Accident prone with knitting needles? (slightly gross)

General Knitting
1

Warning: slightly gross.

So I read the “strangest things people have said about your knitting” thread and noticed that some people think knitting needles are dangerous (“you might poke out your eye with them,” etc.). My boyfriend often tells me that he thinks I shouldn’t knit in the car for that same reason: what if we get into a car accident and one of the needles spears me? I tell him that I trust his driving when he says this, and keep knitting. :rofl:

Okay, it sounds a little farfetched, but this happened to me, sort of. I was maybe 12 years old and knitting while watching a ball game on TV with my parents. At a commercial break, I looked down and realized that one of my knitting needles was stabbed into my knee!! It wasn’t in very deep (maybe 1/4" or less), so I stopped the bleeding and it wasn’t a big deal.

This was with a #6 needle, for the record. My mother probably still has that pair somewhere at her house. I have no idea how it happened, I just remember looking down and being very confused.

Has anyone else done this? Everyone I’ve told this story to thinks I’m a nut! :doh:

2

From someone who once fell into the dishwasher (backwards) and sat on a knife, no, that doesn’t sound at all unusual :teehee:

3

I was winding a ball of sock yarn, and I had my legs crossed with my dpns (size1) on my lap. I guess one had fallen on the floor and I went to get up and put my leg down, and I had the needle in the side of my calf. It went in, maybe, 1/4 to 1/2 inch in. I was kind of shocked. I didn’t hurt until after I had pulled it out. Funny thing was, there were about five of my friends over, and the next day at school, they all were making fun of me for stabbing myself with my needles.

4

Gosh, as accident prone as I am (see thread how do you know if you’ve broken your toe :rofl: ) I haven’t done anything quite that bad yet. I have given myself a nice big callus on my right pointer finger from using metal circs though :shrug:

5

Managed to stab myself in the thigh with one of my US 13 needles last week. It hurt like buggery! :oops: :oops: :oops: It could have used a stitch (haha!), but I was too embarrassed to go to the ER.

6

You want embarassing? This is not knitting related, but my friend called me a little over a year ago to ask me to drive him to the hospital. He was taking the trash out and cut his arm open on a soup can.

7

OUCH! :passedout:

8

Laura, that accident is scary!

I feel a little less accident prone after hearing these. :teehee: All of us need to be more careful, I think!

9

My dh told me a story about a woman who was washing spaghetti plates from the night before. The spaghetti was dried on. As she was scrubbing a piece of the spaghetti poked her under her nail, broke off, and she ended up having surgery to get it out.

So the moral of the story is. . .

10

:figureditout:

Make DH do the dishes? :teehee:

OR:

Make DH install a new dishwasher?

Okay, in my house the answer would be: Do the dishes as soon as they come off the table? :verysad:

:rofl:

I’m sorry for your owies! :muah: I’ve had some really dumb accidents in my life, but not with knitting.

11

Ooops, after reading about these accidents, I should be careful! I don’t remember any knitting accidents but I have had needles stick to me without noticing!

Once, I was using my dpns and after i finished knitting, while i was putting them away, i found one missing. It turned out to be stuck on my sweater and i only found it when I was changing to go to bed!!!

Another time a tapestry needle was stuck onto me!

Both times, I wasn’t pricked (knock on wood!). I have such loyal needles, they stick to me through thick and thin :rofl:

12

About this time last year, I was sifting through my yarn and needles. I set one box off to the side so I could look through the one beneath it.

Well, I found what I was after in the second box, and took a step back so I could pick up the first box to put away… except that I stepped in it and it hurt!

I ended up getting a size 10 1/2 in the foot, between my big and uh, index toe. Went in deep enough that I could see cartilege or bone or something – at any rate, it was shiny and creamy white!

13

There’s an essay in one of the KnitLit books called “Clumsy” about a woman who accidentally pierced her breast with a knitting needle. When she took it out, she found a lump; she went to the doctor and found out that although the lump was nothing to worry about there was a tiny malignancy next to it! So in a way that knitting needle saved her life.

14

HA! Good morals Sara.

For me the moral is knit in the car (do what you like), cause you could end up with a flesh eating virus from washing day old food off a plate! I’d rather get hurt doing something I love. :slight_smile: But for the record I’d rather not get hurt, but if I have to, a knitting needle seems proper.

15

This reminds me of a book called The House of God which is really about life as a resident in a big city hospital. Residents used to recite from it because it was so true to life. It had a variety of “rules” in it. One of them was “there is no body cavity that cannot be reached with a 14 gauge needle and a good strong arm…” :teehee:

16

well I haven’t had any knitting accidents yet, but I did jump through a glass door once, my mom had to rush me to the ER I was cut all over…but it was really embarrassing…I was running out of the bathroom from this office near a restaurant, I ran cause I thought my mom was going to leave me there (I was a kid and very imaginative) but as I am running I see there’s a white border in the floor, my brain said “jump it!!” and so I did…before I know I’m feeling the glass door hit my forehead and next thing I know I’m inside my mom’s car bleeding!!! :stuck_out_tongue: 0ops…the white thing was the frame of the glass door :oops: :oops: :oops:

17

I’m sorry, it must have been terrifying but I couldn’t help laughing… :roflhard:

To apologize, I was jumping on my bed when I was 11 and jumped to high and ended up off the bed and slamming against the glass window. It broke but didn’t shatter so no cuts.

Never hurt myself knitting though.

18

A couple of weeks ago, a friend came over and cut my hair. She did a lovely job and as I was sweeping up, I stepped on something which stuck in my foot. She and I left the house to run a couple of errands and though, there was a stinging pain in my big toe, I went on. When I returned home, I complained that there must have been a tiny shard of broken glass from a few weeks ago and it had found its way into my toe. My son offered to take a look and when he did, there was a 3" piece of hair stuck in my toe. It was really stuck well, it took tweezers to remove it! When it was out, the pain was gone! I had no idea that hair could do that. My friend told me that it was rather common especially for the stylists and for them more dangerous, if it’s some one else’s hair, it can cause a nasty infection! Shoes next time!

19

That is amazing. Once I fell off the bed backwards and could not get my hands back to catch myself. Husband always says I am clumsy but, I just think it was one of those things. I did put a staple in my thumb when I was little. It really hurt.

20

My brother’s the accident-prone one in the family (he crashed his bike at the bottom of a big hill nearby so many times that for a while, the old man who lived there had our home phone number on his fridge even though he’d never met anyone but my bro)

I’ve only once scratched myself with a size-3 needle.

BUT!
I’ve had my moments…

I screwed up my knee in a dogsledding accident.

That’s right. Dogsledding.

Although I do know how to mush, on this particular day, I was a passenger in a sled driven by a man who (I later found out) had never been on a dogsled before in his life. The snow was too deep for easy pulling, and once the sled stopped, with the passengers in the sled, it was too heavy and bogged down and the dogs couldn’t get it going again.
I was sitting at the back of the sled, and couldn’t get out until last.
As soon as I had one foot on the snow, the dogs threw themselves into their harnesses again. A driver with even just a little experience would have anticipated this, and would have been standing on the brake. Instead, the suddenly much lighter sled flew forward, tangling my leg in the rigging. I was yanked off my feet, flipped upside-down, and drug for several feet before someone managed to catch the sled and jump on the brake.

I was OK for the entire half-hour hike back to the main buildings, and then for the hour-long hike to our campsite on the most evil of snowshoes (two days later someone finally figured out that the reason I was having so many issues with my snowshoes was that my bindings were screwed up), and then back to the vans, across the same knee-deep snow (this time without snowshoes because some genius had a theory that we’d probably packed the trail down the first time).

Basically, I was okay as long as I was still moving. But by the time we finished our drive to town for dinner and sightseeing, I could hardly move my leg, let alone put weight on it.

BUT, I’d paid good money for the trip, and I was camping with a bunch of macho guys. So I sucked it up and limped back to the campsite. About every three steps, I punched through the packed-down crust and floundered in the slush-and-powder below. It ranks in the top three most painful experiences of my life.

Next time I go out on a sled, either the musher provides credentials, or I drive. And, I’m sitting in front.