I was going 45 mph on a main road, when an 18 year old trying to show off for his girlfriend, blew threw a stop sign on a residential road and t-boned me going 80 mph. I was one of the luckier victims, with emergency surgery, fractures and breaks everywhere, loss of use of two fingers, and nerve damage in all of my limbs.
The driver’s girlfriend did not survive, and my coworker, who was in the car with me, had every rib shatter and his spine broken. 3 years later, he’s still on oxy (he had to get special approval and prove that it wasn’t addiction).
I don’t remember the crash itself, but I remember a fire and waking up to my coworker covered in blood, screaming and delirious. I remember falling in and out of conciousness while I was moved from room to room to get emergency care for the next 3 days. Most of all, I remember the relief at hearing my coworker’s voice after 4 days, now knowing that he was still alive.
I have died 3 times. I was a very premature birth and spent my first year in nicu. My mother told me I had died 3 time and been brought back. I had independent verification from my aunt but no documentation for proof.
I was just a small kid at swimming lessons (so not deep water). It was the end of the lesson for the day and I was heading back to the locker room. I was the last one I guess. I was using one of those oversized beach towels… and I slipped and fell into the water with the damn towel wrapped around me. I wasnt a good swimmer, panicking, unable to tell which way was up. Not a single person noticed I feel in our heard me. If one of the instructors hadn’t walked out of the locker room when he did and noticed me I would have died. My dad was maybe 20 feet from me chatting up some other parent. But because it’s an old pool in a school, it has this wall that basically prevented anyone in the bleachers from seeing most of the pool (except for the diving board on the far side), so I was drowning in the blind side.
To this day (over 2 decades), my mom and step dad love to bully me about how I had a fear of getting water in my face when I was young afterwards. One of many stories they love to tell!
I was trying to overtake a car on a narrow street with just two lanes going in opposite directions. I was way above the speed limit and another car was coming at me. Luckily, the other driver had noticed an idiot ahead and braked. I barely avoided them as I rejoined my lane in a narrow gap between two cars.
As soon as it had ended, I realized how stupid and dangerous it was. I could’ve died and killed innocent people. What scares me the most is that every other person on the road is the same human species as me. People make these idiotic decisions in a split second, without thinking, and you read about yet another horrific crash on the news. I was very lucky not to cause one.
Now I employ a very different approach to driving.
Glad no one was hurt, but more so glad you took some knowledge away from that. I knew a guy that didn’t work out for. He, his pregnant wife, and daughter are gone now. Only his son survived (with brain damage). All because he was speeding, tried to pass a semi only to meet an on coming semi.
My entire arm shattered through a glass window and cut me down to my bones. Took like 30-something stitches for both cuts, including 3 internal stitches for one of my arteries. I am incredibly lucky to be alive.
That time that a teen with an M16 with safety off, loaded and set to full auto turned around and aimed it at me (and a few others) because he needed help (Would love to shit on US gun laws but this was not in the US)
I’ve had a surprisingly similar experience, in the army, although it was a Diemaco C7. I was following behind one of my conscripts on a live fire walking/pop-up target trail, as a safety officer, and near the end of the trail, the dumbass turns around, finger on trigger, full-auto and starts chatting with the rifle pointed straight at me.
I very calmly asked him to lower his rifle to the ground, then unload it, then tore him a new one. Then I went and sat down for a bit.
My brother tore down old grain elevators when I was young. Where the trucks dump there is a pit about 15 feet deep with augers at the bottom. I was about 14 helping him and we had the grates off the pit. My brother had an older partner who happened to be on site that day. Anyhow I had my back turn to the pit and stupidly was stepping back to look at something. I had just placed my foot over the empty air when my brother’s partner grabbed me. I wasn’t even falling yet.
Anyhow at the moment I didn’t even think about it. Was bit dangerous work overall. We worked with dynamite and heavy equipment after all. Was not till a few days later I woke at night in a start and just realized how close I came to being dead or at best in a wheel chair.
This was about 30 years past. I had only in my life meet his partner maybe 4 times but he happened to be on site that day. I had never told anyone this story as it was a non event at the time but I thought about it lots. My brother had informed me few years back that he had died. Natural causes. Certainly brought back that day and fully explained to my brother how he had literally saved my life.
Ernie if you are reading this, I do not know how to thank you enough. Wish I had mentioned it to my brother while you were still alive as I am sure he would have brought it up in polite conversation.
I once while hiking in the desert I fell off a sandstone monolith and landed in a bush that broke my fall. If Id missed the bush I’d have hit rocks and died, ants would have eaten my corpse.
Closest would probably when I hung myself from a noose over a stairwell and fully blacked out but the rope I used had so much stretch that I actually fell out of it, fell down the stairs and hit my head on a glass doorknob giving me amnesia. Probably would be dead if I wasn’t an idiot about rope choice.
Other than that I mean I have had about 16 concussions and the one I got for accidentally skiing of a cliff and plummeting down below would be second, I’m lucky I didn’t seriously injure myself other than the concussion and that people found me because I landed off to the side of another ski trail.
Almost run over by a speeding motorist who was running a stop sign while passing the car that was stopped at the stop sign to let me use the crosswalk.
Stray bullet passing close enough to make my ear buzz.
Had the opportunity to fly in a small vintage airplane (not sure what kind). It was awesome but the following day we got information that the next flight crashed and all passengers died.
I was on a class trip out on Kjerragbolten in Norway. It is a rock wedged in a cracked mountain, leaving several hundred meters of freefall on either side of the rock. It was a particularily windy day, but somehow our teacher allowed us to walk out on it. I remember walking out on it, and getting basically scarred for life about heights, especially since the quick gusts that day could easily have killed me.
A few months later, our teacher left her position, and we never really knew why she left, but I assume some of the parents informed the board about her recklessness at that trip.
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