4 Fun Everyday Activities (That Will Secretly Destroy You)

4

If You Go Down A Slide With Your Kid Wrong, You Might Screw Up Their Legs

So it's the weekend, and you've decided to enjoy your time off by taking your kid to the local playground. Don't let the friendly pastels fool you, though. This place is a crucible where innocent children are turned into battle-hardened tweens, scarred by countless scrapes and bruises. But at least the humble slide seems like it should be a respite from the carnage, especially for little kids. In fact, maybe you can even go down it yourself ... and doom your child.

If you go down a slide with a toddler in your lap, either because they're nervous about doing it solo or you just want to briefly recapture a fleeting sense of joy, you're running (sliding?) the risk of causing a lower leg injury. An analysis of slide-related injuries (of which there were an estimated 352,698 among American children under six between 2003 and 2015) revealed that a huge chunk of the wounds were to the lower body. That didn't make sense to researchers. If a child catches their feet on the edge of a slide, they shouldn't have enough momentum or body weight to cause any damage, because they're slow and weak and won't even put in an honest day's work in the Cracked coal mines anymore. But if you add the weight and speed of an adult who's holding them, suddenly there's enough momentum to really mess up an itty-bitty leg that gets caught and wrenched back.

We're not calling for a slide prohibition enforced by cold-hearted playground police, but if you do slide with your kid, keep their limbs carefully tucked in so you don't break them like some lumbering oaf petting a rabbit. Or just pretend you'll slide with them, then shove them down on their own at the last second. That's the safest way to keep them from becoming a weird statistic, and you'll teach them a valuable lesson about the inevitability of betrayal.

3

Leisurely Drives Could Eventually Cause Skin Cancer

So the playground didn't go as planned, and now it's time to drive home (or maybe, depending on how things went, to the hospital). At least it's a beautiful sunny day ... and all of those UV rays we get on beautiful sunny days are pounding through your car window and into the left side of your body. Enjoy skin cancer!

Susan Butler, M.D./Skin Cancer Foundation"Death by trucker tan" seems like a terrible way to go.

Dermatology patients generally have more sun damage (wrinkles, sagging, spots, cancer, strange marks that reveal a tremendous prophecy, etc.) on the left side of the body, and that's apparently because, while car windshields are specifically designed to block UVA rays, the side windows don't get the same treatment. The driver's seat, therefore, gets bombarded with the sun's, to use the technical term, "evil energy."

2

Spilling A Margarita (Or Lime Juice) On Yourself Can Cause Second-Degree Burns

God, what a day you've had so far. Time to unwind with a drink. Why not step out onto the porch, whip up a margarita, and then get ready to take another step toward skin cancer when you're driving yourself to the hospital because of the burn you're about to get?

1

"Avocado Hand" Can Require Surgery To Fix

Great, so now drinking is ruined too. You might as well start eating healthy like some kind of asshole, because at this point your skin's going to need all the help it can get. So for dinner you decide to chop up some avocados, because you've heard they're good for you, and put them in whatever avocados go in, other than guac for your 17-cheese-and-12-meat nachos. You grab an avocado and a knife, and oh my god it's right back to the hospital with you.

"Avocado hand" sounds like something baby boomers made up to decry millennials, but it's a real term -- albeit a casual medical euphemism for "slicing your fucking hand wide open." Out of unfamiliarity with the fruit and its innards, people are chopping avocados and either hitting the hard pit inside or successfully rendering the fruit atwain, only to tempt fate by hacking at the pit with a knife to remove it. Either way, the knife will bounce off the pit, or the pit will rotate and slide, and the knife will suddenly be lodged in your palm.

The cuts can often be so nasty that intricate surgery is needed to repair nerve and tendon damage. In extreme cases, the injured hand never fully recovers its functionality. Oh, and the wounds come with both a nasty risk of infection and a nasty risk of having to put up with endless jokes from your friends and family.

Natashaphoto/Adobe StockA sharp knife, a soft palm, and a fruit whose hardness runs from "unset gelatin" to 'collapsed star" ... what could possibly happen?