• the217
• Life
• I thought it was Kool-Aid

This past Thursday, a not especially rare event occurred. I accidentally caused physical pain to myself. As usual, I was thinking about something else when I quickly pulled a door closed without removing one of my fingers from the door jam. It was pretty much what you would expect, that four or five seconds of trauma while waiting for the actual pain to set in, followed by a stream of words that took the event several levels above actual swearing. I know people say accidents happens, but geez Louise, there’s gotta be a limit, right?

I’ll be the first to admit that I generally don’t have much of a reaction unless it’s an over-reaction and this was the case with this incident. I fully expected that the end of my freaking finger would be missing when I pulled the door back open. The finger was still there but the fingernail already had a bright blue wad of blood underneath it. It throbbed several times throughout the evening and now is nothing more than a fun, semi-painful thing to stare at and poke while I watch television. Still, it made me wonder, how long until I simply accidentally lop off enough pieces of limbs to die or maybe even finally have that big accident that puts an end to it all.

I figured I should do some research and then probably buy some life insurance. I ended up at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. I looked at the table for the 2005 year, mostly because I’m lazy and they appear to be behind in their calculations. According to them, there are almost 118,000 unintentional injury deaths in the US each year. I didn’t know accidents would fall under the category of disease, but in my case, it’s probably appropriate. Either way, accidents are the fifth leading cause of death. All things considered, I assumed the number would be much higher. Congratulations to all you other folks out there who are paying attention most of the time.

The number one cause of accidental death is car accidents, clocking in at a little over 43,000 a year. I might actually be okay there. I usually do most of my driving in town and even then I already drive the speed of a man twice my age. I also generally pay very close attention when I’m driving. I’ll admit the main reason for this is the joy I get from criticizing the lack of focus in others. Whatever, if it works, it works. My biggest problem in this area may be getting everyone else to cooperate.

One of the big surprises I found was that there are over 23,000 unintentional poisoning deaths. It made me wonder just how many intentional poisoning deaths there were, but since we aren’t in an old Agatha Christie book, I’ll assume that’s pretty low. Still, that’s a crapload of people accidentally killing themselves with poison. I would assume that’s mostly children which is pretty sad. I at least hope that most adults know better than to take a big swig out of the antifreeze bottle, even if it is a pretty color.

The one that struck me the most was that nearly 20,000 people died from unintentional falls. Going back to my prior point about overreacting to everything, I immediately pictured each of these falls coming from a great height. I’m scared pissless of heights and this made total sense to me. I told all you people mocking me while I stood on the roof of a second floor building that this is how people die. I felt I was vindicated.

After a small amount of thought, it occurred to me that most of these falls are likely from a very short distance, probably when an elderly person falls to the ground. That’s not nearly as romantic, but if you’re old and have brittle hips, I would bet that the two feet to the ground really seems like a lofty height. Because of this, in a couple more years, I plan to begin crawling everywhere. It won’t be convenient, but it may be the only way to deal with my acrophobia.

So, if you’re keeping track, from what I can tell, if you want to hit the accidental death trifecta, get in your car, start slugging drain cleaner, and then drive off a cliff. This will make you not only an idiot but possibly the king or queen of self injury. I, on the other hand, plan to be more careful. Driving is probably the biggest crap shoot because of all the variables, but I’m fairly sure I can avoid drinking arsenic and climbing up on step stools with more than two steps.

It turns out it’s not as bad as I think. For once, looking further into a topic made me not quite as fearful for my life as I thought I should be. It looks as if I might be able to avoid accidental death after all. Granted, even though death by accident will hopefully be avoided, I’m still not convinced I won’t have many, many more rips and tears on my body as time moves on. Actually, I’m sort of okay with that. I see each scar as a cute little pain tattoo that tells a wonderful story and reminds me of the past. This is mostly out of necessity because I’m sure my dumb, clumsy ass is unable to be injury-free for more than a few days at a time.