Hurting your characters. Physically.

Here's the thing. My characters are on a spaceship, and the ship is hit by meteoroids. Not a lot, just an impact. It throws the ship a bit - the effect on the inside is somewhere around a small to medium earthquake.

I need one of my characters to be hurt by it - enough that he can't do any sort of major physical activity, but not enough that he's unable to still be on the bridge and organise things. My first thought was an arm injury, but as I know very little about the limits of the human body I thought I'd ask here. Anyone have any ideas?

Unflattering injuries are usually the best ones in situations like this. He/she could of gotten a shredded colon from the impact and lost all control of his/her bowels and must be assigned to sickbay until he/she regains control of his/herself.

If you'd rather preserve the character's dignity you could have them suffer a spinal cord injury minor enough that space age technology could treat it but major enough to put them out of the fight for awhile.

Either way you choose there are endless possibilities :)

Tricky—you need a trauma bad enough to immobilize him but not so painful that he can't think straight. You probably don't want permanent damage, so it's a temporary condition.

How about temporary blindness caused by the flash of an explosion? Sprained ankle from an awkward fall? Pinned under a fallen piece of equipment?

Severe burns on the hands should keep him from being able to do a lot of physical things, while keeping him capable of making commands, etc.

Most injuries from earthquakes and other jolt phenomena (crashes, impacts, etc.) are the result of the body coming in contact with other things like falling debris, part of the ship, etc.

Sounds like you have a Star Trek Shake going on (which actually did hurt some of the actors during filming a couple times) so it's either a case of lost balance and landing badly resulting in a busted leg or arm, or something broke loose (I assume you have Artificial Gravity) and smacked him again resulting in a broken arm or leg.

Sounds like a broken bone is what you want. You could have him break his leg or his foot, and be temporarily confined to crutches or even a wheel chair depending on the severity, but still able to recover and still able to do non-physical work.

Break three ribs and a shoulder, and he's looking for at least a three month semi-retirement .

A blow to the kidney or even the liver can be debilitating and horribly uncomfortable without permanently disabling the character. These are also likely to involve some rather colourful urinary problems, which are always such fun.

I'm assuming this ship is part of an organized military? If so, one can get put on Light/Limited Duty for as little as dental work, so any injury that doesn't cripple them will get you what you want.

Wouldn't be too much of a stretch for him to get a sprained wrist or a few cracked ribs...

I was going to say the same as JHM. So, kidney or liver injury. He'll be pissing blood.

I just read the title and thought I'd drop in and say that I fucking love doing that.

Concidering my charecters are usally made of iron or better, I should learn to love doing that.

Considering my main character gets shot as part of the opening narration, I'd say I enjoy this a little too much...

Considering I've had my heroine's hand and foot cut off I guess I like doing this too. Then again, I like zombie movies.