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

Holy cow! Now that you tell it, I did hear this story before. I must have blocked it from my memory for being overly gruesome becuase it’s not the kind of story you’d forget.

You never charged the guy with the knife who stabbed you?

RE: combining drugs, caffine, etc. You never know what’s going to happen when you mix and match, but those seem like pretty mild substances. Good for you for pulling through. No body should have “he drank too much coffee one night” on their tombstone.

Tom is exploiting our most painful memories for a contest?

If you haven’t bought it yet, you’re doing it wrong.

For every post here, there may very well be a dozen nerds who never made it safely off the playground…

I haven’t listened to the podcast, but I assumed this was this weeks competition.

And I’d describe it as “Tom makes my fellow posters tell the most amazing and awesome stories for a contest”. For fucks sakes, this one guy blew himself up with C4!

What the hell quatoria, you were more calm and rational at 12 than I was at 19. After my accident I freaked right out, babbling incoherently, swearing at strangers, crying, everything. The part of the story when you had the doctor using his hand to check on your insides reminded me of the second and third most painful events in my life though. When I got to the hospital I had emergency surgery and since they couldn’t do too much with me they just attached external fixators to my arm and leg and stabilized me as best they could. Once I was strong enough to undergo the major surgeries to actually fix me up they scheduled them but since the external fixator was so large I couldn’t fit into the CT machine, so they didn’t really know the full state of the damage to my arm. So a very nice plastic surgery resident had to come into my room, pick up my arm, and carefully scrape away at my radial and ulnar head to get an idea of what there would be to work with. Unfortunately they still didn’t know enough about the state of my arm so they scheduled a quick surgery to open it up and take a look. Right after I came out of surgery my crappy veins shriveled up and my IV failed. They tried just about every spot on my body but my veins just disappeared when they tried to place the IV. They even tried to place a central line on me while I was awake and with very little painkillers. I could feel that needle scraping against my collarbone for several minutes trying to hit the vein. After about a half hour of trying everything they could think of they finally got an IV in my groin and could give me morphine again. The next day while they were doing an angiogram to check the state of the blood vessels in my arm a surgeon made sure to tell them to put a picc line in so I wouldn’t have to have an IV anymore.

I don’t know that how you react to trauma like that is a learned response - I think, at least a bit, it’s ingrained. That’s not the only near death scrape I’ve been in, unfortunately - it’s been about a half dozen, actually - and every time, without fail, time slows down, my heart pounds in my ears, and I get absolutely, totally, scary calm. I mechanically make decisions one after another, without it ever sinking in what’s actually happened to me or how badly I’ve been injured. It’s just not something I can really take credit for, honestly, because that’s just how it’s always been for me. It’s saved my life on more than one occasion, in fact. Afterwards I can totally freak the fuck out, sometimes for quite some time, but while it’s a survival situation, there’s no emotion in it for me whatsoever. It’s like staring at a mental checklist. “What do I have to do next? Okay, I’m doing that. Now what do I have to do? Okay, let’s do that.” The part of me that wants to go “AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH HOLY SHIT” doesn’t get a say until things are safe.

You deserved worse than being told off! /traindriver

Definitely a body reaction. When I got into a car accident this winter (sliding one way, caught traction, whipped around 180 the other way after we lost it again, through a fence into a field, alternative being a sheer cliff face which would’ve resulted in at least one fatality in our car, guaranteed), I just remember slowing down, and going “For fucks sake, Mark” (The guy who was driving), I braced myself as best I could, absent mindedly thumbed my belt to make sure it was in, and then just watched as the car hurtled backwards through a fence.

I remember every single second of it vividly. I got out of the car, immediately removed the wire that wrapped around the wheel. Without letting him even think we slowly removed the fence wires that were tangled all over his car.

It was intense. About 2 hours later it hit me that I legitimately probably would’ve died if we swerved the other way. I fucking freaked shit.

Hey, chill out on Mark! I hit black ice while driving a car with 3 passengers, and all I heard afterwards was me getting bitched at for spinning out and almost hitting a telephone pole, whereas a shitty driver would have gone the complete opposite direction and taken the car headfirst into a ditch. It’s black ice god dammit!

Quat I get the same reaction. If I had freaked out and hit the brakes like most new riders, I would have either skidded out and into a wooden fence at 40 mph, or high-sided (flipped over as the rear tire re-catches traction) into that wooden fence. I think being calm and collected during perilous situations (either your own or someone else’s) is a great trait to have in your genes.

Oh no man, it was not a criticism on him! He’s my best friend, and it was just a “God dammit it is christmas this should not be happening.” type of freak out.

The clicking gun story is by far the best. It freaks me out just picturing that scene.

quatoria must be related to Max Payne.

Two I can think of off the top off my head.

Doing Army training on handheld star clusters and flare launchers (basically a metal tube with a rocket inside and either colored magnesium balls for signalling, or a big flare on a parachute for illuminating). You operate it by pulling the cap off, sticking it on the bottom of the tube and smacking it, launching the rocket. The shitbird two stations down from me smacks his, but doesn’t hold it straight up, so the rocket fires right past my head. The exhaust burned the hair on the side of my head as it passed by.

Number two was during my current fireighter career at an arson fire. The arsonist had poured gas over the kitchen floor and lit it. I went in the back door behind the two guys with the hose with the intention of getting around them and heading upstairs to search for victims. I took two steps past the hose team and fell right into the hole the gas fed fire had burned into the floor. I managed to catch myself about armpit deep in the hole, but couldn’t pull my 300+ pounds of self and gear up. The second guy on the hose heard me fall and helped me out of the hole before I could get cooked.

Hahaha, this reminds me of the first field exercise we did with a new platoon leader - shiny new second lieutenant straight out of West Point. So of course, he knows everything and he’s going to make sure he sets us all straight. Similar situation, yelling at us how to make sure we operate the star cluster properly, shoots it straight up and doesn’t bother noticing where the wind’s going.

Wind carries it right into a dry field. Never mind that we hadn’t yet called Range Control and gotten permission to set off the star clusters (they’d have said no because the whole post was under a Fire Hazard Caution). Cue a few acres going up WHOOSH.

We certainly weren’t in any danger, but we all got a royal chewing out “officially” and unofficially got the talk from the first sergeant of “men, whatever you learn from this, don’t ever listen to a fucking West Pointer…”

This must happen wherever you mix kids with railroad tracks. My friend and I started by putting coins on the tracks and ended up with railroad bolts/screws. What made us cut that shit out was one bolt shooting from the track and taking a large chunk out of the treetrunk my friend and I were hiding under about 5cm’s from his head. I remember him looking at me in shock saying "Brendan. I think we need to stop doing this.

Come to think of it the two of us pretty much lived 5cm from death as kids thinking about the stupid shit we used to get up to. We were “those kids.”. Good times.

My mom’s family used to live near an armory and the kids used to collect what they thought were bullet casings from all around there. Then my uncle and his friends took them to the railroad tracks and put them on and were delighted to discover they were live and so they’d face them away from themselves and have the train roll over and set them off.

Until the day they invited the ‘slow kid’ with them and as they stood watching the train roll over they heard ‘pew’ ‘pew’ and rocks started flying everywhere. So they turned and ran like hell and my uncle got shot in the knee. He was like eight. It must’ve just grazed him, he still has the scar, and he told his mother he fell on a rock. She didn’t know till she was like 88 what really happened when his son accidentally told the hilarious story of Uncle Bobby and the bullet train at Thanksgiving.

That is not even the worst of what those 12 kids got up to in those days!

This thread is absolutely amazing and I thank everyone who has shared their incredible stories. Holy shit! Some of your lives are like movies.

The closest I came to death is fairly mundane.

My Dad and I were driving to the Commodore Show in Toronto when I was in my teens. At one point, about halfway there, the driver ahead of us missed the exit he wanted so he slammed on his brakes. My Dad, not having enough time to react, hit his brakes as well but also turned the car slightly. We slammed into the back of that guys car, spun around 180 degrees while traveling across 2 lanes of traffic and came to rest on the shoulder, after being hit glancingly by another car.

I vividly remember shouting, “Fuck!”, as we came to a stop. My Dad turned to me and shouted back, “Warren!”, as though he couldn’t believe my language.

Amusingly, he then said that we were still going to the show because he wasn’t going to let this ruin the outing. Nobody was hurt and the car was still operational, so, hey.

The part where I almost died came from my Dad expressing concern later when recounting the story that while the car was spinning across 2 lanes of traffic there was a moment where the final car that hit us was lined up with my passenger door and he thought for sure I was going to eat it.