Yah ow ow ow ow.

Inspired by a headache I had on Monday, which continued despite Excedrin on Tuesday, and was still with me when I woke up this morning:

Things that Hurt:

Getting your kneecap kicked around to the back of your leg by an angry mare. Luckily, he was in midair at the time, having been thrown by the horse. If he'd been standing on his leg, he likely would've lost the bottom half of it.

Having a piece of debris on the trash truck in front of you come off the truck, fly through your windshield, and hit you in the eye. At 75 mph. Especially when that debris is roughly round and weighs about two pounds.

Seizing, falling down, and waking up with a kitchen knife stuck partway into the back of your skull. Then getting to the ER.

Getting out of bed several days after a major abdominal surgery and having your wound suddenly open up. Whoops! Intestines!

Getting run over (technically, it's run *under*) by a car. If you're short, it'll damage your lower body. If you're tall, it'll probably take out at least one lobe of your brain, as your head will hit the metal edge of the car's roof. This is another good reason to be short.

Leaping off the fourth-story balcony of a dorm. Actually, the leaping doesn't hurt, probably. It would be the landing that would suck. Especially if you lived, which this guy did...after a fashion.

Getting shot in the back of the head with a kid's pellet rifle. The pellets didn't penetrate the skull, and the docs at Podunk Memorial didn't feel like taking them out, so my patient had some interesting lumps in his skull.

A punji stick through your foot. I'd heard of punji sticks from Vietnam vets but had never seen the effects of one until I had a veteran come in who had a small scar on the bottom of his left food--and a huge mass of scar tissue and old skin grafts on the top. Wowee.

Your parachute malfunctioning when you're still a hundred feet or so from the ground, meaning you land going about 45 mph. Especially when you're in Germany, for God's sake, in World War II. (My favorite old guys are the old guys who fought in that war. They have the best stories to tell. And they're dying off, which makes me sad.)

Being bled, being fed concoctions of woodlice and mercury, having tinctures of snails put on your smallpox lesions, having a black rooster cut open while still alive and laid on your abdomen, having a pan with a few ounces of molten lead in it placed on the top of your head. These are not things that have happened at La Schwank lately; rather, I've been reading about Elizabethan and Restoration medicine. That last, the pan with molten lead? Is a sure cure, or so the promoter said, for chronic headache.

He was right. I feel better now.