What's the closest you've ever come to dying?

Everything else
61

Getting born.

I came out butt-first. It was a very long, very exhausting birth(for my mum and the doctors), and they realised, some way into it, that I was turning blue. When I finally came out, it turns out I had the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck so tightly it had cut off circulation to my head and my heart had stopped. It took some time before they could get it going again.

I don’t know how much it affected me developmentally, but I keep thinking about what might’ve been, if I’d had a more normal birth.

62

Some of these stories are pretty terrifying. I’m glad to say that I don’t have anything that can compete. I have been in a few car accidents, but none of them were very bad. I’ve had a few close calls on my motorcycle, and those are terrifying, but I’ve never been in a real accident on it.

Oh, I thought of one that might qualify. A friend and I went skydiving for the first time. We wanted to get going relatively quickly, so we did tandem jumps. I was about 6’1", and the guy I was attached to was 5’6" or less. When we were getting harnessed up, I kept telling them that it was really uncomfortable, but they said it was fine. So we go up, and we jump out of the plane first. Free fall was pretty great, but when he pulled the chute, it jerked the harness tight on my crotch – one of the more unpleasant things I’ve ever felt. The guy then wanted to showboat a little bit, so we started corkscrewing, and that’s when I passed out. I woke up on the ground on my back with bloody knees and dirt in my mouth. Not actually life-threatening, but the fact that I passed out while skydiving is a little sobering.

63

x 10000

64

Matt, Jim, and I are out on the frozen pond behind Pokigo’s (Matt’s house) and decide it’s time to go in for lunch. As we’re walking back to the house the ice buckles beneath my feet, I crash through and find myself in ice-water over my head. There are a few seconds of thrashing and panic, but it dawns on me pretty quick that A) treading water isn’t going to work so hot in two layers of clothes, a snowsuit and moon-boots, and B) I’m going to die relatively soon if I don’t get out of the water.

I figure (hope) that I’m close enough to shore that “the bottom” can’t be that far down, so I sink on purpose and try to find it. The pond floor turned out to be only a few feet below me, and I was able to push-off well enough to get my head and shoulders back above water for a second and catch some breath. I almost managed to crawl back out onto the ice toward shore, but then that section broke beneath me, and I had to do it all over again. That’s how I got out…pushing off the bottom and breaking the ice until I got to where I could stand up, which is when I noticed Jim and Matt standing like statues on shore.

Once I set foot on dry ground, they snapped out of it and we went inside and ate lunch.

65

I use an abbreviated last half of my name here but have used my full name at a couple of other gaming sites.
Not too worried the worst that can happen is my prospective employers say…check out the games this guy likes, sheesh scratch him off the list ;)

66

Two times come to mind.

First, I was about 11 and we were on a scout hike. The trail went across a pretty steep, and high washout. At the bottom of the washout was a cliff that dropped about 3-400 feet to the river below. I was just about the last one of 12 or so to cross. As I was coming across the trail when the trail just sort of crumbled. I started sliding feet first down this washout right toward the edge of the cliff. I was picking up speed and truly thinking I was going to die. I was scrambling with my hands and feet trying to stop myself, the the entire washout was just loose, dry sand/dirt. Honestly, I don’t know what ever stopped my, but about 3 feet from the edge of the cliff I just sort of stopped sliding and was able to crab crawl my way back up to the trail. Only injury was a severely scrapped/torn up stomach and chest from sliding down this.

Second time was when I was 19. I was in Guatemala, living in a pretty rough part of the city. Lots of gangs, lots of muggings, etc. The Guatemalan army would come once a week or so and we would hear the repeat of machine guns as they were trying to clean out the barrio. A friend and I were walking up an alleyway to the main bus terminal at about 8 pm or so. It was Feb, so the sun was long gone. As we were walking up the alley we saw some guys walking down toward us. I wasn’t too nervous. I had been in this particular area for almost 6 months, knew a lot of people and honestly, am a foot or so taller than most Guatemalans (being 6’3"), so generally felt pretty secure. Suddenly though, I had a gun in my face and this kids says “Take off your backpack and your watch!”

I didn’t really do anything at first, it just all seemed so surreal. Then I saw him pull the hammer back on the gun and he said to me “I will fire”. One of the thugs started frisking my front pockets while the other grabbed my backpack as I was pulling it off. I started taking off my watch but figured they had already checked my pockets, so I slipped it into one of my pockets. They grabbed our backpacks and took off running.

I sort of snapped though. I started chasing after them, trying to find them, vowing that I would kill them. My friend was yelling at me (pretty hysterically) to stop. After a minute or so, the idiocy of what I was doing set in and I just sat down and started to laugh. It was a unique experience. I don’t know how close I actually came to dying, but the pistol in my face, ready to fire, was pretty frightening.

67

Of course these experiences are always profound when you have them and you’re aware you had a narrow escape.

But if you think about it, you’re always a second or two away from death whenever you’re anywhere near a motor vehicle.

This kind of proximity to death is I think different from the possibility that you’ll be hit by a meteor or something random like that. Cars frequently require the attention of the driver to avoid a catastrophe, and of course you see many gross lapses of driver attention every day, that mostly just happen not to cause a major accident, but could have in a circumstance that same driver probably has to deal with a dozen times over the course of that one trip.

68

The gun stories are fascinating. I’ve spent my entire life around (lots) of firearms (Being that every male in my family before me (except for my uncle) is an avid hunter and thinks that having more guns is always the solution) and have never been in a situation where they were mishandled and pointed at someone.

I can’t imagine what I’d do in a situation where a gun was pointed at me. I want to say that I’d probably be really calm since I have a lot of experience with firearms and I know their raw power, but at the same time there is an equal chance that I’d shit my pants and start crying like a little girl who had dirt kicked on her.

69

You know, after spending a few years running traumas, it was really emphasized to me just how true a statement that is.

70

I was playing sandlot football one day and a punk neighbor kid from down the block was playing and I made him mad somehow. He went home and got a big carving knife and came back and tried to gut me.

Thing was, he was four years younger and that was back when I was young and nimble and I could run like the wind. I was amused more than scared because I knew he couldn’t get close to me so I danced about until an adult intervened.

I don’t even know if that qualifies, but he did have a big knife.

71

1.5 years ago (wow, it seems like longer) I told my husband that if he didn’t stop drinking, I might have to leave him. He yelled at me, threw a can of hairspray at me, and stomped off to his computer room.

In a moment I could hear him furiously opening and closing the drawers of the dresser where he kept his gun.

It is possible that I am alive because I went against the advice of two friends who thought I was being silly, and had hidden that gun the day before the confrontation. My husband had never hit me, but he had an explosive temper and there was no telling when or why he might go off about something. I was thoroughly convinced (at the time) that his temper and even his drinking were because I was such a bad and frustrating person to him, and that if I could just find the right words to explain my position he wouldn’t get offended and we could work it all out together. After all, he hadn’t been drinking that much when I met him! I also thought I was being a silly, overreacting, hysterical female, and that it was impossible that he’d ever hurt me no matter what kinds of nightmares I’d had about it.

Still, I couldn’t shake the thought that every woman shot by her husband had probably said something along the lines of, “That’s ridiculous, he’d never shoot me” the night before he did it. And so I hid the gun, telling myself I was an idiot the entire time.

And really, I was an idiot. As my husband looked for his gun, I just stood in the bedroom shaking and doing nothing and thinking dully, “This can’t be happening.” I was as helpless as any battered woman I’d ever refused to have sympathy for. It wasn’t until he said, “I don’t appreciate you interfering with my personal possessions,” that I finally woke up and called the police.

They came and then stood around rolling their eyes at me and joking with my husband on the porch while I packed my son and told him some story about how we were taking a surprise midnight adventure to a hotel. (It’s possible the police were just doing what they had to do to keep him calm since they couldn’t arrest him, and it’s also possible that I’ve got a bad habit of excusing douchebag male behavior.)

Would my (now ex-) husband have really shot me? I have no idea, and I never will. It’s likely I’ve come closer to death from health problem, and it’s certainly not as bad as the things most of you have been through.

This is probably a good time to say that lurking and reading your experiences on this board have definitely helped me find ways to put my own problems in perspective, and also to believe that I could get through the bad times. (Especially your posts, jpinard).

Well, that was an interesting exercise in therapy to write that in public, to say the least. Thanks for reading this far if you did. Also, the story eventually has a very happy ending: I’m now married to my best friend and he’s got the day off from work today, so we’re going to go play video games and have crazy circus sideshow sex until it’s time to pick the kid up from school. It’s good to be able to say I like my life.

72

Mine aren’t so great, most of them involve cars.

When I was a young lad in boy scouts, we went on a hike. There was one kid in the troop who was a notorious douche. We hiked this huge ass mountain, and I stood near the edge of a cliff looking out admiring the view. Turbo-douche comes up from behind me, shoves me as hard as he can. I go stumbling forward, about to fall off a cliff. Then he grabs my pack and pulls me back, and says “I saved your life.” Fucker.

When I was a teen I was driving down the turnpike to see my girlfriend at her college. It was a blizzard, but I didn’t care, I needed teh sex. There was turnpike construction and the road divided into 2 lanes, separated by a concrete barrier. The right was exit only, left was pass through. I make my way to the left well in advance. Some turbo douche, realizing at the last second he needed to go left, accelerates and cuts in front of me, then hits the brakes so he doesn’t collide with the barrier. I also have to hit the brakes, but I am in an ancient car and the wheels lock and I start a skid. The car goes almost completely sideways, but I calmly remembered drivers ed: Turn into the skid, pump the brake, and I regain control with nary a sweat. 5 minutes later, I am hyperventilating at almost dying and have to pull over.

Another time, I was driving my pontiac piece of shit down the road and I stepped on the brakes to stop, and the brake line snapped. I heard a “twang” and the pedal suddenly had no pressure. I was able to slam it into 1st gear and pull off the side of the road to coast to a stop. Again, this was all reflexive, and it saved my life.

3rd time, I am driving back to work at wal mart after a lunch break (summer job), contemplating suicide rather than go back there to work another hour. Apparently I took this too seriously because I slammed into a stopped SUV at 50mph. My entire car crumbled into a heap of twisted metal, with a small pocket around the drivers seat where I was. Go go japanese safety engineering! Anyway my first thought is to get out of the car before it explodes, so I lept out the shattered window and ran to the side of the road, where I fell unconscious. I woke up in the ambulance. Only real damage was some shattered glass in my hands, which I still have some scars from.

73

Or maybe that bike was GOOD luck because, after all, you’re alive to tell about it :)

74

I’m told I had pneumonia more than once as an infant.

When I was around 12 or 13 I had another bout of pneumonia. I had a really high fever, and couldn’t get warm. I set the heater right next to my bed. When I woke up, my comforter had a big charred hole in it.

In college I did a weekend hiking trip in Yosemite with friends. First night, sleeping in my tent when my tent mate rolls over on me, or so I think. I was so exhausted I didn’t open my eyes, and just push and mumble “get off. GET. OFF.” Then I hear pots and pans clanging, people shouting “get away from there!” “Heya! Shoo!”, flashlight beams swirling. Turned out a bear was sitting on me, through the tent. I don’t think I was that close to dying, but still, pushing a bear and yelling at it isn’t the best idea.

Also in college, Mom is driving us all (me + 2 bros) home from a mini-vacation at the coast. She must’ve been half asleep at the wheel, because she passed a truck on a blind curve on a mountainside. All i remember is seeing a huge Peterbilt grill out the front windshield, Mom yanks us over into the right lane. I can’t tell how close we were to getting smashed. It was one of those split-second things. I remember Mom sobbing “I’m so sorry, I’m so so sorry,” and my little brothers saying “way to go mom! that was WICKED!”

75

You did good. I had a friend who was not as lucky. You did good.

76

I got caught in essentially a riptide once. Scary as hell! It wasn’t really a riptide in the normal sense, so swimming parellel wouldn’t make a difference. It was kind of a sand bar problem causing a current, but I couldn’t really touch and get any traction to keep my head up. A buddy was with me, and we just had to keep swimming and hope for the best. I’ve never been so exhausted in my life as I was when finally found the bottom again. It was only a few yards, but it seemed like forever. I thought I would drown for sure. Awful experience.

77

x 17,080 and counting

78

WOW

79

Yeah, I think she wins the thread.

80

I concur. Quatoria and Bahimiron are tied at distant second.