Falling on Broken Glass

It would probably be fine without treatment in a week or two. With a bit of bandaging and some antibiotics it would probably be better in a week.

Unless there's some reason the glass wouldn't lie flat the damage should just be surface cuts.

If he's wearing jeans and a leather jacket he may well not get hurt at all. There's more chance of injury from putting the window in.

Horserider said:

What if he was wearing one of those shirts where the sleeves are torn off and the sides are cut from the armpit down almost to the bottom?

Click to expand...

Do you mean a muscle shirt?

Where's the glass and how does he fall on it?

If it lands on a thick carpet, some shards may be sticking up in the air and could puncture him.

If it lands on wood or something else even and hard, the shards will probably lay flat, and unless he rolls around in it, he probably won't get hurt at all.

It all depends on how the glass is laying, how he fell etc. I mean, if he falls onto his knees then he'll have very different injuries than if he fell onto his side.

It really depends. I think you can do whatever you want to do with this one. Take the story in whatever direction you want. He could be unscathed, or he could be killed. It would depend on how the glass is lying. There could be a shard sticking straight up that punctures him seriously...or he could escape injury. It's one of those things where anything can happen.

It could be nothing.
A scratch with some spotty bleeding could disappear completely in one week.
But a cut 1 mm deep and 1 cm long with bleeding would likely leave a thin but obvious and permanent scar. I have few of them on my fingers.

We chased a burglar through a store one night. He thought he'd escape Hollywood style, by jumping through the plate glass window at the front of the store. The window broke, but he cut an artery on a shard remaining in the window. We rushed him to the hospital where they pumped blood in him as fast as they could while they tried to repair the artery. He died in the emergency room.

It really depends on how badly you WANT him to be injured (and on how you have him fall). As RJK mentioned, if the glass nicks an artery your character could be bleeding out. There's actually a rescue 911 episode where that happens.

If your character falls just right, the glass might not even scratch him, or might rip up his clothing but not really do much more than score his skin. I'm not an expert on glass formulas, but I think a lot of safety glass these days is designed not to shatter the way older glass will. Data point: I once shattered a glass over my head. After we got it all brushed off me, and picked out of my hair, there wasn't a scratch on me.

My gut instinct is that your character would probably try to put his hands out to stop himself and get his hands cut by the glass. Another data point: I once put my hand and arm (up to the elbow) through a glass storm door. I didn't hit an artery (though my veins show through my skin enough that you can see how the scar lines intersect and follow various veins and I was d*** lucky) but a bunch of glass shards went in very deeply. We picked out all the glass shards/chunks, antibiotic-ed and bandaged up my whole hand and forearm. It clotted and scabbed just like normal cuts and along the same timeline. I have a collection of freakishly awesome scars which took a few months to go from angry red to white lines. A few of the thinner ones have faded away in the intervening decades but the thicker ones are just as bad as ever.

When my cousin was ten years old, he threw himself through the window of an old garage, built in 1900. (He and I got 'trapped' in there while playing. I told him to wait, that someone would find us. It was the garage next to his house, but he was a little impatient and a lot claustrophobic.)

Anyhow, he leaped through this very old, plate-glass window and landed on the ground. A few tiny scratches, that's all. I suppose he was very lucky.

(Love and miss you, Billy.)