Seattle - Roll over, Darwin. We've got proof the unfit do survive.Ever Do Anything This Stupid? M. L. Lyke
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
They may get their tongues stuck to fence posts in the dead of winter, brush their teeth with spermicide instead of toothpaste, walk out of public restrooms trailing toilet paper - but they do survive.
"Twenty-five years ago, I was playing with the car door to see how close I could get to slamming it on my tongue," says Nancy Foster Wilson, explaining the missing chunk from her tongue. "I missed on the sixth try."
The 33-year old mother - yes, Mr. Darwin, she lived and somehow managed to reproduce - is one of the Post-Intelligencer readers who sent in their "stupid human tricks" after I confessed to confusing Super Glue with Murine.
"Oh, joy!" wrote Ethel Johnson, who sprayed her hair with bathroom deodorant. "To know I'm not alone!"
Russ Venables admitted his brain was not fully engaged when he decided to make caramel apples without a candy thermometer. The recipe required heating the caramel to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. How to test it?
"Stick your finger in," said his sister-in-law.
Right. He stuck it in. He screamed. And then he inserted finger in mouth. "Weeks later, the blisters on my fingers and in my mouth went away. There was no lasting damage," said Venables.
"It's just one of those really stupid things you do."
Hello? Mr. Darwin?
One patient Super-Glued lips (right place) together, thinking it was lip balm (wrong thing). Another used the miracle stickum to apply false eyelashes.
Even more painful was the case of a man with a big thirst who managed to swallow porcupine quills. His kids had been saving them in a glass of water.
He must have paused to ponder this dictum: What goes in must come out.
That was the incomplete thinking of a man who gulped down three $50 bills when attacked by a mugger. "He came in because he wanted them back," says Dr. Ted Johnson, emergency room doctor at Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle.
Panicked patients who've swallowed their contact lenses have asked the same thing.
Johnson has even discovered a Bic pen stuck in a bladder. "It still wrote afterward," he said.
Patients are often mortified by their flum-bubbery. A portly handyman showed up at Seattle's Group Health Cooperative complaining he'd taken a fall - out the back door.
The back door?
Pressed for data, Mr. Fix-It finally 'fessed up. He had forgotten he'd torn off his back porch.
"And that was two years ago," announced his wife.
Such cosmic oopsies can be as dangerous as they are humiliating. Dr Judy Street, at Group Health emergency room, remembers treating a man who fell from a tree and broke his ankle. "He was sitting on a limb, using his chain saw, and he cut the limb he was sitting on," says Street. "He just didn't think."
Life imitating a Hanna-Barbera cartoon? "You wonder sometimes how people manage to do these things to themselves," says Street.
"I didn't want to come into the emergency room," she says. "I felt so stupid."
Nancy Hogan's a survivor - and she's still laughing.
She was eating dinner. It wasn't her dinner.
"Greedily remembering the scalloped oysters from the night before, I grabbed a bowl from the fridge shelf and heated the contents. I couldn't help noticing, as I ate, how deadly flat the food tasted. No matter how much salt, pepper, and ketchup I poured on, it was blah! blah!. It had all the gusto of damp papier-mache," she wrote to the Post-Intelligencer.
"Being a member of the Clean Plate Club, I polished off every lousy morsel."
That's when she discovered she had eaten Rainier's food.
Rainier is her dog, a 94-pound Great Pyrenees.
"As I fell asleep that night, my feet were twitching under the covers and I was whimpering a lot," said Hogan.
She signed her letter, "Certifiably yours."