I can think of examples of all of these. But I did have siblings, burn myself bbq'ing, know people who worked in the local slaughterhouse (knife in the arm to get off work), know of a surgeon who made this terribly sad mistake, live in the UK (IRA letter bombs).

Ok, I kinda give up on the last one.

I knocked one of those quartz desklamps over on my bed when I was asleep. Set the blanket on fire, caused it to melt. Fortunately, I was awakened before I was injured. Not sure if that would count, though.

Sibling rivalry is a serious condition where your young child is trying to harm or murder your new baby.

> Y6553 Performance of correct procedure (operation) on wrong side or body part

That's horrifying.

When I was younger, I had a commercial-grade stapler (the big ones that advertise stapling through N-hundred sheets at once) go into my pointer finger on my left hand. The resulting bone infection eroded all the bone in my fingertip, which was reconstructed later from "donor" bone.

Step one of the operation was getting taken back to a patient room, being given an IV (since I was not to eat or drink for 12hours before the operation), and waiting. After a few hours, a nurse walked in with a sharpie and wrote "NO" on my other hand.

It wasn't comforting.

It happens. http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/17/us/doctor-who-cut-off-wron...

Coincidentally, two posts talking about this kind of never event, with links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12773709

They do happen, but they're quite rare.