Add Event My Events Log In

Upcoming Events

    We see you appreciate a good vintage. But there comes a time to try something new. Click here to head over to the redesigned Louisville.com. It's where you'll find all of our latest work. And plenty of the good ol' stuff, too, looking better than ever.

    Magazine

    Print this page

    Each month, we send our staff a memo that poses them a question. In our August issue, we asked about the worst injury they've had, inspired by this month's Top Surgeons list.
     

    I fell in a four-foot-deep open sewer walking home from a bar one night in remote Kigoma, Tanzania. Blood gushed from my shin. And there was nothing to do about it. The town had no hospital and ran on giant generators. I tied it up tightly with a shirt and, still seeping blood, went back to the little inn. I eventually fell asleep wondering if I might bleed to death in the middle of the night. Nice to wake up the next day.

    — Chris Kenning, contributing writer

     

    The neighbor boy I had a crush on offered me a ride on the back of his bike. As he pedaled, my sandaled foot rested on the chain guard and slipped into the spokes. All the skin ripped from the side of my foot. He dropped the bike with me attached. Somebody got my mother, who ran down the street and exclaimed, “Suki, you ruined your best pair of sandals!” I passed out and woke up in the car on the way to the ER.

    — Suki Anderson, art director

     

    A backyard baseball game turned bloody when a kid swung and hit me in the head on the follow-through. I put my hand to my forehead and it came back drenched in red, like I’d touched a painted wall that was still wet. Somehow, I only needed a few stitches on my eyebrow (and still have the scar). After that, we had a rule: No swinging until you did a slow pirouette with the bat extended at arm’s length.

    — Jenny Kiefer, associate writer

     

    I tripped over a loose brick around a fire pit and fell backward, placing my hands inside the fire to catch myself. It resulted in second-degree burns on both hands, third-degree burns on my lower back. This guy scooped me out of the fire. Shortly after, he became my boyfriend and we dated for four years.

    — Brooke Wyrosdick, operations assistant

     

    Friends and I rented a vacation house on Put-in-Bay, a quaint village on South Bass Island in Lake Erie. We grabbed lunch at a nearby watering hole, and, before we knew it, we had to hustle to catch the ferry. In an effort to save time, I brilliantly decided to hop a chain-link fence…in platform wedges. I landed and rolled my right foot, which immediately looked like a golf ball was growing out of it. I spent the whole trip on wooden crutches and Percocet. Back in Kentucky, a doctor reset the bone, put in a giant pin. I was in a cast for 12 weeks and lived in a second-story apartment with no elevator. I called my brother in tears one day and, because I couldn’t drive, he drove down and took me home to Michigan. Sometimes you just need your mommy.

    — Mandy Wood, advertising account executive

     

    In high school, a softball hit me in the eye one day at practice. It was so swollen the next day that I missed the ACT. I had a black eye for two months.

    — Megan Brewer, editorial intern

     

    I ruptured a tendon in my big toe going down stairs and my foot swelled up. A cortisone shot only made the injury worse. I was told to ice my foot regularly, so I did…to the point that I gave myself frostbite. I got stuck in one of those walking casts, and when I came out of it my gait had altered in such a way that I put too much pressure on the outside of my foot, which led to a “bone bruise.” With all strength lost in my big toe, I could not stand on the ball of my foot at all. (As an avid runner, six months without lacing up was torture.) To this day, sometimes I rise up on my right foot, onto my toes, just to make sure that big toe isn’t getting lazy on me.

    — Anne Marshall, senior writer

     

    I was rushing because I was running late for my appointment with a rhinoceros having a pedicure — no kidding — and fell down the stairs and broke my left ankle and left foot. I screamed bloody murder, and the guy fixing the plaster in our living room at the time asked, “Are you OK?” This struck me as funny, so I eventually stopped screaming.

    — Jenni Laidman, writer at large

     

    I fell from the monkey bars in second grade and broke my arm. My parents had to drive me to two separate hospitals because the first did not have a pediatric surgeon. I was unmedicated in the backseat of my dad’s two-door Mercury Cougar while we navigated stop-and-go Atlanta traffic and my humerus attempted to exit my body through my skin. 

    — Michelle Eigenheer, contributing writer

     

    Other than giving birth to five kids? I was so excited for my 10th-birthday party that I did a Russian dance in front of a hallway mirror, which, unfortunately, had a small coffee table in front of it. I split open my shin, down to the bone, and my dad, who was a doctor, had to come home on his lunch break to stitch me up. My mother, a nurse, pinned me down in the living room. Eight shots of numbing medicine, 25 stitches to reattach the flap of skin. We still had the party.

    — Michelle Roeder, Louisville Tickets manager of business development
     

    This originally appeared in the August 2018 issue of Louisville Magazine as the Inter-Office Memo. To subscribe to Louisville Magazineclick here. To find us on newsstands, click here.

    Cover photo: Pexels.com

    Share On:

    Most Read Stories