Dangerous Games

Perhaps it was boredom; perhaps it was a way of blowing off steam, but adolescents play some pretty dangerous games. This week, I treated two teens for injuries sustained by these games.

The first game was called “Knuckles”. Forgive me if I get the rules of this game incorrect, but from what I understand is that teens challenge each other to a game of ramming their fists (knuckles) into a variety of objects, such as walls, doors, road signs, each other, etc.

One of my first patients in the morning was a 16 year old girl (yes, a girl!) holding her right hand. She had some tenderness of the fifth metacarpal — the bone of the hand directly below the 5th or little finger. This was most likely a common hand fracture, often referred to as a Boxer’s Fracture.

A quick trip to the x-ray revealed that she indeed had a 5th metacarpal fracture. It wasn’t a bad fracture, but she will need a special cast on her hand for a month or so. A month in a cast should be plenty of time for her to ponder this decision to slam her knuckles into a stop sign on the way home from school. I am not sure how this game is won, but if getting a fracture is considered a point, then maybe she is a winner.

The second patient was brought in with some additional hand injury, mostly just pain and bruising. This was a result of a game called “Quarters”. The mother was initially horrified by thinking her 14 year old was playing a drinking game of the same name in which a quarter is bounced into a shot glass. If you miss, you have to drink the shot of alcohol. Fortunately, it wasn’t this game.

I know even less about this new quarters game, but apparently it involves the spinning of a quarter on the table. If this spinning quarter stops near your hand, you are awarded with having a quarter flicked into your knuckles. There was no need to x-ray this one. The treatment is simple: Stop doing that! We never played this game when I was a kid; we never had quarters!

This same patient freely shared another game called “Pong”. In this game, you volley the ping-pong ball until you miss. If you do miss, then your opponent can hit a ping-pong ball as fast as they can at any part of your body you do not cover. Girls will cover their faces and end up getting a series of round, red welts on their chest and abdomen. Boys, naturally, will cover their groin, not wanting to get receive a line-drive in this area. They will likely end up with red welts on their face.

These are the only three games that I know of at this point, but I would welcome posting from other parents or teens on more of them.

Now, before you start becoming judgmental about teenage behavior, try and remember what YOU did at that age. When I think back on some of the dangerous games that we invented, I am surprised that I made it to adulthood unscathed.

We played Knuckle Poker. If you lost, the winner of the hand was allowed to hit your knuckles with the edge of the deck of cards. Not only was it painful and caused your knuckles to bleed, it encouraged cheating. A variation of this game involved slapping your tender forearm with two saliva-wet fingers. That, of course, stung like a bee and was on the unsanitary side.

The worst of the poker variation was in college, where I played (once) a game of Water Poker. The losers of the hand must drink a small Dixie cup of water…just plain ‘ol water. Over the course of an evening, the unlucky ones developed some profound electrolyte imbalances, became dizzy, disoriented, and appeared intoxicated (water intoxication). You would think that future medical professionals would have known better, but in our defense, we did not have that class yet.

Later on, water was replaced by beer or Jack Daniels — a game that I did not play. I have never been a fan of alcohol and I certainly am not a fan of being drunk. I only experienced alcohol intoxication ONCE in my college years from a drinking challenge (I needed the money, and it wasn’t time to sell a pint to the Blood Bank) and vowed never to do that again.

To this day, I do not drink alcohol in any form. People who do not know me think I am either a Mormon (we do have five kids) or a recovered alcoholic! Apparently, it is not socially acceptable NOT to partake in a glass of wine without a detailed explanation.

And, yes, there were other dangerous games, like the various versions of Chicken. Not wanted to be painfully labeled as a coward or chicken, kids will try just about anything. We shot BB guns at each other, threw kitchen matches, threw darts into the air and tried to catch them on a piece cardboard.

We were also constantly challenged to eat various things, from horse manure to hot chili peppers. Not wanted to be a chicken, I would swing on a vine over a 50 foot drop into the canyon below, or sit in the Devil’s Seat at Wolf Rocks — a natural depression in a rock that hung out over a precarious drop off of several hundred feet. Does this sound like a popular television reality series?

I can’t say that I was ever Triple-Dog Dared to do these things. I did them thoughtlessly and willingly; just the way kids are supposed to act. My mother knew nothing about any of these things that we did. Just as long as I came home by dark and did not require obvious medical attention, she was totally oblivious to our acts of adolescent stupidity. And, I lived to blog about it.

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