Not to be morbid, but this thread reminds me of the guy who dove headfirst into a hot spring to rescue his friend’s dog. Some of his last words were, “That was a stupid thing I did.”
Sometimes the hero impulse doesn’t work out so well.
I was at a party once back in university days, and a girl friend (not girlfriend, her fellow was there too) stepped on a broken glass which had gotten on to the floor. Serious bleeding, it was possibly a minor arterial cut.
Her boyfriend’s car was totally blocked in by other vehicles but mine was free. So I immediately insisted we bundle her into my car, with her chap instructed to keep pressure on it while I drove hell for leather to the local hospital.
We were actually stopped by the police (it was quite late, I was driving well over the speed limit, and must admit was significantly over the limit for drink).
I have to say they were very decent about it (this was Britain in the 60’s); escorted us to the hospital and located an open petrol station for me later since I was just about running on empty.
Of course I have always had a convincing upper-middle-class BBC type accent, and I’m sure that helped.
But I like to think I did the necessary thing quickly in that case. In the end she was fine with no long term consequences.
I had this experience once when being thrown from my horse. We were cantering along a trail, I saw a stick across our path and thought, well, Ben will either stride over it or do a little jump. But no! He saw the SNAKE MONSTER, dropped shoulder, and spun around to flee.
I was spun off him and went into that state where everything happens at once in slow motion. I remember watching his shoulder slide away past me and realizing I wasn’t going to avoid a fall; I recall seeing the bushes beside the path as I fell past them; then I was on my back on the ground trying to recover the breath knocked out of me.
Another rider was behind me and was able to stop Ben’s flight; I got my breath back, got up unscathed if a bit shaky, remounted, and on we went.
It’s a distinctive feeling, that sudden crisis mental state, the mind narrowing down to tunnel vision on the immediate need, locking out useless emotion and any extraneous details irrelevant to the moment.
Was hanging out in the back patio of a friend’s house. They live right on a pretty major street, but a section that’s curved, a hill, and there’s a traffic signal one block uphill, but downhill there’s not another light for a half mile, so people come out of that light and floor it.
It was late, like 1130P, and we were getting ready to leave. We don’t really know what happened, but from our perspective there was just a loud crash, skidding, and engine noises very close, like right over the fence. At the moment it was a “which way do I dive?” situation, but thankfully nothing busted through the fence like the Kool-Aid Man. Anyways, we run out to the street and there’s a sedan wrecked in the median, wheels still spinning. I immediately ran across the street and checked inside. Just a driver, looking dazed, saying “I don’t know what happened!” over and over again.
My friends are on the phone with 911, and I’m looking around and notice there is a caved-in section of fence further down from my friend’s house where there’s a deep ditch and the end of a service road, much lower than the main road. So I run back across the street, walk down to the damaged section of fence, and there’s another car in the ditch, upside down. There was no one in it, but the driver’s door was open, and it was still warm. I assume it was a drunk who ran off or something like that.
Emergency services arrive pretty quickly, the guy in the other car was okay. Never found out anything about the other driver.
So I guess I’m a “spring into action” guy. Or at least a “let’s go check it out” guy.
I was driving over a bridge and saw someone climbing over the parapet out of the corner of my eye… after a few seconds of ‘what… err… yes…no’ in my head i turned round and went back… first on scene as you might say. Score one for me in my personal tally.
Spoke to her and offered help (“just give me a push” was the request) but struggled to find an emotional connection and yielded to second arrival a minute or two later, score minus one. Stayed close and discretely arranged emergency response, score plus one. (Keeping up?).
She jumped. I kinda turned away involuntarily in horror… another guy immediately ran around to get down to where she landed and i followed. Score minus a half for delayed response. She’d broken both legs as far as i could tell, lots of screaming and trauma… not forgetting that in a hurry. I was fine from then on, good at comforting, immobilisong, emergency first aid, calming down the very pale policeman who slithered down the bank first, and helping carry her to helicopter. Went home (round the corner) and had a beer and a bit of a shake. Score plus 2 for that bit.
I drive over there quite often and every time I think about it and wonder if she’s ok. Could I have done better? Oh yes, I’m sure I could and it still bugs me that I couldn’t think of a way to connect, to cleverly stop her from jumping like they do on TV… but in the heart of the crisis I just didn’t have what it took to do that. Extra points to everyone who can.
The “hoping it would just resolve itself somehow” was my reaction too, in a very different situation.
In the last year-plus I have had several blackout episodes due to sudden drops in blood sugar (wrote here about one that happened last August). The first was in November 2022. While I was driving, my glucose levels plummeted to what turned out to be about 40. Cars suddenly started jumping all over the road. I tried very hard to get to someplace safe, a parking lot or a wide shoulder or something, but couldn’t. I remember thinking, completely calmly, completely dispassionately, “Hmm. I think I’m in big trouble here…”
And that was the last thing I remember for some time. (I ran off the road and hit a sign at low speed, which was a very good thing as it prevented me from sailing into a line of traffic. Fortunately, I was not injured.)
I always figured I’d be white-knuckled and screaming bloody murder if such a thing happened to me. OMIGOD I AM GOING TO DIE AAAAAAH HELP ME SOMEBODY. But no. “I think I’m in big trouble here” was as intense as it got. You just never know.
Two days ago, I was almost at the Snoqualmie Pass exit to go snowboarding. SUV in the left hand lane, maybe 50M in front of me, and I was in middle lane. Somehow, the SUV slid to being 90 degrees to the right and flipped over resting upside down. I was on the phone with a buddy, said “holy shit, someone flipped, gotta go.” Was the first car (several others as well) that pulled over, jumped out and ran over to pull the folks out. Electrical fire that freaked me the fuck out. Someone else went to work to pull the driver out. I went to find a fire extinguisher. Truckers passed by me trying to wave them down. A guy in a pickup pulled over, grabbed his extinguisher and gave it to me. I ran back and put out the fire. About the same time, another person that stopped, told me to calm down that the driver was out (and sitting on the bed of my open SUV).
Thank fucking whoever. A couple of scratches, a healthy dose of shock, and that was all. I was really afearing the car would actually blow. Maybe better designed these days? Dunno, but I just ordered fire extinguishers for everyone in the family.
Although I offered to take to the destination, the driver was a college student and understabdabkt got roommates to come get her. Once the fire and police were there, and the driver preferred to wait for roommates, I drove the 5 minutes to go snowboarding. Did two runs and decided, I wasn’t entirely OK, and headed for home.
I have kids the age of the driver. Really thankful the worst was here Toyota was totaled. Even got here laptop and purse out of the wreakage. Fingers crossed, she is ready to start classes on Monday.
As a teensy person, I’ve always avoided violence of any sort (nice side effect: running from bullies made me the fastest kid in first grade).
But at 16, I surprised myself at an outdoor concert when I jumped between two big drunks starting to throw punches. I pushed them apart and yelled at them: “WHAT are you doing? This is stupid! Knock it off!”
Then I turned to my friends and said “Whoa, can you believe that?”
.
eta: The really heroic part of pushing those guys apart is that they were both shirtless and sweaty.
One episode that worked out (for me, at least):
It’s late at night, a holiday, and I’m traveling on I-5 heading south just past Castaic. Traffic is moderate and running at 70+ (which is typical). I’m in the fast lane and I see ahead that the brake lights are coming on in my lane and there seems to be a line of stopped cars (only in the fast lane). So I start braking, with plenty of time to come to a stop. As I am slowing and approaching the stopped traffic, in my rear view I see that the headlights well back of me don’t seem to be slowing down. About 100 feet from the last car in the line, I realize the car behind me doesn’t seem to have noticed the stopped traffic and isn’t slowing down (white line fever?) which looks like it isn’t going to have time to stop. Instantaneously, I whip my car into the next lane and hit the gas. I am about a quarter mile down the road when I see the puff of dust from the collision in the fast lane.
When driving on the freeway I habitually maintain SA on what’s behind me and to the side, so I wasn’t changing lanes completely blind, but I didn’t have time to check if my SA was correct or weigh options. It was a combination of luck (good for me, bad for the car ahead of me) and the benefits of continous awareness while driving.
One time it (almost) didn’t work out:
I’m close to home on the two lane highway a couple of miles from my parent’s, late at night, no traffic at all. I come around the last turn at about 70 and there, near the center of the road in my lane, is a dog (probably feasting on roadkill). No problem, I have plenty of time to move into the oncoming lane (no traffic at all for miles). So I move into the lane and the damn dog starts trotting off the road, into my lane! This is where I made my mistake. Without thinking about it, I whipped my wheel to turn back into the lane I’d been in. Next thing I know, I’m rotating down the road, no control (or even good understanding) of direction.
Oh, did I mention that there are orchards on both sides of the roads, along with walnut trees running in a line about six feet off each side of the road? There were, and I was very aware of this. The car finally finished spinning and came to a stop, dead center between two walnut trees about 30 feet apart.
Next time, I’ll let the damn dog figure out how to get itself out of the situation.
My daughter and I were washing my car in our driveway about 15 years ago, when we heard many police sirens approaching from far away. Then we heard a car speeding down the county highway behind a big pond and a fence across the road from my house. We couldn’t see the highway because of the high wood fence, but we looked in that direction when we heard the car coming fast (I estimate ~100mph).
The car crashed through the fence and flew into the air, then landed in the middle of the pond. It sank like a rock. I told my daughter to stay put and ran to the pond, taking off my shoes on the way. I jumped into the water and swam toward where the car had splashed. Before I got there, two young men (both 17, I found out later) emerged from the water and swam to shore. I turned around and met them on land, but they ran off. I chased them and caught up with them. They were shaken and confused, or I wouldn’t have been able to catch them, I’m sure. They said they had stolen the car (a Mercedes) and didn’t want to get arrested. I convinced them to stay and face the consequences, because it would be worse if the cops had to chase them.
The police cars had gone past where the kids had broken the fence and kept going down the highway. They were too far behind to see the car go off the road. But soon enough, I heard them come back and speed into our neighborhood where the kids and I were waiting. I guess a neighbor must have called in the crash and the sinking car.
It turned out that the car belonged to one of the kid’s parents, and they were more scared of their parents’ punishment than of getting arrested. The story was on the news that night. My daughter thought it was awesome (she was 10 at the time) and she delighted in bragging to her little sister about the cool thing she saw (and sis missed).
Everything after the crash seemed to go in slow motion. My actions were automatic and stress free. But, I did down a couple shots of rum afterward.
Thursday this past week the Lil’wrekker was complaining about her co-worker leaving early again. They are (and one more guy)office assistants to a professor. As papers are in to be read she was really aggravated.
Friday she goes in and the co-worker is there but still complaining about her headache. The Lil’wrekker told her maybe she needs new glasses or something and went about her morning.
She stepped out, when she came back the co-worker was asleep in the outer office, slumped in her chair. She walked by a tapped her shoulder and said wake up, we have more turn-ins.
And went to her spot. The young woman never came for her papers. The other guy comes thru and says, “you know she’s sleeping in there?”
The Lil’wrekker goes back out and realizes the woman isn’t sleeping.
She said she screamed “Oh my God, she’s dead!!”
She wasn’t dead.
She says she thought the woman was really dead. She had the good sense to call 911 and send for the campus security before completely falling into a bowl of mush.
The young lady is in ICU with a head thing. Kinda vague about the details.
But it’s serious.
I told the Lil’wrekker, see things aren’t always what they seem. First they thought they had a shirker, then they thought she was dead.
When I was 13, we took a trip to visit some family friends down in Mississippi. The other family had three kids, one 8, 13, and 15, and during our visit we went to the Jordan River for a little swim. It was the first time I had ever swam in a river. We played close to the bank for a bit and either my sister or I suggested we swim across the river to the other bank. As we approached the middle of the river, I noticed the other three kids were struggling to keep their heads above water, so I said, “Let’s turn around. We’re going back.”
When we turned around, the youngest was in real trouble as she ceased all forward progress and her struggles to keep her head above water were failing. I was a decent swimmer, but not a particularly strong swimmer, and what limited water rescue skills I possessed meant that I found myself struggling to keep my head above water as I helped her get to the other bank.
I laid into all three of them pretty hard when we reached the bank. Given that these kids lived right on the ocean, their street had their own private pier, and that they agreed to swim across the river I just assumed they all knew how to swim. They did not. As I’m shouting at them their mother asks me what the big deal was and when I explained the situation she dismissed my concerns by telling me, “Oh, you can float forever.” And then I sassed back, “Doing the dead man’s float!” Somehow all three of those kids surived into adulthood.
Here’s another one. When I was 19, I was walking my dad’s Golden Retriever through the park when I spied a very large, mean looking dog. This dog barrelled at us from a great distance, glistening teeth shining like daggers in the sun, and I just froze. This monster dog rushed up to us, stopped suddenly, and just calmly towered over my dog while drooling all over him. Luckily for both us he was a horrifyingly friendly dog who just wanted to say hi.
I was driving my truck (Toyota double cab, probably doesnt count as a truck in the US!) with a heavy load, one ton of wine destined for a local festival, early in the morning.
Some guy crossing the road was behaving a little erratically on the road ahead, so I slowed, thinking he was drunk. He first walked into oncoming traffic, a red car that swerved to get around him, then turned and saw my truck and bent over and ran directly towards my vehicle head-first.
Suicide attempt, I learnt later.
Fortunately I had thought he was drunk, so I had some suspicion and slowed down, but with a ton payload the vehicle has a lot of momentum. I had like 5m at 90km/h at most to react. I swerved to avoid him and luckily he hit my truck with his left shoulder and to a lesser extent his head, while his left leg went under the front tyre. My swerve was lucky for him because it meant the back tyre did not hit him.
He survived, thank god, with little more than extensive bruising.
I pulled the truck to a stop and ran out to him in the middle of the road.
Check 1: not too much blood, most of it from superficial wounds on the head
Check 2: I am no first-aid guy, but I do know that you should be able to move your toes, and with a broken leg that is painful
Check 3: can he flex the leg? Luckily for him my tyre ran over his leg just below the knee, else he would have a major injury.
So I went into logical problem solving mode immediately. It did not take much time for local farmers to arrive and take control of the scene, including calling the police and emergency services, and taking me aside, by which point I was a crying mess.
Turns out he was a local farm employee who had been on a three day bender, and when he reported to work on the unfortunate morning he was fired. Farmwork here pretty much guarantees both a meagre salary but more importantly accomodation. Poor guy lost everything at once.
I understand his motivation for suicide, I just wish he had not chosen me as his method.
When I was 19, my parents and I climbed a mountain in western Washington. It was mid-summer, but a lot of the mountain (especially near the top) was covered by snow fields. My dad was well-read and had a bit of mountain climbing experience from his college days, and he knew that you could quickly/efficiently descend from a summit like this by glissading:
The catch is that you need a way to control your descent so you don’t slam into the rocks at the bottom of a snowfield. Properly outfitted climbers have an ice axe with them, but since it was a bit of an afterthought for us, and my parents were, um, budget-conscious, we just grabbed suitably sized sticks from the forest before we ascended above the timberline.
After summitting, we began our descent. When we got to our first snowfield that was steep enough for glissading, we took a shot at it. And very quickly, we were out of control. It was a warm day, and the snow was kind of sloppy and quickly formed a sort of raft under us, making it extremely difficult to punch our sticks deeply enough to reach firm snowpack and provide a useful braking effort. My mom was next to me, but was getting bounced around a bit and couldn’t even get into a good position to jam her stick into the snow. I was getting bounced around too, all the while conscious that we were hauling ass toward the bottom of the snowfield, and probably serious injuries if we couldn’t get our speed under control. I managed to get over to my mom so that she could grab onto my leg, and then worked my body over to the edge of our snow raft to where I could jam my stick into more solid snow pack and start slowing us down. It took a long time of jamming that damn stick into the snow as hard as I could before I got us stopped; my arms and abs were seriously sore the next day.
I’m not always so on top of things. I learned how to drive in the '80s using rear-wheel-drive cars, so I was very familiar with how to control a rear-wheel skid in slippery conditions. But when it happened just a few years ago at something close to highway speed, my brain locked up, just too freaked out to accept what was happening until the skid was too far gone to recover. The resulting crash totaled my car; somehow I walked away without any physical injuries, but I was stuck with PTSD for a few years after.
Apparently, my daughter does better in a sudden crisis than I do. Or, at least this one.
My minivan gets stuck on a railroad crossing, daughter saves the day
Back as a boyscout, the other boys did this on a snowpack in the summer. (I was too scared and didn’t try it.)
One of my friends was trying skiing down it, just with his shoes, and found that he couldn’t stop when the snowpack ended. Fortunately, he broke his wrist and not his leg so it was easier to get him off the mountain.
First and foremost, kudos for being decisive and brave!
The key is in the quote: “didn’t stop to think”. The brain is a logical organ. If you give it time to think, it will probably decide that it doesn’t want a metal horseshoe driven into its skull. The idea is to see, understand, and react in pretty much an instant of time, which is exactly what you did. As a wise old baseball player once opined, “Too much thinkin’ ain’t good for 'ya.” LOL
The day we brought my firstborn daughter home from the hospital, actually within a couple hours at her first feed at home, she stopped breathing. One moment she was crying her head off, the next she was completely quiet and turning blue.
I gave her CPR and walked my wife through calling 911, then talked to the operator while continuing CPR (my wife was, understandably, in no state to make coherent words).
I didn’t panic (or even process much emotionally at all) until first responders (police in this case) got there and took over CPR, by which point my daughter woke up and was breathing again. She ended up with a week long NICU stay.
In the moment, my mind was completely occupied with whatever it was that needed to be done at that time, which kept me calm and functional, thankfully. I kept it together until the ambulance took my wife and daughter.
On the other hand, large amounts of blood or any kind of cut flesh makes me lightheaded, or even potentially faint. I’d hope that I’d be as capable of putting that off till later in that kind of emergency, but it would be much harder.
That’s exactly how I felt.
I just hope that my squeamishness around blood wouldn’t be a problem in a scenario involving blood.
I get that. I had to work through some weird feelings of guilt - obviously, the whole NICU experience was traumatic in general, but I was also feeling strangely guilty about not freaking out more, if that makes any sense.