I was the only one with remotely applicable tickets, and because I wasn't as squeamish as the rest of the staff. So...

Got a call, rush job, suicide in a town about 45 minutes south, needs to be done right away, not much to do. Fair enough.

The boss was out of town, and we had several flood jobs on the go, so I was a bit tight for staff. I sent the new guy. In hindsight, this was a mistake.

"Not much to do" to me sounded like "a bit of a stain on the carpet", which he could have easily handled. And if not, he could have phoned me and I could have talked him through it.

Instead, it appeared that a 215cm (seven foot) man had put a rifle under his chin and blown his head off, in a basement kitchen. The geyser of blood from what remained of his neck had apparently been under such pressure that when it hit the ceiling, it managed to spray all the walls, the appliances, the cupboards... everywhere... with unbelievable amounts of goop.

The new employee, completely unprepared for this and having (as I found out later) a weak stomach anyway, couldn't get past the smell and was unable to go back inside once he'd got the sheared copper smell in his nostrils. His wife (who didn't work for us), whom he'd picked up on the way so they could spend a little time together actually did most of the work for us, bless her. And when she'd got some of the deeper slicks of sludge cleaned up, our employee managed to overcome his nausea and help her.

It may have been when the twelve year old stepson of the suicide came and and started helping them to clean up his dad that convinced the new guy that this needed to be done in a timely manner. He re-lost his composure though when he found a chunk of jawbone under the front of the fridge when he was mopping up more blood.

The pictures were just unbelievable. I don't have them (I've not been with that company for many years), but imagine John Woo making the Quake movie.

*pop*

Length? I believe the police report said it was a .30-06
(Ejaculantern was caught desecrating pumpkins on, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 19:00, Reply)

Ahhh the wonderful world of blood transfusion
Back in the day when I was but a mere undergraduate student I worked part time as a lab tech in haematology and blood transfusion at my local hospital. My course involved a very interesting unit on forensic biology, including, amoung other things, blood splatter patterns.
The university lab practical involved splattering horse blood everywhere (obviously when the lecturer wasn't looking) was quite fun but did show some interesting results such as the "shape" of the blood drops flying at a resonably speed were the exact opposite shape to what you would think.
Next day I went to work with my new knowledge of blood splatter and informed my boss of the results I had got from my experiments the day before (something I often did because he thought, for some bizarre reason, that what I did at uni was interesting). His response?
"Really? We'll see about that. I just have to check whether these old viles of blood are ready to be chucked or not"
Off I went chuckling to myself about the fact I actually got to do the experiment so I knew what I said was right.
Five minutes later I wandered into the lab to see my boss (a senior biomedical scientist) chucking blood samples around trying to prove me wrong.
Honestly I though he was old enough to know better.
(tillyecl Tilly, Thu 7 Aug 2008, 18:54, Reply)