Please do, Gwendraeth. Having been through a similar situation/relationship, I can’t tell you how much therapy has helped. I’m finally back to feeling like myself.
I only have three that I would label close calls. Well, maybe two and a half.
The first two happened in 93 when I was a cop in DC. My partner and I had pulled over a vehicle with stolen plates and we were about to approach it when the driver tried to bail. He tripped on the seat belt and fell, the gun he was holding slid across the street. So we rush up and grab him and the passenger, get them on the ground, cuff them and all that stuff. So I’m watching them while my partner checks the car out and I hear someone behind me.
It’s a guy standing there with a knife in is hand, so out comes the gun again, he drops the knife, gets on the ground we cuff him and wait on transport. Later at the station after we’re done with the booking and just kinda hanging out waiting for our shift to end and someone tells me I have blood on the back of my shirt. I go to the locker room to pull off my shirt and vest, and sure enough I had a small cut in my lower back. Just big enough to bleed but no real damage. My shirt and vest both had been cut through. We could only assume the guy with the knife had managed to stick me with it before I heard him.
The second one, still a cop was in 95. I was part of a unit that handled major crimes and we were working on a rash of auto thefts. It was at the end of our shift so we thought we’d take on more ride through the area and call it a night. So we pull into this little shopping plaza on the corner of Pennsylvania and Alabama avenues and the owner of the liquor store comes running up to our car and tells us he’s just been robbed. He points down Pennsylvania and tells us the guy went that way. We don’t see him and think he’s already booked around the corner.
Off we go in pursuit, whipping around the corner and the guy is nowhere to be seen. Turns out he had ducked down between two cars behind us and popped up when we passed him. I turned and saw him just as he raised his gun and fired into the rear window of the car. Gun fight ensues, we win, he loses. Later when Crime Scene Search was going over our car they found five bullet holes in the dash on the passenger side where I had been sitting. Two to the left of me, three to the right. Luckily I hadn’t been hit.
The third one, and this is the one that can still haunt me happened on thanksgiving in 2001. The days leading up I had been sick as all hell, a really bad case of flu. Now the thing with me is, I loathe being sick. So I tend to dope myself up as much as possible to avoid feeling even a little bit of any sickness.
Okay so the day before thanksgiving, I’m starting to feel better, but still bad enough to be a pussy about it and chug flu pills like M&Ms. All the while drinking coffee by the bucket full. You see where this is going? So to add to the stupid, my knee is swollen as well, and being the baby I am I take a couple of Darvocets(prescribed to me for my knee)and head off to bed to feel sorry for myself until I fall asleep.
I wake up at about 3am feeling like shit, whine to my wife about my heartburn, she tells me to go drink some pepto or something. So I do and almost immediately throw it up. But my heartburn feels better so I go back to bed. Now at 5am I wake up again, covered in sweat, chest pounding, left arm aching. I wake up my wife again and tell I think I’m having a heart attack.
We get to the hospital and they do all the cardiac stuff. Slather me with nitro, hook me up to a bunch of machines and tell me that yes, I’m having a heart attack. They then spend the next ten minutes asking me what drugs I’ve had so I tell them. They don’t buy it and want to know how much coke and/or meth I’ve been using. My wife told me later that they grilled her as well until they finally believed us. So now they start pumping a pain killer or something in me, I never bothered to ask what it was. All the way my heart is pounding harder and harder. I start to think this is it.
I’m going to die in a hospital on thanksgiving morning in fucking West Virginia. Then I start to slowly drift away, my heart is still pounding but I can feel myself going under until finally it all went black. I woke up about 6 hours later in ICU weak as a kitten and more than a little thrilled I hadn’t died. The ER nurse came up to tell me the last thing I said before the drugs knocked me out was, “For fuck’s sake.”
So the following six months was spent with testing, physical therapy and constant drug tests to see if I was still using. They never found any blockage or heart disease. Fuckers never did believe that all I had taken was Actifed, Darvocet and coffee.
Now if I feel so much as a flutter in my chest I freeze waiting for any sign that it may be more than just gas. Knives, gun fights, all that shit pales in comparison to laying in a bed and just drifting off.
Wow. There are some pretty intense ones up here, much more than I’d expect from nerds. It’s nice to see that Our People live such interesting lives, and moreover survive them.
Mine was in third grade. My family was living in South Africa while my dad took his sobbatical to teach at the University of Cape Town for a semester. We were on vacation, driving from Windhoek to Victoria Falls, and we’d camped at a small camping area on the southern bank of the Zambezi for the night. We pitched our tent about as far out as we could get since, as a family of nerds, we were naturally inclined to do so, settling in for the night a few feet from the river’s edge.
Everything was quiet until I woke up in the middle of the night with a coughing fit. My mother, calmly and quietly, asked me to stop, but as a child, I couldn’t. I didn’t think it was odd that she was awake, nor did I, at first, notice the heavy sounds of motion and rustling around us. As my coughing fit came to a close my older brother woke up and started telling me to shut up, in turn waking up my father who, half asleep, started to turn on the flashlight to see what was going on.
My mother, bless her, told him to stop what he was doing and luckily he listened to her. As I stopped coughing the sounds outside came through clearly. Something very large was clearly moving around outside. The tension inside the tent was palpable and while sleep came at some point it’s hard to recall when. The next day we emerged from the tent to find heavy prints around us. When we went into the camp’s store we learned that elephants regularly emerged from the river to steal food and generally terrorize the town. Elephants, generally, aren’t inclined towards people in that part of the world and if they’d noticed us it’s likely we would’ve ended up crushed.
An honorable mention/tangential elephant story also goes to the time, around six years later, we were taking a vacation in Etosha and a bull elephant entered into a dominance/defense dance with our jeep while we were driving back from a watering hole. Luckily he was just trying to protect his mate and child while they were crossing the road but my brother constantly squirming, then hitting and yelling at me until my mother, thank god for my mother, got him to stop. Nothing as exciting as some of these, but yeah. That’s about as close as I’ve come, personally. In situations involving elephants.
My near-death stories aren’t nearly as involved as a lot of your’s are, but I have two very close encounters.
The first happened when I was nearly four years old…it’s my first solid memory, too! My mom and I lived in Florida, and our weekends were spent at the beach. I wanted to go out into the water, so she scooped me up and out into the waves we went. We eventually made it out to a small reef stand that was about 4’ deep on it, and about 7’ around it (if not more). My mom and I are still playing in the waves when all of a sudden, my eyes sting from salt water. I remember being tossed over and over, and seeing the top of the reef above my head.
If you’ve never been to the Atlantic side of the Florida coast, it is infamous for the horrendous undertoe and riptides that can form. After the wave knocked us over, and I see the reef above me, I felt the water start to pull back away from shore. Even now, 25 years later, I can recall the utter panic. I’m not sure how long I’d been under at this point, but I remember my lungs starting to burn as the tide started pulling harder. My feet hit the bottom and just after I gave a big push up, I felt a hand anchor on to my wrist.
My mom pulled me up and we beat feet onto shore. I couldn’t take a bath until I was around seven or so, and refused to get within 25 feet of ocean water for years. Now, I love swimming, go snorkeling, and diving whenever possible. My two year old, though, has been in a baby swim class for a year; I don’t want him to even come close to ever having the feeling I had then. Recollecting the actual event, not just a quick “Hey, I nearly drowned,” still triggers a shot of adrenaline.
The second encounter was much later; I was 20, and driving to work with my then-girlfriend, now wife. It was the first day of Spring Break, but I was saving up for something stupid so I didn’t go on vacation that year as I normally did. We were on our way to work in my beautiful 1994 Mazda Protege, and turned off a four-lane highway onto a two lane road that cut around a high-traffic area (or as high traffic as it gets in Southwest Missouri). A yokel in a pickup truck was going 15-20 in a 50, so I attempted to pass him. As I accellerated and the wee hamsters spun their wheels to get around the large pick-up, I notice the truck accelerate with me. After it was apparent he didn’t want to be passed, I slowed down to just get behind him and keep going. He had a shotgun rack in the back window, and the guy was obviously acting weird already.
He slowed down with me, and started coming into my lane. It looked like he was trying to either ram me or force me off the road. The country highway we were on was, like I said, a two-lane country road, but, both sides had a 3-foot ditch. As this large truck, with wheels as high as the roof of my car, starts coming into my lane, I try to slam on the brakes, but he matches me and starts to fishtail, with his back end behind me. Since I couldn’t stop to let the guy keep moving forward (since his truck would take us with him), I hit the gas once more to get ahead and, hopefully, away from this crazy ass.
Unfortunately, a large SUV crested the hill going about twenty OVER the speed limit, and my little Protege hit their SUV, head-on, with a combined speed of approximately 110 MPH.
I woke up moments later, my head killing me, and not able to breathe. I looked down and saw my shirt covered in blood and my left leg at a 45 degree angle towards the midline at the knee. My wife looked okay at first, but then I noticed she had a similar 45 angle in her leg, but her’s was in the middle of her femur. I looked around, told her I loved her, and blacked out.
I wake up again, this time I’m being carried through tall weeds. People are shouting, my head, legs, and chest are killing me, but before I can get my bearings, the world goes black…again. My last thought this time was, “Enough with the fucking blacking out already.”
Wake up again, this time I can see out of a window. In my brief ten seconds of lucidity, I thought, “Hey, I’m in a helicopter. Everything’s so little!” Bam. Lights out.
I woke up, briefly, in the ER as they were trying to reinflate my collapsed lung. That was painful, but not what brough me around. My wife let out the most bloodcurdling scream as the orthopedic doctor was attempting to set her leg to restore blood flow. Her femur was fractured, but missed the femoral (barely, we later saw in the medical records).
This time, when I passed out, I was out from sometime in the morning until well after night fall. Aside from remembering waking up those few times, I couldn’t remember anything after us leaving home for work that morning. To say I was confused as to why my leg was in a cast, I had a tube sticking out of my chest, my jaw was covered in bandages, and a catheter was shoved up my dick would be an understatement. The nurse came quickly when I hit the call button, and filled me in on at least what she knew. I was in ICU with about seven broken ribs, a still partially-deflated lung from a pneumothorax, a broken patella, mild concussion, and a litany of lacerations and contusions. My wife was in surgery getting a titanium rod implanted in her femur, but also had a fractured ankle, a splenic laceration, and a few broken bones in her left hand. This last part was strange, but we later pieced it together that we had apparently reached for each other right before impact and I crushed the ever-living shit out of her hand. Go love!
Normally, the story for most people would end there. However, as I sat in the bed, doped up on a massive dose of painkiller, a late visitor came in. A guy came in, whom I didn’t recognize, and immediately started praising God for me being alive, etc. The nurse, seeing my confusion at this stranger, asked him who he was. He said he was at the scene of the wreck and just wanted to follow-up and make sure he took care of me. The nurse, whom I still thank to this day, told him to leave, yelled for security, and shut the door.
I talked with her quite a bit for the four days I was in the hospital (and after I was discharged), and she always said she had no clue why she did what she did…she said the guy just bothered her. Unfortunately, the guy left before the guards got to him, but they pulled his picture from the security cameras.
The next day, after I’d finally been able to see my then-girlfriend again, she started filling in the gaping holes that I’d missed. The guy who tried to run us off the road had to be restrained by the driver of the SUV we hit, and left before the cops showed up. My nurse came in (since my wife was only a few rooms away), and asked if I could give a statement to the cops. The guy who visited the night before tried to come in to the hospital with either a gun or a knife, but bolted when the metal detector picked them up. The security guards said that the detectors only went off for large metal objects, like guns or knives, but not for much smaller. The cops showed us a picture and my wife recognized the guy as the one from the night before and as the driver of the pickup. The driver of the SUV (who had nary a scratch), later confirmed it with the cops as well.
They never caught the guy. The cops traced the plates to a shithole house outside of town, but the crazy motherfucker had left by then. This concerned me enough that my wife and I got two very large dogs (a huskie and a german shepard), in addition to firearms, once we got out of the hospital. We never saw him, or heard from him, again.
To this day, I still do not remember anything after leaving the house to go to work until the first time I woke up immediately after the collision. I ended up recounting the above with my therapist under hypnosis, which my wife corroborated separately.
Whoa. Almost killed by elephants… twice?
I went hiking with my family (at a place called Mohonk in New York) when I was 10 or so. We were walking across a ridge, and it was a bit slippery (kind of a bad idea by my parents really). Anyway, I slipped and started falling off the ridge, down towards a hundred foot drop or so. Luckilly, my back hit a tree JUST on the edge of the cliff, which stopped me in place with no injury. A foot to the left and who knows. This was the same trip where my step-mom almost fell in a 50 foot hole and my dad had to grab her hand in that dramatic way that only happens in movies. We didn’t go back to that place after that. Also, maybe this is why I hate hiking :)
Holy shit pogozorro.
Yes, yes, I know:
[b]Wall of Text hits you for 34,567 damage.
Wall of Text kills %Forum_Reader[/b]
No, I don’t mean, “Holy shit, what a long story,” I mean, “Holy shit, what kind of psycho fuck shows that kind of persistence and determination to kill a random stranger?”
A crazy one. The cops couldn’t find much on the guy, but they think he was schizophrenic based on what they found at his house after they tracked the plates and whatnot.
We never bothered to get details, because I really don’t want to know. It’s in the past, now, and I can only hope that wherever he is, no one else ever gets hurt by his weird ass antics. Suffice to say, though, I am a much more aggressively defensive driver. Aside from sporadic arthritis in my knee, my inability to accept being boxed in while driving is the only real remnant I have from the entire incident. You should always have a way out when driving, but I really always do.
One minor benefit to the entire thing, as I was going through physical therapy for my knee (well into the summer break between semesters), I had little more to do than play games all summer. Morrowind was my second home that year.
The only thing that comes to mind is barely stopping short of stumbling myself and a few friends into a rather large black bear whilst taking a shortcut back to our campsite after dark but really, that doesn’t seem like a big deal after reading the rest of this thread.
Waiting for someone to post the story about how they survived parachuting out of a crashing jetliner holding their intestines in, landing on a sleeping bear and getting hit by a car driven by their deranged husband.
Edit: Also the car exploded.
This did happen to me, but I didn’t survive.
Ah, I finally found where I’d told the story - three years ago, in the ‘things you have seen’ thread. No wonder I couldn’t find it. So, the story:
I was 12 or so, and driving an ATV. It was the middle of the night, and visibility was pretty poor. I was driving down the street, headed for a friend’s house, when out of the gloom loomed what was, at that time, the biggest goddamn rock I’d ever seen. As I later found out, our vicious elderly neighbor had hauled it there, in the hopes that anyone trying to cut through his property would hit it. Unfortunately, he didn’t get it all the way on his property, and so, driving on the easement, I rammed straight into it.
That wasn’t really much of a problem - it was an off-road vehicle, fitted with ram bars, and I wasn’t going much more than fifteen miles an hour or so. It rocked me back in my seat, and the ATV jolted back a few feet. I shook my head to clear it, and as I accelerated away, reached down with my foot to shift gears. This kind of machine has the shift lever on the foot rests, which happen to be sharply serrated for grip. This will be important later in the story.
As I mechanically put my foot down, as I had hundreds of times before, expecting it to come to rest on the foot peg, I found that I hadn’t accounted for the fact the impact had shoved me back a few inches in my seat. Not much; just enough for my young foot to miss the peg entirely, and instead come to rest on the pavement whizing by underneath my machine. The moment my foot hit the pavement, the rear wheel of the ATV ran it over, dragging me under the machine in a process that would cause the razor sharp teeth of the footrest to slice through my side, stomach, and pelvis and slam my head into the pavement hard enough to crack my helmet in half like an egg shell. The last part I had to be told later, as that same impact rendered me unconscious for thirty seconds or so, and totally erased my memory of being dragged under the ATV.
I came to as the machine was rolling off me, trying to figure out why I was looking at its tail-lights receding into the night, and why I didn’t know where I was. As I stood up and began to brush myself off, I realized that the front of my pullover was slick. Assuming I’d been injured in the fall, I raised the front of the shirt up to see what was the matter with me. There was no pain, so I assumed it couldn’t be too serious. I was wrong. It took me a moment to figure out what I was looking at: a layer of something yellow and slippery on top, with a thick ragged white substance I can only describe as marshmallow-like underneath it. I wasn’t exactly sure what it was, but I knew that it shouldn’t be shoving several inches out of a ragged tear through my stomach. Let me tell you, it’s a very curious sensation to be holding pieces of the human body that aren’t really designed for outdoor activities. Still, it does mean I’m one of the few people who can say I’ve got my own fingerprints inside of me, and, hey, that’s something, right?
I was too deeply in shock at that point to panic, so I pulled my shirt down, clutched my hands to the front of my stomach, and tried to figure out what to do. It was at that point that I saw lights in the distance, and began screaming for help. I don’t know if he didn’t see me, or just didn’t care about the scared kid standing on the side of the road, but the trucker in the rig I had seen blew right past, doing a good seventy miles or so through our little residential streets. At that point, I knew that there wasn’t going to be any help for me, so, I did the only thing I could. I faced myself towards the direction of my house, clutched my stomach as hard as I could with my hands, and started walking home.
I don’t actually remember anything at all from that walk. The next clear memory I have is of my mother’s face, after she answered the door, as I said “Mom, I think I’ve been hurt pretty bad,” and pulled up my shirt. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget that look of pure horror. Fortunately for me, she’d been an ER nurse before she settled down with my father, and was able to keep her head. She bundled me into her car and drove me to the hospital, keeping me awake and out of deep shock. “Don’t go to sleep, honey. I know you’re tired, but you can’t sleep. Don’t go to sleep.” It was the most afraid I’d ever heard her.
I still hadn’t felt a bit of pain; that didn’t come until later, when the ER physician had to shove his hands into the great wound in my stomach to see if it was just fat that had been torn out of me, or if the teeth of the footpeg had bit deeper. It wasn’t until after I woke from the general anesthesia, after several hours of surgery, that I found out just how close to death I’d come. The blade of that foot rest had cut through every one of the walls of fatty tissue that seperates your internal insides from your outsides - all but one. Another millimeter or so, and instead of holding in those fatty tissues and trying to walk home, I’d have been trying to pick my unspooled intestines off the ground, or, more likely, dead.
So, it could have been a lot worse. Aside from an inch wide band of numbness, running from the side of my torso to about half an inch above my dick, and a massive two-foot scar, there were no lasting effects. And, hey, I got a laser-tag rifle as a get-well-soon present!
I had a botched spinal tap that veered close to killing me. Plus, growing up in England almost suffocated me with its repression, racism, and small mindedness.
These sentences do not go well together.
ha, ha. This.
Is this penis-related?
I grew up next to a railroad. When I was about six or seven me my brother and a few friends decided to investigate if passing trains would cut branches in two if you put them on the rails, they did. After having tired this one of the friends declared that trains could pass through brick walls, so they should be able to cut stones in half as well. So we progressed to pile stones on top of the tracks. At this point my dad luckily discovered what we were doing, and our experiment came to an end. That is the closest I have come to causing death and injury to scores of people.
Oh, forgot one (one and a half).
(I really want to win that copy of Bioshock 2)
When I was bartending the pub closed between 12 and 3 pm. Instead of a well deserved rest it was my job to procure firewood. The publican decided that all the fallen trees and branches from last years big storm would be good free firewood.
One day I was in a tree sawing the branch I was sitting on. I was just a kid, but not a complete idiot, so I was sawing further out than I was sitting. The branch was big, about 15 meters up and half broken off - I just wanted to saw the rest. Of course when branch and tree finally parted ways, the bit I was sitting on bucked like a mechanical rodeo bull.
Not being that stupid again I decided to stop doing that. One of the regulars (my age, just a stupid) had a four wheel drive and offered to help me pull another branch down. He didn’t have proper steel wire just a non braided strand of quite strong wire. I climbed up and attached it and he started pulling.
With a TWANG the wire broke and I heard the whistle as it passed over my head by a few inches. It cut into the corner of the pub and was embedded at least 3-5 inches in the brick… I had a notion what would have happened if it had been a few inches lower.