The most unusual events that sent people to the emergency room every month

Yu Han/Business Insider

If you play football, September is the most likely time you’ll end up in the emergency room with an injury from the sport.

In February, the odds of you landing in the ER with a sprained ankle from a game of pick-up isn’t as likely. 

Looking at data from the 2014 US Consumer Product Safety Commission’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System — and the mesmerizing visual compiled by FlowingData — we decided to map out the wackiest things that sent an abnormal number of people to the emergency room every month. We also compared those spikes to the number of ER visits that related to each activity over the rest of the year.

January: Snowboarding landed more people in the hospital in January, with virtually no accidents during the summer months in the US.

February: More hospital visits related to snow removal occurred in February, higher than any other winter month.

March: Exercise equipment was linked to hospital visits throughout the year, but the biggest spike was in March, followed by September.

April: Outdoor track season in high schools gets underway in the spring, and in April 2014, the sport sent an estimated 6,522 people to the hospital.

May: As baseball season heats up, the number of hospital visits related to the sport jumps up to 26,568 before declining the rest of the year.

June: Beach chairs are related to a surprisingly high number of accidents (an estimated 1,231) in June, compared to the rest of the year.

July: The time around the Fourth of July is filled with excitement and a whole bunch of amateur fireworks. Those displays send an unusually large number of people to the emergency room compared to the rest of the year, with just a small uptick again around New Year’s Eve.

August: elevator-related emergency room visits hit an all-year high in August based on the 2014 data.

September: Accidents related to football sent the most people to the emergency room in September, followed closely by October, winding down as playoffs get underway.

October: Relatedly, cheerleading accidents hit an all-year high in the middle of football season with an estimated 6,881 emergency room visits happening in October 2014.

November: Oddly, daywear (the clothes we wear every day) was connected to a number of hospital visits throughout the year, hitting its peak in November with an estimated 5,773 accidents.

December: To finish out the calendar year, ice hockey was linked to an abnormally high number of emergency room visits in December, around the middle of the ice hockey season.

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