It's easy to laugh now that the bleeding has stopped and the scars have largely healed.

But as you're falling 10 feet from a rafter, or seeing your wrist get power-sanded, or feeling a nail go up your nose, the thought going through your head is not that this will make a funny story someday. It's more likely something inappropriate for publication in a family newspaper.

And those curse-laden thoughts — and shouts — are on the rise.

A federal study released earlier this year showed that consumer injuries from nail guns have increased by 200 percent since 1991.

The study, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says the increase in injuries among the general public could be because of the increased availability of inexpensive nail guns.

It didn't mention another possible reason: the popularity of those home-improvement shows. It looks so easy on television.

It's a vicious cycle. Once you've decided to tackle a job yourself, you head into a big warehouse home-improvement store and see all those power-tool options, just like the people use on TV. They would just make the job easier, right?

Well, sometimes.

Besides nail guns, the Consumer Product Safety Commission reports an increase in a whole host of power-tool accidents in the home.

For instance, power paint guns and sprayers. The commission didn't even keep count of paint-gun accidents until 2000. And even then, the number of reported incidents were too low for the agency to guess a national average.

For 2006, though, it estimated that 1,296 people were injured by the devices. A scroll through sample cases shows one report of a 44-year-old female with this narrative: "accidentally sprayed paint in both eyes."

CHAIN-SAW MAYHEM

Then, there are the chain saws.

Pat Johnson of Gilbert, Ariz., knew there would come a time when her palm tree would grow too large for her to trim herself. But she thought she could do it just once more. "I'll give it one more time," Johnson remembers thinking, "and next time, I'll hire a professional."

The palm tree was near her swimming pool, surrounded by loose gravel. Johnson climbed on her wooden ladder and started trimming with her trusty chain saw.

There was just one branch left to cut. "I'm thinking, I can reach it without getting down and repositioning the ladder," she says.

She was correct. She could technically reach it. Except she had to lean so far over to get at it, the ladder tipped over sideways.

She landed on her arm and was momentarily stunned. When she came around, she realized she had started this chain-saw project while she was home alone. "I better be able to move," she thought.

She could, except for her right arm. She called a friend, who took her to an emergency room. Six months of physical therapy cured her severe tendinitis.

The chain saw, sadly, never worked again. "I think God didn't want me to do any more chain-sawing," she says.

SAVE THE DRILL OR YOU?

The safety commission estimates there were more than 2,000 accidents involving drills nationwide in 2006. That's up from about 1,600 in 2000 and 1,200 in 1991.

David Tracy of Sedona added to those statistics. He was screwing in some metal air-conditioning ducts. To do this, he was laying face down across the rafters, about 10 feet off the ground.

There was just one screw left to get in, and he had to stretch to get it into place.

"Somehow," Tracy says, "something slipped."

At this split second — just before gravity kicked in — Tracy had a decision to make. Let go of the cordless drill and grab at a rafter with his free hand. Or hold on to the drill and fall 10 feet to the ground below.

His choice: the $50 drill. "It was like in my hand like I'm holding an egg, and I didn't want it to break," he says.

Tracy soon realized that a falling body travels 10 feet pretty quickly. As a former gymnast, he was trying to tuck his feet up to nail the landing. But didn't.

"My toes went at a 90-degree angle straight into the floor," he says. "I broke two of them and bruised some of the others. You talk about musical toes. They were every color of the rainbow."

The drill, though, still works, he says. "I still have it to this day," he says, proudly. "It's probably worth 29 cents at a garage sale."