Warning: Discussions of infant death.
Recently, after almost causing long-term damage to my back by not purchasing a proper ergonomic desk chair for multiple years, I thought about all the little habits and things we do in our lives that can actually be quite risky or dangerous.
My chronic back pain wasn’t necessarily the “riskiest” thing out there, but it certainly taught me a lesson to protect my body. I wondered about the other seemingly innocuous but risky things we all do, so I turned it over to the BuzzFeed Community to share. Whether they learned the hard way or are an expert in a field that sees too many seemingly “safe” bets gone south, here’s everything they said:
1.“Road rage. You’re seriously gonna endanger yourself and everyone else on the road because someone cut you off? Nobody in the history of mankind has ever ‘won’ a road rage contest. It’s just a question of how badly you’re gonna lose.”
2.“Not wearing safety goggles while doing yard work. Any yard work. I work at an eye doctor’s office, and starting in spring, we get at least one patient a week coming in because they got something in their eye while doing yard work. Usually involving mowing, cutting, etc., One lady literally bent over and got a branch to the eye. My BOSS (the doctor) actually got injured this way once too, which he kicked himself over for weeks, lol. So, yeah, safety goggles people!”
“Also, sleeping in contact lenses. You can get a nasty infection. Your eyes need to breathe! You wouldn’t wear a tampon for over 12 hours, don’t do it with contacts.”
u/Shiny_Buns / Via reddit.com
3.“As an RN, I have to say it’s people NOT getting vaccinated. So many diseases and deaths could be avoided by a simple vaccination. The other dangerous and harmful habit is listening to these idiots on social media who have no clue.”
Similarly, “Not getting your vaccines. I work in the medical field, and it’s shocking how many people follow the medical advice of almost everyone else over their physicians if they even choose to see one. Our office has TVs in the waiting room playing medical tidbits and commercials. The number of patients having full-on verbal meltdowns over the ‘fear-mongering’ vaccine commercials is immense. Having an advertisement relay how easy it is to get the meningitis vaccine and prevent horrific symptoms while interacting with a man in his twenties having to be physically supported by his mother and his walker due to meningitis was terrible.”
4.“Hairdresser here. Never use a new color or lightener on yourself or someone else without first doing a skin patch test. If you end up having a severe reaction, it’s better to only have it affect a small portion of your skin, as opposed to glopping it onto your head and THEN finding out.”
5.“Co-sleeping. I’m an EMT and will never forget coming to work and seeing a friend of mine typing up his report after a co-sleeping fatality call. During the call, he and his partner attempted to resuscitate a baby who was suffocated from co-sleeping. The mom had rolled over onto the baby by accident, not realizing she had done so until she woke up and saw the baby had turned blue. She called 911, but there was nothing my coworkers could do. The baby had been without oxygen for too long.”
“Not only will that mom have to live with the guilt for the rest of her life, but my coworkers on that call will never be able to forget trying to revive a dead infant. Co-sleeping might be temporarily easier to get your baby to settle and fall asleep, but it’s NOT worth the risk. Every parent I’ve tried to warn about it says, ‘I do it safely. I’d never fall asleep on my baby.’ Newsflash–no parent who suffocates their baby by falling asleep on them PLANS to do that.”
Daniloandjus / Getty Images
6.“Driving tired. My friend had his life cut off at 27 because his dad fell asleep behind the wheel and crashed into a tree. There are studies showing that it’s as bad as driving drunk or high, but that doesn’t stop people from doing it.”
7.“For me, it’s electric scooters. In the last decade, they have become ubiquitous (at least in Europe), but since they’re small and not that expensive to buy/rent, many people don’t think twice about using them. However, they are pretty fast for something with zero protection for the driver. A single bump on the road can result in concussions, teeth loss, or worse. If that wasn’t enough, they can cause serious danger to pedestrians because they typically move on sidewalks.”
8.“Keeping guns in your home. Someone I know lost a relative because of a rifle leaning against a wall, got knocked over, went off, and shot them. If you keep guns, you have to be hypervigilant!”
9.“Taking several over-the-counter cold remedies all at once. Many have Tylenol, so the person might be unwittingly overdosing on Tylenol (or other ‘safe’ cold medications). Read the labels!”
10.“Shoveling snow. A major cause of heart attacks.”
“And hernias. And people throwing out their backs. All three of those injuries go up during the snowy winter months. Plus, the injuries from people slipping and falling while shoveling snow.”
11.“Never turn your back on a kid wearing a life jacket, pool floaties, or anything in the water!!! Things pop, twist, break, and fall off all the time. Teach your kid how to swim or get someone else to. You are not doing your kid any favors by letting them rely on something other than themselves, especially in water. Also, wear life jackets and know where you are swimming. There are so many preventable drownings.”
12.“Don’t stand on a chair to change a light bulb. Get the appropriate stepladder!!”
“My ex-husband is a doctor, and early on in his practice, he had the worst case he had ever seen. He had to surgically repair the anus of a man who stood on a chair to reach a light fixture. The chair flipped upside down. The man flew up and then fell onto the upended leg of the chair and ‘ripped a new one.’ It took my ex half the night to make that poor man whole again.”
13.“I live in Hawaii. Most tourists don’t understand how dangerous it can be to hike here. The trails can be very steep and narrow because they were formed by volcanic rock. The rocks can be slippery and often wet due to tropical rain. Most trails are poorly maintained. And the drop-offs go straight down. No soft landings here — you will fall 40 feet or more onto more volcanic rock. We rarely hike here and only in dry weather.”
14.“Ignoring your snoring. A lot of my family members have sleep apnea, including myself. My uncle ignored his and wouldn’t wear a CPAP. His doctor later cited it as a direct factor in his stroke. He survived, but he lost the use of one arm and still has to walk with a cane.”
“I got a sleep study not too long afterward, and it revealed that I stopped breathing over 200 times per hour, and my blood oxygen was below 60% while I was asleep. I would have had a stroke or a heart attack before too long if I hadn’t gotten it treated, and I was still in my 20s. People need to take sleep apnea way more seriously!”
15.“Tripping over a rug. It’s one of the leading causes of death at home for the elderly.”
16.“Randomly stopping meds when they were prescribed for a longer period of time. I’m a doctor in an inner city area, and I see this all the time. If you stop antibiotics early, you run the risk of the infection coming right back and the antibiotics not working well over time (meaning it gets harder for us to cure). Also, abruptly stopping pressure or heart-related meds can cause strokes and heart attacks.”
“Your doctors and nurses really are here to help you. We wish you would call us if you can’t afford meds, they make you feel weird, or Google results scare you about side effects. It breaks our hearts when something bad happens (like a stroke or life-threatening infection), and we find out the reason — we would’ve loved to help prevent such a thing.”
—Anonymous
17.“Ignoring an abscessed tooth and ignoring regular dental cleanings. A tooth that once throbbed/hurt when biting and then stopped likely became necrotic and died. That zit-looking bump on the gums near the tooth’s root (a fistula) that ‘comes and goes’ doesn’t mean the problem is gone. There’s a space in the bone of your jaw/skull that is being eaten away and filled with puss as the infection is left untreated. Especially on an upper tooth, that infection can easily spread into neighboring tooth structures, possibly requiring IV antibiotics, and can even be fatal. There’s a fascial space in the head and neck area called ‘the danger zone’ because of how easily an infection can spread if it violates that space.”
“Ignoring dental cleanings is dangerous. There are direct effects on overall health related to gum health. Infected gums will send bacteria into your bloodstream, and it is a chronic inflammatory condition, like a festering wound. It affects cardiovascular health, impairs healing, and makes managing diabetes and high blood pressure more difficult/impossible without care. It can cross the placenta and negatively impact a developing fetus, along with other things. I promise your dental hygienist and dentist will never, ever judge you, no matter how many decades it’s been! And if you have anxiety, we love to accommodate however we can. We just want you to be healthy! It’s not worth the risks to continue neglecting your oral health.”
Andreswd / Getty Images
18.“Using Q-tips too aggressively. As an otolaryngologist, I see severe ear infections resulting from earwax and other debris pushed too far into the ear canal by Q-tip use. These infections can spread to the tissue between the ear and brain and, if not addressed properly, can become life-threatening.”
And lastly:
19.“Telling people you don’t know on the internet your name/age/location. Especially kids. I’ve seen so many young people just giving away their locations and names to complete strangers and not understanding the risk they are taking.”
—Anonymous
Got any other common habits or things we all do that can actually be pretty risky? Let me know in the comments or by submitting at this anonymous form.
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
