Mine also involved cooking.

The minor one:

I used to be a cook for a steak house and we of course had tongs we'd use and of course we cooks would try to be a bit fancy and twirl the tongs every which way instead setting them down properly. I ended up with one set that had ended up with a razor sharp inside edge, and when i went to twirl it it sliced almost half of the top half of my pinky off. It was so sharp that it was one of those painless cuts and didn't feel pain until my hand went back over the grill. I look down and see blood everywhere. Luckily it grew back together but i sill have a nice little U scar on my pinky.

The Medium one:

Labor day weekend i've been in a habit of BBQ'ing a pork shoulder. I make my own BBQ sauce and 2 years ago i was turning the pork around in my cooking pot and it was at just the right stage where it was starting to break apart. Instead of using something to pick it up on both side i used a big bbq fork, stabbed it through the middle and went to turn it over. Well it decided at that time to break away from the bone and this dropped the meat into the sauce splashing it up high enough to get this boiling hot, sauce onto my wrist.

The Big one:

Similar to the medium one but much worse.

When i was 17 i got a ride home from work and saw that my mom had left me some hamburger patties to fry in an iron skillet for my dinner. She was gone with my brothers to dance rehearsal. There was still grease in the skillet from where she had cooked theirs, but it was expected of me to clean up afterwards anyway. So i plop the patties in, turn up the heat and crashed in a recliner to wait for em to cook. Well i crashed pretty hard because i wake up hearing the crackling sound of burning grease.

I've never know when,how,why this happens, but for as long as i remember if i wake up and try to do stuff in a hurry there seems to be a sort of lag for different body parts. Like my limbs wake up seperately from me. I've fallen right out of bed due to a leg not working, i've not been able to pick stuff up, and this time when i jump up run into the kitchen and grab the iron skillet off the eye my arm decides it's not going to work anymore and drops the skillet. It was picked up just enough where it hit the stoves edge and splashed that grease up/down my arm. I ended up with 2nd/3rd degree burns on my arm. I still have some of the scarring from the 3rd degree, but it's really faint now. I've been in accidents and have had broken bones, broken back, torn muscles from wrecks and sports injuries, but those burns is the worst pain i've ever experienced. Dont wish that for no one.

Bit of wives tale lore tested during this one. Since my car was broke and my mom wasn't home, and my best friends mom wanted me to get a hold of someone before she took me to the ER i called my grandmother. She ended up telling me to shave a potato and take the shavings and put them on my burns. While i didn't have the patience to wait for shavings i thinly sliced a potato and put the slices on my arm. Wherever i put them down they would turn black like they were sucking the heat out of my arm. It also made the burn not hurt as bad. Worked MUCH better than aloe vera did. Plus it seemed to not scar as bad as it did on other spots that didnt' get touched by the potatos.

I can only think of two such injuries and they weren't bad.
Once, I decided to carry two glass bottles and a jar made of glass. I stumbled on some stairs and fell, breaking a bottle. Two minutes later I realized I was bleeding. I had four cuts on my hands, one right besides a big vein.

The other was really dumb. I touched a heated iron to test if it was hot. And it WAS hot. Burnt the back of my finger.

As I said, they weren't bad. I never had a big injury.

At one point while trimming hedges with electric hedge-trimmers, I lost my balanced leaning over to get a far area, and sliced a good quarter-inch off the side of left index finger. Though that was when I was young, and it grew back, even my finger-print. My hands suffer quite a bit in the way of minor injuries: I've skinned off most of the pad of my left thumb off while peeling potatoes, sliced my left index finger to the bone while chopping broccoli, and cut a jagged half-inch into my left thumb when a can I was opening deformed.

I did some metal working in high school, and I got a bad second degree burn on my left arm when working on a hot piece of steel. The leather gloves I was using had cuffs that extended about six inches down from the wrist. Unfortunately, the metal I was working on with an oxy-acetylene torch was curved, which I wasn't used to, and managed to catch right under my glove. Wasn't wearing a long-sleeved shirt under it either, since it was summer and I was none-too-practical in my youth. Gave me a rectangular scar, about three inches long and one inch tall. Of course, that was a fun experience all around, since I never was properly trained on the torch either. Just given an instruction manual on its operation and told to get to it, managed some impressive, though harmless, fireballs while I was learning to use the damn thing; lucky I never managed to set myself on fire.

I hit my hand with a machete once. Split my pointing finger open to the bone. It was only 8 stiches though.

Somehow I managed to slam a car door shut while my thumb was still inside. It was the first bone I've ever broken. We were on our way to the Grand Canyon but thankfully we were in a small town with a clinic. They took xrays and cut a hole in the nail to relieve pressure/drain the blood.

When I worked at a wire mill, I was fixing a jam on a machine I had never been trained on and shouldn't have been touching. My hand got caught between the side of a small plastic spool and the hydraulic arm that held it in place while the machine was actually working. The spool had little ridges on the side, and the middle finger of my hand (the left hand) was caught on onen of the ridges, while the other fingers somehow squeezed into the gaps. From the third joint to the tip my middle finger was kind of flattened out, with a huge gash in which I could see the bits of bone that had been smashed up. Fortunately I was able to reach the emergency release button. I found the machine operator, said "I think I could use a hand ...", and then showed him my injury. That join is now much larger than it is supposed to be. The doctor had said the finger nail would never grow back, but he was mistaken. It does grow in with a split up the middle, which has some pretty strange side effects at times.

I'm clumsy, and accident prone.
As far as self inflicted, This probably won't be the worst on this thread, but
I've cut the tip of my right hand index finger off. *Twice*

Luckily for me, it was just the fleshy bit at the front, but I've got cool scars on it now =)
Only lost a little bit of my sense of touch where the scar tissue is at.

*edit* Oh yeah, I forgot about the pitchfork through the foot.... Glad I'd had my shots earlier in the year for Tetnus.

Koshnika

When I worked in fast food, we had to clean behind all the equipment *every* night, regardless of it was busy or not (in theory anyways). On this particularly slow night I had hauled out one of deep freezes and cleaned behind it like a good little employee should. I moved in front of the deep freeze to move it back into place and gave it a mighty push. For some reason that night, the deep freezes' back legs stuck in the ground and didn't budge, but the front of the deep freeze went straight into the air. I was off balance when this happened (fully expecting the deep freeze to slide forward), and my foot went underneath the deep freeze. The bastard appliance feel fully down on my big left toe. I swore loudly, and pushed the deep freeze back up to get my toe out. 15 seconds later, my toe began to throb and I had to sit down. Within one minute I could not walk on it and hand to spend the majority of the night on a milk crate. In an act of pure, heart felt compassion [/sarcasm], my co-worker would helpfully tell me when a customer was at our cash register, since she herself could not work the cash. I would hobble out and serve the customers, grimacing the entire time.

I could find no one to replace that night, so I had to work the rest of the shift. After locking up the joint, I drove straight to the hospital. I had a quick series of X-Rays done (nothing broken), but my nail was turning a few deep shades of purple. The doctor's told me that they had to release the blood by drilling through the nail. They were handing me pain killers for the procedure, when I oh-so-cheerfully informed them that I was on medication and could not take any pain killers. My much wanted happy pills disappeared, and they started to drill out my toe nail. I saw a small amount of blood come out, but my toe hurt like hell. They sent me home telling me to keep an eye on it.

The next day my toe still hurt like hell and I could barely walk. I decided enough was enough and filled the bathtub up with water. I began soaking my bad foot/toe in the water for a few minutes, then put a towel in my mouth to bite down on. I grabbed a needle and set to work re-opening/enlarging the holes in my toe nail. After routing around for a bit, I struck gold and the blood began spurting from the openings. I put my foot back in the tub and watched in amazement at the amount of blood that gushed out of my nail. Later that night, my toe felt better and I could walk on it easily.

The toe nail fell off a few weeks later, and one eventually grew back that is quite deformed.

One time I was scratching my head with my pistol and...

Wait, no.

Once I was carving with a swiss army knife and put pressure on the blade while it was pointed straight down. Note that the standard swiss army knife, the classic red one with the little toothpick, does not lock. When you put pressure on the blade in the direction in which it folds, it does so. When you're putting a good deal of pressure on the blade directly down, it takes a very, very small movement to shift the direction of that pressure. So I folded that knife pretty damn hard, right on my hand. My pinky absorbed almost all of the damage but was cut so deeply I could see the tendon, which I nicked (but did not sever). We didn't have any butterfly bandages around and my father didn't want to take me to the hospital so we threw a normal bandaid on it and let it heal. I've still got a big scar there and that tendon doesn't quite work as smoothly as it ought to, but it does work.

I have a long history of injuring myself but you want the worst, so here goes.

I was a welder and needed to make a flat piece of metal into a curved piece of metal. I bring this piece to the roller (three steel cylinders that pinch the steel and and bend it as it goes through) and start feeding it through, curving it more and more with every pass.

The piece of steel wasn't very large, think of a donut about 8 inches in diameter and 1/4 inch thick. The gloves i was wearing weren't very tight fitting, and on the 5th or 6th pass my glove went in to the roller with the steel.

In an instant, I was caught. I hit the emergency stop button and said "Sh*t". After calling for help, someone came over and took the top of the roller off so I could get my hand out, and off to the hospital I went.

Luckily the crushing had pinched off the flow of blood to the affected digits (Left hand index, middle, and thumb) so there was very little blood when they cut the glove off of my hand. The damage was severe. My two fingers were peeled like a banana, and my thumb was only split open to the first joint. They cleaned me up, and temporarily stitched me together until a plastic surgeon could work on it later that day.

There was not enough soft tissue salvageable to completely rebuild my fingers, but I got away lucky. I have lost 3/4 of my index finger, and 1/3 of my middle. My thumb has healed completely. The amount of stitches I had would be over a hundred, but I didn't break a bone. That is the amazing part to me, my fingers were crushed to perhaps an eighth of an inch but my bones were intact and functional. During surgery, I was bending my finger bones asking the surgeon why he had to cut them off. He wouldn't let me keep them afterward, either.

The surgery was fascinating, I watched it all. The Morphine sucked. It made me itchy after a couple of days.

Minor, but could have been bad:

Trying to drain a clogged kitchen sink with standing water in it. I poured a whole bottle of Liquid Plumber into the water and let it sit for about 20 minutes with no luck. I decided to "help things along", grabbed a toilet plunger and went to work. The plunger slipped and a sizable amount of the water splashed in my face.

I guess I was lucky and closed my eyes just in time before blinding myself, but my eyes still burned for a while afterward...Yeah, I'm real smart.

A little more destructive:

While in college I worked and a roofing company in D.C. We had a large shop where we would cut and bend metal sheets for tin/copper roofs. While working at a large bending press (about 15 feet long) with another individual I had my thumb in the wrong spot just as we were clamping it down and I yanked my thumb out at the last moment. When I looked at it my whole thumbnail was torn out about half way.

I had to go to the ER to get it pulled out all the way (man those novocaine shots hurt).

Side note: Nothing is more disgusting than a finger/toe with a nail completely removed. That little crescent semi-circle underneath the base of the nail balloons up like an angry blister when there's no nail to keep it pushed down. Ick.

Side note: There were a lot of little things that I realized I took for granted like tying my shoes, the L1 button, WASD, and the buttons on a keyboard related to those missing fingers.

Oh, man. Completely agree.

Mine happened when I was twelve. We had an old pot-bellied wood burning stove in our family room, a big cast iron monstrosity that would get a good foot, foot and a half of orange embers at the bottom when you stoked it right. It was set on a raised stone hearth, set back a couple of feet from the edge.

Anyway, it was a cold winter day and my parents had had a fire going all day while I was out playing in the snow. I came inside and, like always, stood backwards on the edge of the hearth with my hands behind me to warm up. I lost my balance somehow and fell onto the stove, catching myself with my right hand. I had that freakish moment where I didn't feel any pain, but remember thinking, "Oh, sh*t, this is going to hurt."

I got second degree burns on my palm and finger tips. I had a huge blister that covered the meaty part of my palm that looked even worse because some of my skin had been burned so bad it turned white.

The worst part was the pain...it felt like my hand was on fire for days.

Yep, me too.

My stupidest self inflicted injury happened was I was 17. I was in a rush to go out, and didn't have an ironed shirt. I was hurriedly ironing a shirt, barechested, and gave myself a lovely second degree burn to my stomach. I still have the scar, 12 years later.

It was so painful, everything hurt. Standing, sitting, wearing clothes, walking, everything. Not as dramatic as some, but I would say more stupid.

My friend actually managed to put a nail through his foot with a nailgun, which was and odd thing to explain to the paramedics at 3am. Beer was a factor.

Aries wins.