I was 11, and handled the ‘samples’ at a BNFL booth (at an airshow) where a geiger counter was set up, it wasn’t til the demonstration guy returned and demonstrated to someone else how the coin-sized samples set off the counter that I realised it wasn’t a ‘self service’ type demonstration. The samples were labelled with their atomic symbol, and the most reactive samples were labelled as uranium (about 20mm diameter) and plutonium (about 5mm diameter). At the time I told myself they were likely fake, since leaving a plutonium sample lying around wouldn’t be very likely.

I’ve not died of radiation poisoning or cancer yet, but it’s only been 41 years.

Wasn’t quite a teenager, maybe around 10 or 11. I wanted to make a “weed killer” concoction with my sister one day when we were home alone. So we hoarded together every cleaning solution we could find in the house and poured it into a bucket. I have no idea how we didn’t end up in a hospital.

The test patch of grass we used it on never grew grass ever again.

Not a teen, but when I would have been 10 or so we lived out in the country, with a big eucalyptus tree in the back yard. I used to climb it a lot, and was real into building things like platforms and little (shoddy) tree houses. We also had a great trampoline, which I often used to get down out of the tree.

You might be able to see where this is going.

One day, I was up in the tree building a little ladder with the trampoline below me. I went to get down, dropped my hammer to the trampoline, and immediately followed it.

Time slowed, i witnessed it all happening in slow motion as I was thought “oh fuck, that was dumb” as the hammer hit the trampoline, i landed, and the hammer flew in a perfect arc and hit me in the forehead with the head of the hammer.

I stood there, stunned still for a second, and then immediately went “oh god, that could have been so much worse”. Thankfully I was completely fine!