Yeah. I didn’t want to say that, because I don’t want to take anything away from many of these other impressive narrow escapes, but just… Wow!
My escapes can’t compete with anything in this thread, the only difference is they have a birthday theme to them.
On my 21th birthday my dad was giving me a ride to college and we were on the Roosevelt Boulevard in Philly, just a crazy highway. We were doing about 60 MPH when a car cut my dad out as we were coming out of a turn, if my dad didn’t quickly move into the next lane he would have hit us and we would have gone into the metal divide to our right. Also fortunately no one was in the lane next to us either.
Then 3 hours later I was walking to my next class which was across a 4 way intersection, I was halfway across the cross walk when a bus decided to run the yellow light and came within about a foot of hitting me going at least 30 MPH.
I have more crazy examples but none of them life threatening.
wtf? Don’t frame it as a competition. That just puts people in the unfortunate position of trying to defeat a battered woman.
Anyway, quat’s story is probably great, but man, you gotta tell the story! If there ain’t no meat, there ain’t no sizzle! Sure, you’ve got viscera in your hands, now put it in ours!
Acid’s is the best in my mind. I’m pretty sure his tale is the origin story for a Frank Miller character. Or possibly Catwoman. (Catwoman written by Frank Miller?)
Wow, I am so sorry so many of you have had such close-to-death experiences, but I’m glad you all survived. :) Makes me feel both lucky and blessed that I only have this little tale to tell…
When I was born, it was two months premature. Biomom was a teenage smoker, drinker and drug-user. When I came out, I weighed less than a pound, wasn’t producing salt and a boatload of other things. Two or three months at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia – and the hard work of a lot of people – saved me, thankfully. Sadly I only found out about this in my later teen years, and wasn’t really able to thank the folks that saved me, since most of them had passed on.
Wow! Good for you.
Must have been hard to share that and just to say thanks for letting us hear it and that I hope that was a low point you have been climbing from ever since.
Was that the ATV accident?
Edit - yup. Great story, you should repost it.
Huh, really? There may in fact be something really wrong with me, because in my mind it doesn’t seem to compare to most of the stories here. I wonder if that’s some kind of maladaptive coping strategy; where your brain won’t let you absorb some unbelievable reality until it’s sure you’re safe and can survive accepting it without freaking out.
I suppose it might be time to suck it up and find some Al-anon meetings up here, or even a therapist. It can’t hurt, and I really can’t cling to the excuse that “things are still stressful from the divorce/marriage/move” anymore.
Thank you. I don’t know why, but it really helps when people reaffirm I did the right thing. The guilt and the self-doubt have been crippling at times. I am very, very sorry about your friend.
edit: and no, please don’t make it a contest. I think these are the kinds of things where once the pain and fear go beyond your resources and expectations, it all feels about the same to everyone. Humans seem to have this remarkable ability to reset their “midpoint” for what’s good & bad in life, no matter what happens to them. This is a problem when it makes you take good things for granted, but it’s also why you’re always just a little stronger than you think you are when it comes to crisis.
Good for you, and thank you for delurking for that story. Inspiring and terrifying it is, glad you survived it.
You know, I had some bad shit happen about a year ago, and I’m only now coming to terms with it. Point is, the bad shit that happened with me doesn’t even compare with what you just described.
Your story was harrowing. I’m glad to see you’ve found some happiness since then.
I don’t know if I’d say it’s something wrong with you, as it sounds like you came out of it okay and well-adjusted enough to form lasting relationships and talk about it with some level of objectivity. All I know is that by your description of the situation I think you’re probably right about the outcome had you not hidden the gun earlier. Almost dying in a car crash is one thing, but knowing you were that close to coming to lethal harm at the hands of someone you’re supposedly in a loving relationship with and avoiding that harm solely because of a previous acted-upon hunch is a very different one. So yes, as far as stories that make me go “Whoa” like Keanu Reeves at a circus, you win, narrowly edging out Bahimiron’s 7-11 robbery story.
Back in my younger years, I was in the Army as a Combat Engineer. Most of the time that means “glorified infantry with a shovel” but we were an Airborne unit so we got to do all the really fun stuff like fall out of planes and blow LOTS of stuff up. Two near-death stories there.
First one is my seventh airborne jump, so the second one since leaving jump school. It’s a “combat gear jump” meaning that you’ve got a 35 pound rucksack and weapon case that you’re jumping with. And by the luck of the chalk order, I have door position - first guy out of the plane, but it also means that for about ten seconds on approach to the green-light point, you’re literally standing in the door.
Me being dumb Private Mightynute at the time, I think this is AWESOME. It’s the day after a massive rainstorm, so we’ve got lots of mid-altitude fog and stuff, so during pre-jump they tell us “Don’t lower your equipment if you can’t see the ground, don’t slip (pull on your risers to change direction) if you can’t see your fellow jumpers” safety stuff.
Heading for the DZ, we stand up and hook up and I pass off my static line and get in position. I’m so psyched it’s like the whole world’s in slow motion. I see the green light out of the corner of my eye and the jumpmaster slaps me on the back of the helmet and I step out and snap into the jump position, elbows in, feet together, legs straight, head tucked, four-thousand count and boom, my chute opens. And my risers are all sorts of tangled behind my head to where my neck’s cranked down with my chin against my chest. I can’t see shit because of the fog, so I do like we’re taught and try pulling the risers apart while kicking my legs to spin around. Eventually I get unspun just as I clear the bottom of the fog.
And see the ground zipping by horizontally at a VERY rapid pace. I look up and think “Where in the hell is the back half of my parachute?” - the shroud lines were so tangled that the back third of my chute was folded inwards, turning the chute into a makeshift ramscoop and propelling me forwards. I didn’t even have time to release my equipment before I hit the drop zone–
–which was like landing in a giant pile of foam rubber. The torrential rains the night before had turned the sand of the DZ into a mucky soft mass, which I dug a pretty good trench through as I tumbled to a stop. Popped my risers and sat up just surprised that I was alive, and then I realized “Where in the hell are the other jumpers?” as I see the next few of them come down about six hundred yards across the DZ. So I roll up my chute in the kit bag, grab my ruck, throw the kit bag over one shoulder, throw my ruck over the other, and high-tail it to the assembly area.
As I get there, laughing and happy to be alive, I step on a piece of wet cardboard. Foot goes out from under me like a Keystone Kop on a banana peel, and I land sideways on the metal frame of my rucksack - and fracture three ribs.
I became known as the guy who walked away from being a dirt-dart on a failed parachute, but broke three ribs walking.
lol awesome, mightynute
Mightynute, that is a freaking fantastic story. :)
The second is slightly less awesome. About nine months after that incident, my company is out on training exercises at one of the demolition ranges. Now, this is in the post-Desert Storm timeframe, so almost all our engineer training is still using Cold War doctrine, learning about Soviet box mines and anti-tank obstacles using the lowest tech possible. Engineering and ESPECIALLY improvised demolitions have progressed a hell of a lot in the past fourteen years. So this has to be looked at through the lens of “We did not have all of today’s awesome stuff”.
We’re practicing bunker breaches - satchel charges (blocks of C-4 or TNT on a time fuze shoved into a canvas bag or MRE bag and chucked into a bunker) which have the distinct drawback of “What if the enemy throws it right back out?” - so we learn an optional method. Pole charges.
A pole charge is two blocks of C-4 (1.25 lbs each) attached to the end of a 6’ to 8’ pole with about a twelve to fifteen second time fuze. The intent is that you pull the fuze, count off six seconds, then stick the explosive end into a firing port and then lever back on the pole, wedging the mess in there when it goes BOOM. Ideally, the bunker contains the blast, everything inside gets turned into chunky salsa, and your arms feel like you’ve just swung an aluminum baseball bat into a telephone pole.
Ideally being the key word there.
At this point, I’m not high-speed Corporal Mightynute yet, I’m still eager-like-a-puppy PFC Mightynute. “Things that go boom! YAY!” Welcome to the event that broke me of THAT particular fetish.
Pole charge over my shoulder, me and PFC Roth who’s playing the role of “cover guy” for this run-through make our advance downrange. Low-crawling through a trench that had been blasted earlier, there’s no simulated grenades or anything - we ARE carrying live demo, of course. But after about ten minutes of crawling through mud, we pop up by the bunker that the trench goes by. Roth sets up about twenty yards back and takes up a cover position as I flatten up against the front of the bunker and ready the pole charge. Pull the initiator, count down six seconds and jam the boom-y end into the firing port and wrench back.
Uprange, I can see my squad leader waving and yelling at me to pull back more and flatten myself against the wall like I’m supposed to. So I just wrench back on the pole and throw my back against the wall.
I should point out that the “Mighty” part of the nickname tends to refer to the occasional “freaky retard strength” I was known for in my youth. I wrench back and hear a crack and suddenly I’m holding a two-foot broken piece of pole in my arms.
I see Roth hop out of the trench and I start to yell at him for being an idiot when I look down and see why he jumped.
That two-and-a-half-pound block of C-4 is laying in the middle of the trench.
Ah shit.
At this point in retrospect, I wish I could go back and thank every drill sergeant who bellowed grenade drills into our heads in Basic because the first thing I did was drop into the prone, head away from the explosive, feet tight together and tucking in to try and present as little surface area as possible towards the blast.
Thanks to that, a flak vest, and a kevlar helmet, I am alive and typing today. From what I was told later, I got launched out of the trench like a BB out of a Red Ryder rifle, caroming headfirst into another bunker about ten feet away. Most of the blast went up and away - Roth was completely out of the trench and just got dirt rained on him. I was medevaced with a pretty nasty full-thickness burn on my right calf (my boots were shredded, but my feet were fine. They think a burning piece of C-4 somehow stuck to my leg.) and a jaw broken in two places from slamming into the other bunker.
These days the only signs of the accident are my right calf being slightly misshapen, my jawline looking more heroically square than it did before, and a lingering minor (minor) case of Post-Concussion Syndrome.
So yeah, everything you see in the movies about people outrunning an explosion? BULLSHIT.
Just wanted to ditto that sentiment.
And I can’t help thinking, the more you share your story, the more likely you’ll save the life of another woman in a similar situation.
So thanks again for sharing.
And this is why you went to become the legendary champion of Quakebells.
You most definitely should seek counselling. Your story is incredible and has clearly given you some amazing perspective, but talking about these things with a neutral party can (as you’ve already seen a bit) be incredibly helpful, and will probably save you some severe mental trauma in the future when all those buried emotions come boiling up. It can be a big pain in the ass to get therapy set up; I went through four different therapists and a 6 month wait to see a psychiatrist before I felt comfortable with who I was working with, but it really did help me once I was ready to do it. I’m by no means normal or cured or anything, but I never would have been able to make it out of the hell that was my accident, my mother dying of cancer ten months later, and my dad going crazy and destroying our family without my psychologist, psychiatrist, and a whole lot of anti-depressants.
This is definitely not a contest, but again, kudos for sharing that, Gwendraeth, as it’s the kind of story that could make a huge difference to someone in a similar situation.
That said, these guys only declared you the instant winner because you mentioned “crazy circus sideshow sex” in a room full of boys. :)
I’m glad you’re all still here with us. Guns in faces, fortuitously hidden guns, failed parachutes, mysterious eviscerations… Youch.