Death: Have you ever "missed it by that much"?

In My Humble Opinion
1

December, 1988. I was coming back from a wedding in Delhi, flying Pan Am via Frankfurt to New York. Arrived in Frankfurt late in the afternoon, rushed to the next gate and was ready to load. No time to get a paper.

The gate area in Frankfurt was really crowded, and it looked like they were trying to load too many people onto the flight. When I finally got on, and got to my seat, there was already someone there. We compared boarding passes, and we both had that seat. Weird.

I stood in the aisle until a steward told me to take my seat. I explained the problem, she went away for a bit, and came back. I’d just been upgraded to business class! W00t!

Went up to business class and the stewards went through all the pre-flight stuff. Pilot came on the intercom and thanked us all for our cooperation in loading a crowded flight, but explained that we all would have heard of the situation, which was causing backlogs.

I asked the passenger next to me: “what situation?”

He said, “One of their planes fell out of the sky yesterday. They think it was a bombing.”

I opened my complementary International Herald-Trib and saw the big headline: “PAN AM FLIGHT CRASHES IN LOCKERBIE SCOTLAND”.

Then I heard the doors shut, and off we went.

Same flight that I was on, just a day earlier. I could easily have been on that flight, if my travel schedule had been just a bit different.

Uneventful flight to New York. More chaos at the Pan Am desk, as they worked late trying to get us all onto new connecting flights.

Several of us got bussed to Hoboken to a hotel. I was finally able to call home to let my parents know I was safe. My mum burst into tears. They’d been trying to figure out what flight I’d been on, had made several calls, and had been told I might have been on the one the day earlier.

I ended up having supper with two other passengers in the Hoboken hotel, a man and a woman about my age; none of us knew the other two, but we talked late into the evening about the events.

And the next day I came home to Canada.

That’s my “missed it by that much” story.

2

When I left the Foreign Service, I departed Kampala on August 7, 1998, the day of the bombing of the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Had the flight left a little later, I would have been stranded in the immediate shutdown of the embassy and all movements. My wife was scheduled to follow in a couple of days. I didn’t find out about it until I reached customs in MSP. The customs officer looked at my passport and said “Oh, Uganda? Is that where they just blew up the embassy?” I believe my measured response was “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!!!”

3

I got destroyed on my motorcycle by a teen-aged girl talking on her cell phone. Pulled right in front of me. Missed Certain Death by about 4". Flew over the hood and way down the road instead of impacting on the A piler. Was about a 60 mph hit.

4

I collided with an adult white-tailed deer in my car in 1994, at around 50mph. It was sprinting across the highway, left to right, and hit the front of my car dead center (right at the license plate), then smashed into the passenger side of my windshield, before being thrown off the car by the A-pillar (the pillar between the windshield and the passenger side window).

I was uninjured, but had I hit it a fraction of a second earlier, it probably would have come right through my windshield, and into me – and that car (a 1991 Mazda Protege) had no airbags. I have to imagine I would have been seriously injured, if not outright killed, by that.

5

From 2005

Basically, a few inches either way would have been a clean miss or a clean kill.

6

I owe my life to my mother’s weak bladder. Once, when I was an infant, my parents put me to bed, and since it was a hot day, left my window open. But then, as often happens, Mom had to get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and noticed the draft coming from my room. The temperature had dropped precipitously overnight, to the point that I was turning blue. If she’d slept through the night, I probably would have died of hypothermia.

7

I was a teenager, proud of how I repaired and maintained my first car.

It needed an alternator, so I bought one and commenced changing it myself. I jacked the car up with the bumper jack - no jackstands, no other support than that cheap bumper jack.

Underneath the car now, I started loosening the bolts on the old alternator. They were tight, it took a lot of muscle to get them to budge. I recall the car above me swaying back and forth as I worked on that nut.

As this was going on, an old-man neighbor happened to be walking by. He started screaming at me to get out from under the car, grabbing at my feet as he did so. He then walked back to his house and returned with a couple of jack stands.

This may have been the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. I still think about it now and then, 50 years later. I so easily could have been crushed to death.

Thanks, Mr. Godwin!

mmm

8

Did you ever get around to discussing Hitler?

9

It’s a story I’ve told before, but it’s my version of “missed it by that much”.

One Friday night a few years ago I was preparing some crackers and cheese and a nice bottle of wine, and the annoying chest pains that had been plaguing me for the past couple of days were not going away and were worse than ever. The previous day – and this is a cool part of the story – despite the chest pains I had gone out to shovel my driveway because there had been a snowstorm. So I finally decided that the nuisance of spending a couple of hours in ER was worth it just to sort out what was going on. I recorked the wine, left the cheese on the cutting board, and drove to the ER.

When they did an initial assessment, my blood pressure was through the roof. I immediately got taken into an ER room ahead of everyone else. Shortly after, I was admitted, injected with various things, and told that I was having a heart attack. The snow-shoveling episode could have been the last moments of my life on earth. I did not get back from hospital to dried-out cheese on the cutting board until nearly a week later.

10

I was 17 and driving my mom’s car with a friend as a passenger.

I was driving down a 4-lane road (two lanes each direction) at around 50 mph in a 40 zone.

I was in the right-most lane and a car pulled out from the other side of the street, turning left and almost turned into me as they went into the left lane. Wondering who this dick was I was looking out the side window to give him a dirty look and, maybe, the finger.

What I had not realized was the car ahead of me in my lane (far ahead when I got on that street) had a flat tire and was limping along at maybe 5 mph.

Fortunately, my friend who was also looking at the car just to my left turned and looked forward and saw the imminent collision about to happen (me rear ending a car at about 45 mph…and no, we didn’t have air bags and, being a teen, I saw no need to use my seatbelt).

My friend screams and I look forward and see what is about to happen. I, of course, slam on the brakes but it is apparent to me I absolutely will not stop in time. I’ll probably hit him going 30-35 mph. It is weird how much time slowed down for me in that moment. This whole next bit probably took 3-4 seconds but it felt like 20 seconds or more.

I consider swerving into the left lane but there is that car next to me that I mentioned before. Hitting the car in front was a last choice so I decided to swerve right, over the curb and hope I could keep the car on the 10 foot wide strip of grass and not hit the trees (forest) after that bit of grass.

As it happened I saw the curb was a really tall curb. I knew going over it would, at the least, absolutely wreck the car as it tore the undercarriage apart. In my head, I actually thought about my mom and that she would kill me for wrecking the car. I was legit, in that second, more afraid of facing her if I wrecked the car than what was about to happen to me.

But, there seemed no other better choice so that was my plan. To this day I do not know how I did what happened next but, without thinking about it at all, I swerved to the right but didn’t go over the curb. Instead, I squeezed through between the curb and the car with the flat tire. It was such a squeeze that there were swirls on the right tires after this where they rubbed against the curb. The car with the flat tire passed so close I could have easily reached out the window and touched it. I am shocked the side mirror didn’t get torn off.

I was looking to the side when I passed the flat tire car and saw the guy’s eyes wide in shock…I think he saw what was about to happen and had a moment to get really worried.

I rocketed by the flat tire car and moved back into the lane like normal and nothing had happened. The guys in the other car in the left lane (I was still looking that way) were going nuts (in approval…hooting and hollering). They thought massive destruction was about to happen but then…it all came out fine…somehow. I looked at my friend and he was in some kind of shock. Frozen and pale and speechless, mouth hanging open.

For my part, I wasn’t freaked out except in a vaguely intellectual way. I mean, I knew what almost happened but the whole thing occurred so fast it just never had a chance to really grab me before it was over and all was fine (it caught up to me that night as I went to bed and then it all landed on me).

I do not know if I would have died but no question it could have been very, very bad at the least. Death was certainly in those cards.

I’m not a religious person but I had a guardian angel with me that day. If I were I cat, I definitely burned one life on that one. Maybe two of the nine they get.

11

Close in the sense of inches…

An SUV went out of control, hit the divider and flew right at me (nearly inverted). This was on a highway and I was in the center lane on the opposite side, where you’d think you’d be mostly safe from opposing traffic. It was like watching a shark swimming in to attack me. Fortunately, I accelerated instead of braking, which changed the angle. It passed just behind my rear bumper. A fraction of second difference and it could have taken my head off.

I’ve had a few close calls in airplanes, mostly my own fault. A couple of which left me breathless and could certainly have killed me had I taken the wrong action.

Close in terms of stupid risk…

I used to be an indoor rock climbing instructor. Once we had a guide rope fall out, which means they have to be re-threaded from the top. I free climbed up the back of the wall, which was wood framing. Nobody else was in the facility and once I was up there (about 35 feet) I realized how stupid a decision that was. I finished the job, carefully got back down and never did that again.

Along the same lines, I once took off in a VFR-only airplane (meaning, no useful instruments for flying in weather) with a solid overcast. I was in the clear, but the overcast was extensive and I flew over it for more than an hour. If anything had happened requiring a quick or forced landing I would have been completely screwed. Never did that again. And importantly, I realized even an instrument equipped airplane wouldn’t have helped all that much with such low fog, though it would have given me more options if I had time to divert.

12

I have a friend with a load of stories like this. He could post them himself, but he’s dead. :wink:

(Heart Attack)

13

Oh, multiple occasions, I’m pretty sure. I missed being crushed in a crowded bus on the lower deck of the Cypress structure by about twenty minutes.

I’ve been in two cars that did full 360 spin-outs - one on an elevated on-ramp, one across a full five lanes of moving traffic. Completely untouched both times (and I wasn’t driving).

Ran through a plate glass sliding door as a youngster and while I sliced myself up something proper (still have a few scars), I could have very easily slit my throat or at least lost an eye or been seriously impaled.

14

I’ve previously shared on the dope, of a time where I was led through an area in complete darkness. Then, when a light came on, I saw that I had just walked past an open manhole, with a drop as far as I could see down. It freaks me out to think about it.

15

Driving home on the expressway and about a mile from my exit, an F250 style truck rammed into the back of my Hyundai Sonata at about 100mph. I was in the center lane and immediately lost control, going left into the median wall. I barely remember the rolling though the cops said I had to have rolled at least three times based on the amount of exterior damage. My moment of lucidity came when I saw all the sparks flying up as the car skidded upside down on its hood & roof before coming to a stop. I hung there as people stopped and ran over to help, cut me out of my belt and I walked away from the accident. When I got to the hospital, the nurses said they just assumed I probably wouldn’t be making it out based on “rollover accident” in the warning while we were en route.

Instead, aside from some impressive bruises from the seatbelt and airbag and some cuts from climbing over the broken glass to get out, I was fine and went home an hour or two later.

16

I was driving in Baghdad during the worst of the sectarian violence and someone was dropping mortars onto the neighborhood to my right. They were coming in over the road I was on.

I’ve also been pretty close to large IEDs and once in Afghanistan the security services came into the hotel that we were working out of and arrested some men. They had rented a room next to the conference room that we were using as an office and were in the process of building a bomb in the room to kill us all.

17

This story sent an icy chill down my spine.
.
.
.
.
(I hate to see good cheese go to waste)

mmm

18

I’ll have to think if I want to post any of mine, but when I saw this thread, this video (which was really hard to find) came to mind. Talk about a lucky guy:

19

I had a similar, though altogether different experience. I describe it to others as “the world’s slowest heart attack”.

In the mid-90’s, I had recovered from a mild cold but had lingering fatigue and pain in my shoulder and back. So I went to my GP and they ran some tests, did some x-rays, but could not identify the source of my pains (at one point pleurisy was suggested). This went on for 4-5 weeks. Night were the worst. If I tried to sleep in the wrong position, the pain increased. It became harder and harder to find a sleep position that didn’t cause pain.

One Saturday afternoon, I’m sitting watching TV when I realize I’m reduced to a single position (sitting bolt upright) that doesn’t give me excruciating pain. I debate whether to wait and go to my GP on Monday, but decide no sleep for two nights is not going to cut it. So I drive myself to the ER and check in, during which I gave my old grad school address (from twenty years previous) and my childhood phone number, so yeah, some mental confusion. I wait patiently to be called and then get called into the big open ER exam room with multiple beds around it. The nurse tells me to take my shirt and pants off and put on a gown, then climb onto the bed. I start to climb on to the bed and realize I’m no longer physically able to lift my leg up. I whisper “I can’t” while starting to collapse. The next thing I know I’m on a gurney in the middle of the ER surrounded by medical personnel and someone is shoving a nitroglycerine tablet under my tongue.

I had pericarditis (fluid buildup in the lining of the heart), which the cardiologist on call determined with an ultrasound. I had a centimeter of fluid squeezing my heart and preventing full oxygenation of my blood.They talked about “tapping” me (which is exactly what it sounds like) but decided to try steroids first, which immediately brought relief, so I ended up in the ICU, untapped.

The next day, I remarked to my doctor that since it wasn’t a heart attack, I was lucky, it was bad but not life threatening. I told me that in fact, if the fluid had continued to build up, it would end up squeezing my heart enough to prevent it from beating, which would not be good. And I was on the verge of this when I came in. I might not have survived the weekend if I had waited.

20

I’ve had two which were quite narrow misses:

1974 plane crash

2010 nearly drowned trying to rescue a kid (& kid didn’t make it :confounded: )

Otherwise a few near misses driving & flying but those didn’t even muss my hair. Much. Oh, and a heart attack but it was ‘mild’ (as far as those things go).