Well that was dumb...

I was working on a 2001 Durango 5.9L for a fellow pizza delivery driver back when I was still in grad school. I forget why but I was under the truck and had to reach up to check something near the engine. I had it running as it was the middle of winter and figured I could carefully snake my hand past the HOT exhaust pipe. Well I did but when I went to pull my hand out I nicked the exhaust pipe with the thin-skinned inside edge of my wrist and promptly got a nice 3rd-degree burn. That **** hurt for weeks and really restricted my motion, had to reapply dressings multiple times a day for the first few days.

Another time I was in a cranky mood while replacing the license plate registration tags on my mom's car. Using a razor blade to remove the old stickers, I wasn't paying attention and was holding the plate with my left middle finger, right in the path of the blade. Welp the blade slipped and I sliced off a small piece of the tip of my finger, RIGHT where the nerve ending was. Damn thing just kept bleeding like crazy, after a couple hours I gave up and went over to the nearest Urgent Care. They realized it had to be cauterized to stop the bleeding. I really really didn't want an anesthesia shot numbing my whole hand for hours so I told them to just use topical. Well the blood flow was too constant that not enough of the numbing stuff actually got into the wound; as soon as they touched it with the Silver Nitrate stick I felt a massive jolt of pain like a lightning bolt running up my arm and let out a yelp which freaked out the nurses lol. At that point I audibly said "F*** it, give me some wood to chomp on and just go for it". Bit down on a stack of tongue depressors while they finished cauterizing the wound. One of those times that I was in so much pain I got woozy and nauseous afterwards, crazy how something so small can cause so much pain.

Yet another time I was trying to unscrew an upper ball joint on my Duster, the socket wasn't quite the right size and on one crank I didn't make sure it was seated properly... socket slipped off and I slammed the end of my breaker bar right into the center of my chest. Thankfully didn't cause much damage but I had a cool-looking scar for a couple months.

All that stuff happened within a year or so and I quickly did a 'self-eval' and told myself to stop being so careless and stupid lol. I was lucky I'm still young, I'm sure those experiences would have been worse if I was 60 instead of 30.