That’s exactly why many people around here use pseudonyms at this point.
My personal planned solution is to reach the point where, professionally, I can post in threads like this and if someone does google me and find it, who cares, if they don’t want to hire me for it I have a queue, bitches.
Hey, we all need impossible goals to aspire to.
Yeah. It was after a trip out onto the lake ice for a “winter picnic” that I came down with my bout of pneumonia.
Going fishing with my brother. He was towing his boat doing 100km/h+ near a national park. I noticed an animal grazing on the verge of the road and quickly tell my brother: “Deer in the road.”.
His response is:“Where?”
Next thing this eland (Think of an antelope about 1 1/2 times the size of a cow.) jumps into our lane - panics, turns around and jumps back the direction it came. That thing was practically all I could see through the windshield. My brother swerved causing the trailor to fishtail and almost loses control. Meanwhile the eland is so close it kicked the passenger door with a hoof as it jumped out of the way.
The whole thing from “Deer in the road.” to eland kicking the door must have taken two or three seconds but I swear time stopped for 10 seconds when I thought we were going to plough into it and that thing looked positively prehistoric in size.
Not as fucked up as having a gun pointed at your face misfire twice but pretty scary.
My lungs were underdeveloped when I was born and I spent some time in the hospital while they gained strength. The same thing happened to my older brother and he did not survive. Ten years ago I had testicular cancer, the same kind that Lance Armstrong had. Luckily mine was caught almost immediately, it had only spread to my lymph nodes but not my lungs or brain.
-Chris
Wait, what? What is this?
Do you just urgently point at your throat or is it some well-known signal, like a peace sign (index and middle finger) or a fuck off sign (middle finger).
Save the story about your drug OD in the room full of midget pre-op transgender prostitutes for when you’ve got a little more plausible deniability. I know it hurts.
Get anything good from this? If it had happened to me (and I survived), I would have stood at the well for years. Years.
“You don’t have to get me the new bike Dad. I’m sure I"ll… survive. I’m a real… survivor.”
That reminds me of one of my possible answers to this topic. I’ve never really really been in true mortal danger, but have gotten in some situations or sustained injuries that scared me.
The one I’m reminded of now took place when I was maybe 10 and had gone with my sisters to a barn where they use to ride horses. After they had gotten their fill of that the owner of the place invited my whole family down to his house for something to drink. As we were walking down the unpaved driveway to the house I asked the owner about a nearby fence. I wanted to know if it was electrified like I knew some of the others around were. Only he wouldn’t say. So for some dumb reason I walked over to it and grabbed the fence with both hands.
Naturally, I was electrocuted. When I regained consciousness a minute later no one had come to help me. In fact my whole family were all still standing on the drive laughing their heads off. They thought I was faking. I was really mad.
In July of 2002 I was in a very serious car accident. I was on highway 48 just north of Newmarket (about 90 minutes north of Toronto) heading south. I don’t know entirely what happened since I don’t remember but according to the police report both my car and an oncoming car crosses the center line of the road and we collided driver side to driver side at a combined speed of 180 km/h. I was in a 1984 Volvo station wagon and the other car was a GMC Safari. My car and the good 3 feet of hood in front of me took the brunt of the impact and most likely saved my life. The engine block was split in half and the front tire was under my feet. Even so I was seriously injured. I shattered my left femur at the knee and destroyed my left elbow joint, 13 cm of my left humerus, 2/3 of my tricep, and half of my bicep. I don’t remember the accident itself but I remember everything after vividly. I even remember a woman coming up to the car before the ambulance arrived and asking if she could help me since she knew first aid, to which I responded “Lady, I think I’m beyond first aid.” The pain and terror I experienced while I was alone in the car is indescribable. I never actually thought that I was going to die, I could think of nothing other than the pain coursing through me.
I suffered a whole lot for the next two years and still have a good amount of pain today. I only have limited use of my left arm and diminished strength in my legs. But I was incredibly lucky to have some of the best surgeons in the world, worked with one of the best physiotherapists in Canada for about two years, and I like to think I do pretty well for myself. I don’t have to walk with a cane any more, people can’t tell that I’m disabled unless I tell them, and I have a great appreciation for all of the wonderful things I have in life.
You’re only electrocuted when you die, if you live you’re just shocked. A couple months ago I was unplugging my laptop and my finger slipped at touched the prong while it was still partially plugged in. After I was done shaking and throwing up I called my girlfriend at work. She of course was concerned but felt it was important for me to know that I was only shocked after reading about it on webMD.
Tom mentioned it briefly in the podcast, but yeah, train wreck. Here’s the original post about it: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=1818
The links in that post are long dead, but here’s the NTSB report on the accident: http://ntsb.gov/events/2003/Burbank/Burbank_Board_Meeting.pdf If you look at the picture on page 12, I was in the “Train cab car.” It looks like maybe it just fell over there, but it actually spun around, and ended up facing opposite the direction we were traveling.
The NTSB assigned most of the cause of the accident to the intersection design. At the time I type this, seven years later, the intersection has still not been changed.
Remember last year, when I was in the hospital with appendicitis? That was the second-closest.
The closest I came to dying was when I was born. My mother’d had some bad things happen to her guts, problems which plague her to this day. It was only by modern medical science (ca. early 1970s) and the grace of God that we both survived my birth.
Something which she never ceases to remind me of when necessary.
I fell off the top bunker in a train compartment and landed head first in a tool box when around 8, got about 11 stitches…
Driving back home on the freeway, I was in a lane between 2 big trucks, I decided to pull down the shade so I can see better, lost control of my car, and was literally swerving back and forth, took me about 15 seconds to regain control.
When I was a little kid, I was eviscerated and had to walk several blocks home, carrying my guts in my hands, to get medical attention. I WIN!
Going home for the holidays from Michigan Tech with a few friends. I took the first shift of driving, despite having been on an all-nighter and a little on the strung-out side.
We’re about an hour outside of Houghton and are basically in a caravan of cars doing 45mph on the freeway due to the snow on the roads. It’s not icy, there’s so little freeze/thaw up there, but there is an assload of snow. I’m itching to pass some people; if we can skip ahead of 4 cars, we’ll be able to set our own pace. I know my car can handle more than 45mph despite the snow. Yes, I was an idiot, I was 18.
At some point, the driver in front of us sees a window to do some passing, and I take one look and decide it’s big enough for two. So I pull out behind him and accelerate as much as I can given the conditions. It doesn’t help that my little car is laden with three extra people and a winter break’s worth of luggage, so I’m not moving as fast as I’d like. The initial passing car gets ahead of all the cars and pulls back into the lane, but he doesn’t leave enough room behind him for us to squeeze in, and he doesn’t begin traveling any faster than the rest of the group.
Meanwhile, it’s come to our attention that there’s a semi truck oncoming. All of the gaps in the cars we’re riding alongside are too small for us to squeeze into, and we can’t accelerate fast enough to get ahead of the initial passer.
So we’re watching this semi get closer, everyone in the car is starting to freak the hell out, and the initial passer finally gets a clue what’s going on and he begins to move faster. A gap opens behind him and we swerve back into the lane.
I think another second, maybe two, and we’d have been red jelly on that semi truck’s bumper.
I’m pretty sure that was the closest I (knowingly) came to dying. There’s a good chance it was the closest my passengers came, too.
Coming home from a concert in Alpine Valley WI one night. Near home in IL. About 1AM. About 30 years ago.
Make a turn, get my station wagon Chevette (!) into first. Drop it into second. Several hundred yards behind me I see something come over the rise in the moonlight.
It’s a GTO doing over 100mph (hey, I have to estimate it, who the hell knows?). I have time to scream at my buddy Pete (I don’t think I said anything, not enough time to articulate anything, just a primal scream).
Impact, in the rear view mirror I watch the back of my car fold up at me like a time lapse photography tin can crumple thing. Both rear wheels are folded up inside the car so we are now launched like a rocket forward and have lost all brakes. All I can do is steer. We twist around backwards and pass an oncoming car backwards (this is a two lane road, lined closely by very old solid trees). The woman in the car is sure we died based on what she saw and drives straight to the nearest police station (about 5 miles away).
I’m not wearing my seat belt (I have, every time, ever since, because of this). All I have to hang onto is the steering wheel and I need to steer this rocket sled. Afterwards, we find out I actually bent the steering wheel (either that, or my impact on it did).
The car comes back around to about an 80 degree angle and plows off into the ditch where we miraculously miss hitting any trees.
Both doors on the car are punched so we can’t get out that way. I hear the gas tank gushing - it was punctured. We climb out the windows.
Pete starts praying. Me, I drop to the ground and kiss it, but I’m a life long atheist. I’m very pissed off in a David and Goliath way and I run back towards the GTO screaming obscenities (I have a wicked filthy tongue) where the two stoners are trying to lift the rear axle of their car back onto the road (but, their car was in bad shape too, and not very driveable).
Other than nasty whiplash and a lot of eggplant bruises, I’m ok, but I think we came pretty close to biting the bullet there and, considering the forces involved, believe I am lucky not to have been ejected from the car.
I went sledding when i was 6 and hit a tree stump. This was in the family holiday cottage about 3 hours from the nearest hospital. The steering wheel of my sled hits me in the stomach and i go inside crying. Turns out the pain has no intention of going away and they drive me to hospital the next morning. Cue x-rays of the stomach and an immediate reaction from the doctors as they throw me in an ambulance and send me to the national hospital on Oslo. I have advanced cancer on one of my kidney, of the highly aggressive and deadly kind. They operate me the same night and i spend the next 4 months in hospital recovering from the surgery and chemotherapy. The next 2-3 years i do frequent checkups but the cancer is gone. According to a doctor that was interviewed in one of our biggest newspapers a few years later none have ever survived this type of cancer in an advanced stage in Norway so i guess that makes me a zombie (braaaaains). I still have that newspaper clipping.
I have also been in no less than 3 pretty serious car crashes
When i was 4 we were hit straight in the side of our VW Bettle by a police car going to a big fire. They ran a red light and hit the passenger side where i was sitting. Beeing in the 70’s there were no such things as kids safety seats but luckily i had my seat belt on. Both our car and the police car was totalled
When i was around 20 me and a friend were going to pick up some movies that another friend had borrowed from me. He was in the car in front of us and being extremely stupid teenagers and the best drivers in the world (who isn’t when they are around 18-20?) we were racing to get there first. We were going about 120 km/h when we went off the road and were sliding along the road for about 100 meters before my friend managed to get some traction on the front wheels and get the car back on the road. This was about 5 meters before we would have hit a concrete pole. This is actually the most frightening of my crashes as a sat there seeing the pole getting closer and closer.
And finally i totaled my car about 5 years ago when i went off the road in a blizzard. I did not go very fast (maybe 50-60km/h) due to the conditions but i spun out and went off the road backwards and straight into a small creek. The car was 10 cm shorter afterwards.
edit Oh, and i grew up with a crazy kid in the neighborhood that was extremely aggressive and not to be trusted. He shot me in the knee with a bow and arrow once when we were playing cowboys and indians and held a massive hunting knife to my throat when i did not want to play with him another time.
I don’t have a good one, really, other than driving really stupidly when I was young.
There was the time we (three of us) were in my two-passenger Honda CRX. Not the sport model. Doing ~125 mph down rt. 495 in my dinky U or H rated tires. It was an automatic. It was red-lined. I remember one of my friends suggesting I take my foot off the gas and put it back down again to see if it would down shift. And I did it. lawl. It didn’t downshift, of course.
Another time I was in my Honda Prelude VTEC (with actual V rated tires this time) going up some two lane highway at around 90 mph. I was in the right lane, and there was a car in front of me doing about 60, so I was coming up to him fast. But in the left lane and also in front of me was a pickup doing about 80, also rapidly gaining on the car. Using a highly flawed risk analysis, I gun it and and narrowly weave between the car and the truck with inches to spare. At 90-100 mph. Fucking brilliant.
Anyway, my dad has a good story. When he was ~19, before I was conceived, he fell from the top of this -
He worked for the construction company building it, and he fell from the top of one of the towers. Luckily for him (and me), a guy on a level below him reached out a caught him with one arm (and broke the arm in the process).