The 5 Stages of Sustaining a Drunken Injury

Rob Fox13 years ago

1) Getting Really Drunk

This one may seem obvious, but that doesn’t make it any less important. To truly sustain a drunken injury you need to be disturbingly, sinfully, shithammered drunk. This is also known as “Game Day Drunk” or “Hey We Won Something, and by Something I Mean Anything, Drunk.” If you’re not stumbling around, acting like a fancy hobo then you aren’t inebriated enough to qualify for a true drunken injury.

2) Over Stimulation

No one unintentionally punches a wall or jumps off a balcony. Even when it seems random, it’s not. Sure that guy was quietly drinking by himself and seemed fine only moments before demolishing the drywall. But where was he two minutes before that? Probably in a group of people chanting “U-S-A!” or in a heated argument over something he literally already can’t remember. But it doesn’t matter. Patriotism, meet wall. Of course the most dangerous drunken injuries are sustained when the victim is being egged on by a group of people. You might have walked out on that balcony to pee, but now everyone below thinks you are going to try and make the jump into the pool. Who are you to disappoint them? Besides, you didn’t go to formal to not be awesome. If The Four Seasons didn’t want people to hurt themselves, then maybe their architects should’ve built the swimming pools a little closer, or a lot farther away. Architects ruin everything.

3) Feeling Hilarious and/or Invincible

Everyone thinks they’re funnier and stronger when they’re drunk, and those assumptions are amplified the more we drink. As far as being funny goes, what’s really happening is that you’re losing your ability to tell when people are laughing at you, not with you. The suggestion of sprinting through a plate glass window may have gotten uproarious laughter, but it wasn’t the good kind. Unfortunately in the mind of “Mr. Funny Guy” this equates to: Suggestion=Laughter, therefore Execution=MORE LAUGHTER. To be fair though, he’s technically right.

Feeling invincible is probably the worst of the two if only because it’s harder to talk someone out of something when they’re convinced they’re capable of doing whatever bad idea they have in mind. Completely made up example:

Guy 1: Kobe Bryant’s a bitch. I could totally jump a car if he can.
Guy 2: No man, you couldn’t.
Guy 1: I could jump, like, a Miata.
Guy 2: No, I still don’t think so.
Guy 1: You don’t think I could jump over a fucking speeding Miata! You think I’m a bitch?
Guy 2: I mean, I couldn’t either.
Guy 1: Fuck you! I thought you were my brother! Kristin!
Kristin: Yeah?
Guy 1: Get your fucking Miata and meet me in the street in 10 minutes. We’ll see who’s a bitch now.
Guy 2: Dude I never said…fuck it, whatever. Let’s go.
-11 Minutes Later-
Guy 2: Goddammit, call 911.

4) The Injury

It can literally be anything. Fractured skull, broken hand, ruptured appendix, an erection snapped in two. It doesn’t matter. The only thing all these injuries have in common is that if the victim was sober they’d be screaming “FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!!!” However since the victim is essentially a booze fueled zombie the reaction is more of a gasped “Wait, what?” My general rule of thumb is: if you can walk, didn’t concuss yourself, and can stop the bleeding: party on. Otherwise head to your nearest hospital. Which leads us to…

5) The Aftermath

The luckiest victims of drunken injuries wake up in their own beds the next morning and think to themselves “Why the fuck does my elbow hurt so much?” The unlucky ones come to in a hospital and think to themselves “WHY THE FUCK CAN I SEE MY ELBOW!?” Hopefully whatever drunken injury you sustain doesn’t land you (immediately) in the hospital but rather the sympathy, attention, and vagina of a nursing student you’d been trying to hook up with.

There you have them, the five (completely indisputable) stages of sustaining a drunken injury. Will knowing these prevent anyone from drunkenly injuring themselves in the future? No, absolutely not. Because the first thing you forget when you’re blackout drunk is stuff that you read.