- Almost got abducted by pedo but a cop rolled by
- Mom and I got rear ended by a dump truck that left us hospitalized for weeks
- Renal failure due to something wrong with my kidney (I was too young to understand what) but surgeons were able to fix it without removing kidney
- Almost drowned surfing...at least three times
- Hit and run when on my bicycle. That got me a nice new bike, which was nice.
- Near miss with a car while bombing a hill on my Powell Peralta skateboard. It should count as multiple because, in hindsight, bombing a hill that steep, that fast, on that board, with no gear or helmet, was in itself a near death experience every time.
- Near miss with a territorial tiger shark while surfing.
- Near miss with a territorial moray eel while scuba diving
- Wrecked my motorcycle
- Rode off a cliff while back country snowboarding...alone. Please don't be this stupid. That was very dumb and 100% on me. Always bring a buddy. I should know better.
- Hit a hidden rock while snowboarding that caused me to whip the back of my head into the ground so hard that I almost passed out. When I checked my helmet I saw that my head must have landed on another hidden rock because there was a quarter sized hole where the rock had pierced. It was very likely a fatal hit had I not been wearing a helmet.
- Suffered from chronic and acute insomnia that almost drove me to suicide. Reality gets tilted when you don't sleep at all.
- Felt not good. Went to the ER and was rushed to surgery. Turns out most of the arteries on my heart were blocked 93+%. One was 99% blocked. Ended up getting four stents but at least I dodged a bypass and a heart attack. Close though. Had I waited, maybe even a day, I would have had a massive heart attack. *Got cancer. Beat cancer. Fuck cancer.
EDIT: Reading someone else's comment reminded me of a time when I was very young (5?) where we had an aquarium on top of a tall dresser. I opened the bottom drawer and climbed on the lip so that I can could see the fishies. The whole thing toppled over on me. The dresser landed on my lower body and the aquarium landed on me, shattering. I clearly remember my mom screaming in panic, my neighbors lifting the dresser off me, the terrazzo floor cover in bloody water and me yelling at the top of my lungs for someone to save the fish that was dying next to me. It didn't make it. Oooh boy, there's trauma there. That memory hit a nerve for some reason.
Getting a crouton stuck in my windpipe. Your body can and will try to take over when life is on the line. Fortunately, I could still breathe a little and I had to wait for saliva to dissolve it. A scary 15 mins or so of small breathes.
Hiking mountain, misty/rainy midday. Summit didn't look like a summit to me, and I'm not an experienced hiker. Had forgotten my hiking boots so was hiking in flat-bottom running shoes.
Arrive at summit, of course, want to walk to edge to enjoy my hard-earned view. Begin walking down incline to my "perceived summit" (mistakes intensify). Realize it sure is a steep path. Total path from arrival to "perceived summit" was ~10 meters. 5 meters from edge I slip, ow, that hurt. Oh, I'm sliding. Time ceases to exist, this all feels like forever. Quickly flatten body such that backpack grabs surface.
Where am I? How far did I slide? 2-3m, panic, I am more than halfway towards the edge in an ever increasing steepness summit. Everything is wet. I launch myself to my feet and rush away from the ledge, processing what just happened. Oh. I see.
Strangers freaked out, friends freaked out, everyone has adrenaline. Sit and consider what occurred, try to calm myself but the panic of existential dread was persistent for the next six hours or so.
Good hike.
Posted this recently on a similar but different question, may as well include it here because it fits:
Exploring an easy cave with a friend. Nothing tricky at all, just one way through, standing room all the way, about 1m wide, ankle deep water flowing through the whole way (walking against the flow).
As we went, the water very slowly became harder to press forwards against. The change was so gradual we were second-guessing it the entire time until it got really strong. We figured it was better to walk against it than with it - at this point it was rushing against our legs, and the thought of slipping and being swept through, bouncing off of the walls, was not great. It felt much easier to keep our footing facing the flow, and also it seemed like we were much closer to the end than the beginning (the cave had an exit at both ends, it was basically a small fork of a river that cut through a hill).
So we pressed on, until we got to a point that should have been a small scramble up a few bits of rock - except now there was a massive flow of water hitting us at chest level as we tried to climb it. We were both completely unable to push against it and get up. We were also now convinced that the cave was filling up with water so we had to get out - which now meant turning around and doing the whole length again but with the water hitting the back of our legs the whole way.
Oh and the water was freezing, coming off of some snowy mountains. So for about an hour, we held onto the sides of the cave and slowly tried to move steadily through, while by this point I had almost no feeling in my frozen feet to help with keeping my footing. It was like guesswork every step.
By the time we got out, the water had risen by almost a metre I'd say. Not much but the extra force was insane, and the feeling of a cave filling up with water behind you was not easily ignored. Anyway, turns out there was heavy rainfall way up river from us, always check the forecast and think beyond where you are when dealing with rivers and caves!
A few years back I woke up with some minor pain in my pp, assuming it was just a UTI that'd pass on its own I let it go for around a week until it was unbearable, and I ended up leaking blood every time I went to pee. Finally went to the hospital and it turns out I had E. Coli in my weenie. The infection had spread to my bladder, and up into my ureter. Doc said if I'd let it go another day it would have hit my kidneys where it could have become a full blown systemic infection, which likely would have killed me.
If your bits hurt, go to the doctor.
I have this hazy, memory from when I was about 8. I was exploring a peat bog, which was fun because everything was soft and squishy and I could just run around. I saw some weird looking bushes, and decided to go check them out. But, as I ran up, it turned out there were growing over this sort of wet hole, where maybe there was a spring or something. I suddenly fell about 8 feet, and was in this mud pit slowly sinking. Luckily, I managed to grab some of those bushes I'd seen, and pull myself out. But it was very hard, because the mud was pulling me down like quicksand. Eventually, I crawled back out on the bog, covered in mud.
Nobody I was with remembers this, and honestly it might not be real. Childhood experiences are super weird.
Do you mean times in which I made a lucky mistake that avoided me running into a fatal issue, or times in which I was in a fatal issue that didn't finish me off?
Most of them are dog attacks or almost-dog attacks. Nobody seems to know how to keep a dog on a leash. I was attacked by one while strolling and couldn't escape and another time narrowly avoided another one. Me and dogs don't seem to get along except for my own.
I was at a lagoon/pool trying to traverse across when something distracted me enough that I fell in the deep area and started drowning because I can't swim. The person who should've helped was distracted and so a family member stepped in at the last minute. Same fate almost happened to me due to some very sinky mud.
I narrowly avoided being crushed under a burning foundation by not being around for a lot longer.
I was at a psych ward for reasons I would rather not mention here, and psych ward visitors have a tendency to do something hostile and end up getting a room faster. There was an uproar that broke out because one of the patients was the son of one of the nurses, and someone else felt jealous that a patient had come in with love and support built-in into the visit, and the jealous person started threatening people, and I guess I avoided that by not really minding I was being threatened, so he (the one threatening everyone) decided to assault me, in the NSFW way.
First one was right at my birth, as I came out feet first and was apparently almost strangled by the umbilical cord which was around my neck.
When I was about 5, a large wardrobe fell over and missed me by just a couple cm.
Most recent one was a few weeks ago when I was riding my bike. An oncoming BMW cut a corner and, as the road was inside a ravine, couldn't see me and almost crashed into me.
waited until it was almost too late to get checked for appendicitis
to be fair the symptoms weren't very clear cut
My ex-partner had the same experience, she said it felt like period cramps. Her appendix was the size of a grapefruit by the time she had the thing sliced out.
Fiancee and I were hiking into and camping at a state park. We got a little turned around and low on water, so I was a bit out of it and tired. I saw an interesting looking log across the trail and stepped over the smaller end of it. It was around 9:30am, so things were a little cold. I stopped and turned to wait for my fiancee and right as she was about to step on the log I realized it was an enormous 6-ish foot long rattlesnake. I grabbed her arm right before she put her foot down on the bastard and yanked her as hard as I could and backed up a step or two. Somehow the snake hadn't noticed me yet, but it noticed me wrenching my fiancee away from it and it went into full coil-up-and-rattle mode. Had that thing bitten me I would have been in a bad place because I was already dehydrated. If it had bitten my wife, both of us would have been in a bad place because we were closer to our destination with fresh water than to our car.
Bunch of failed suicides, an accident in a school swimming pool, and the time my neighbour accidentally diverted a fuck tonne of carbon monoxide fumes into my house. All the times I've been close to death don't make for particularly interesting reading.
How about a brush with serious injury instead?
1st year of uni. I'm in the labs for the first time and I am hyped to do some microbiological analysis. We were given a bunch of techniques to try and I'd decided to start by doing gram staining and then observing a slide. Most of my class mates had less experience on the microscopes than me and I was feeling great about how quickly I'd calibrated everything. Cocky enough that I hadn't noticed just how coated in immersion oil my gloves were, until my hand accidentally passed through a Bunsen burner and went up in flames.
Thankfully I'd picked a bench close to the sinks and was able to wrap some damp towels around the hand quickly to try to smother the flame before I got seriously burnt. But the scars on my hand are a reminder to me to be aware of my surroundings in the lab at all times.
Bunch of failed suicides
I sincerely hope your life is now better than it was before, and that your state of mental health is improved.
Thanks for the sympathy. I haven't felt that bad for a couple of years by now.
:)
Back when I smoked and was an unexperienced driver, I was having a cig in my car. I stuck it out of the window to tap off the ash and I drifted off of the road with my right side tires. Instead of slowly moving back I jamked the wheel and almost had a head to head collision with traffic in the oncomming lane. Escaped death by half a meter.
