The all too sobering news of the junior high track and field athlete who was hit in the head by an errant shot put throw, with his recovery looking good, brought to mind a couple of things.

First — I’ve only been here a couple of months now — there have, fortunately, not been any serious injuries to any of the student-athletes on the teams I’ve been covering.

Secondly, my own life-long history with injuries, both in and out of the sports arena. Which is funny because when I was younger, I was that type of kid that a mere scraped knee would leave me dramatically crawling.

I guess the injuries started when I was 5 and I broke my leg sledding.

Our backyard had a little hill that my dad added to by building a small, elevated platform and ramp to mount our sleds on and slide down.

On one run, I had stuck my right leg out to drag in the snow and slow down, but I hadn’t slowed down enough, and my leg was still extended, when it hit a tree.

There were no obvious signs as

to the extent of the injury after an older neighbor kid carried me into the house, no major swelling or discoloration, and with my aforementioned bent toward the dramatic, my parents didn’t really believe anything was wrong.

But I guess I had cried in my sleep during the night which prompted a trip to the doctor, where it was discovered that it was, in fact, broken.

The following summer, my older brother Mark was learning how to cast a fishing pole.

He was standing on the pier of our summer cabin, going through the maneuvers of reaching back, hitting the release button and throwing forward.

I happened to be sitting on the shoreline maybe 15 feet behind him, which seemed to be a safe place.

Except that when Mark was ready for the first real try, he hit the release button, then swung the pole back, sending the line and hook flying back at me.

It proceeded to hook me just below my lower lip and Mark, having not looked back, thought it was snagged in the brush and started yanking — pulling the hook painfully down toward my chin.

Other than a few other cuts and bruises of an active youngster, I had a pretty clean bill of health until eighth-grade, which is when things took a decided turn for the worse.

During my eighth-grade football season, during a game in which I scored four touchdowns, I received a concussion on a hit that literally had me seeing stars.

Early the next spring, I was shot in the mouth with a BB gun, having a BB stuck in my lip for a week — it’s a long story.

And not too long after that, I had my most disastrous injury.

At the end of another long story, I was in a bicycle accident, where a friend and I were each going top speed on 10 speeds, collided head on, tire to tire.

While my friend was able to start to jump off his bike as the collision was imminent, I apparently wasn’t.

I’ve never had a memory of this accident, but from what I was told, I flew headlong over both bikes and landed face first in the street.

The bridge of my nose was knocked an inch to the left, I was knocked out, received another concussion and was in a coma for 22 hours.

A few weeks later the photos were taken for our high school ID cards, so of course the ID card I carried through my first year of high school had a picture of me with a cast on my nose.

My sophomore year saw me on crutches virtually half the time as I severely sprained my right ankle four times — once during football season, twice in basketball and once in baseball.

When I had recovered from my first ankle injury and was back on the football field, I took a helmet to the chin and needed 12 stitches.

I’ll never forget sitting in the waiting room in my full football gear and uniform.

Junior year, if I recall, was pretty uneventful in the injury department, but it came up again senior year when, while playing pick-up basketball, I turned my left ankle and heard the familiar crunch.

Although this time, rather than just spraining the ankle, I had torn off all three of the exterior ligaments.

Those were the big ones, with a number of jammed fingers and a bruised tailbone along the way, and other than an odd detachment of ligaments from my left middle finger while playing softball in Boulder, Colorado, my adult years have been pretty non-injurious.

Which is why, having now discussed this and with us getting to the end of the school year without any major Panther injuries since I’ve gotten here, let us all wish for continued health — and knock on wood.