Dung Beetle - omigod, you fought back, and you got out. And your kids are okay.
Everybody else has some hectic stuff, too. madmonk and t-keela - oy. And zev - I have only read a few of the various 9/11 threads on the SDMB, so didn’t know you were that close. Wow. I was a few miles north - no danger.
Anything I could add to this thread would be embarrasingly modest in comparison.
AK-47 rounds make a very distinctive “CRACK” as they pass by your head.
Six year-old kids with Russian made Rocket launchers, who, thank god, couldn’t figure out how, or were too nervous, to take off the safety when pointing said rocket launcher at my chest.
Somalia- “Operation Restore Hope” (quite a mis-nomer that)
I had a guy pull a knife on me in Jamaica while he was robbing me. What made it extra scary is that it was a cheap-ass kitchen knife about 10" long.
Was mugged in Harlem by several teens. When I reported it to the police they said I was lucky I wasn’t a couple of streets over because I probably would have been killed.
My extremely small car was rear-ended by a semi. I was thrown out of the car onto the shoulder of the road and the car then rolled down an embankment and flipped.
I was in a plane during a storm when it hit an air pocket and dropped several hundred feet. It then was hit by lightning and the hydraulic fluid boiled off making the brakes a bit dodgy. We had to assume the crash position on landing and there were fire trucks on the tarmac waiting for us. Landing was perfect with no problems.
Twice I’ve gotten close to death. One ‘exciting’, the other ‘not so exciting’.
Exciting one- I got hit in the back of the head with a rock in Israel, and fell down a flight of stone stairs to land in a nice pool of my own blood. I just remember on the way to the hospital wondering if that sunrise was going to be the last one I ever saw.
Not so exciting one- I almost died of malnutrition. You’d never know it to look at me (I’m overweight), but about 11 years ago, I’d stopped eating regularly due to being pretty much near-homeless. One morning I woke up paralyzed (and if that doesn’t scare you, little will). After a few hours I was able to move with great pain, and then it let up an hour or so later.
That night I couldn’t move again. The next morning a friend I was staying with called my parents and got 'em to take me to the hospital. (My dad thought I was ‘just joking’. Grr.) The diagnosis- severe potassium deficiency. Doctors said if I’d gone a few more hours, the involuntary muscles would’ve shut down, too. ::shudder::
Hey, I thought of another one.
I used to work a lot of temp jobs. One of them took me to a banquet hall, cleaning up after a convention. While carrying a bus tray of dishes, I scraped my middle finger on the lock of a fridge door. Over a few days, it became infected. I kept it clean and wore a bandage, but more was going on, as I would soon find out.
While on another job, somebody asked me what that purple line going up my arm was. I hadn’t noticed it. I looked, and sure enough, there was a purple line going from the wound, all the way up my arm, past my armpit, onto my chest. We figured I should go to the hospital.
I showed it to the intake nurse, who jumped up from her chair to go get a doctor. When the doctor saw it, his eyes got big like saucers, and he got out the largest syringe full of penicillin I’ve ever seen, and shot all of it into my arm. Plus, he gave me some penicillin pills and told me to eat them NOW.
Apparently, I was about 20 minutes from death by blood poisoning.
I’ve been in mortal peril twice, though these don’t really compare to some of the horror stories above for sheer drama.
Age 11 (approximately): I was washed off the side of the Westport jetty by a freak wave. I spent several minutes in the pounding surf and nearly drowned. I was getting plowed into the sandy bottom and bounced off the large rocks as the undertow slowly pulled me into deeper and deeper water. By a stroke of random luck, there happened to be a fisherman on a rock right next to where I got washed against the jetty about three-quarters of the way out to the end, and he was able to grab me and hang on when the water dropped out from under me. He pulled me up to semi-conscious safety. It was a miracle I didn’t have any broken bones and was able to stumble off the jetty under my own power. Another few seconds in the water and I would have been beyond anyone’s help.
Age 19: I had suffered the collapse of my left lung three times at this point, and they had become somewhat routine. I mean, insofar as blinding pain in the chest is routine. Go to the hospital, get x-rayed, get a chest tube, wait a few days, go home. Well, not this last time. I felt the collapse, finished my lunch, drove to the emergency room, and calmly explained what was happening. They nodded and did the routine exam. And then they freaked out. They dosed me with narcotics, jammed a large-gauge needle in my side, threw me in an ambulance, and rushed me to the large surgical center half an hour away, where I underwent several hours of emergency surgery. Turns out I had what’s called a tension pneumothorax, which means the hole in the lung that caused the collapse has become a one-way valve: Air pressure in the lung leaks out, but cannot get back into the lung, which means I was gradually pumping up a bubble in my chest (which the needle was intended to relieve). At the time I originally got to the emergency room, I was feeling a little lightheaded, which as I understand it was due to the fact that my organs were being pushed together in my chest, compressing my heart and negatively impacting its ability to pump blood. They told me later if I’d waited another half hour I probably would have passed out and if I were alone at the time certainly would have died.
Scary experience, but it’s just the thing to strip away the false sense of arrogant immortality typical to the average 19-year-old. Changed my whole worldview. I can’t say I’m glad it happened, but my life would be significantly different without it.
Shot at once by crack dealers, and had a crack head swing a razor at me inside a cramped apartment. The first time I got back in my car and headed out very, very quickly. The second time I punched her to the ground and kicked her in the teeth.
The first time I was scared, the second time I was scared, then very, very pissed.
Dang, but I have led a sheltered, safe life. Not too many events have left enduring memories of near death. There was the time my Datsun 310 slid into the path of an oncoming snow plow during a storm. That could have been mighty ugly if I hadn’t managed to control the swerve and pull over into my lane in time. And there have been the usual idiot driver does something stupid, missing your car by inches situation, but those happen so fast that you don’t realize that you were in peril until it’s all over but the leaning on the horn and shaking of the middle finger.
There was the time I thought I’d take a shortcut up Arthur’s Seat in Scotland and found myself on a steep, steep slope, reluctant to go up, and unable to go down with all of Edinburgh spread out below me. It felt like if I let go, I’d end up in the Firth of Forth, but realistically, the level of peril was probably not that high
You ain’t lying, I’m 0 for I quit counting.
One that happened a while ago occured during a helicopter training flight. We were in restricted airspace at night and not expecting any civilian air traffic. A single engine prop plane came busting through on a perpendicular course at our altitude. With no lights. At all. Did I mention it was nighttime? I was looking inside at something and never saw him. Its a good thing there was someone in the back seat who call out a warning. We got out of the way fast, straight down. No way there wouldn’t have been a fatal mid-air if the guy in the back didn’t see it. The plane never deviated from its course. Probably a drug runner going back to the Gulf of Mexico.
When I was born I had an intestinal condition that meant I couldn’t eat or drink anything , so I was slowly starving to death. I had to have a life-saving operation at 10 weeks old.
In my 20s I was in a multiple pile-up accident on the motorway (UK = freeway). Foul weather, rain, wind, fog, low visibility. My car went into the one in front, the one behind went in to me, and so on for a line of 20-30 vehicles. I knew I had to get out of the car and away to the shoulder, so I did. As I did so, I saw some huge lorries that were bearing down on the line of crashed vehicles and were obviously going to be included in the crash scene. As it happened, I escaped totally uharmed, but it could have been a lot worse.
Last year I visited Indonesia specifically to visit the dragons on the island of Komodo. I weighed up the various ‘worry’ factors. Lots of nasty diseases (I had to get the whole gamut of shots before I went); lots of nasty insects and things that can make you very ill; international terrorism; a corrupt local police force that can make life uncomfortable for anyone. Plus the Komodo dragons themselves are lethal killers, and I did get VERY close to them. I enjoyed the trip and nothing bad happened, but I was taking lots of chances all at once.
well, I was in a chemical plant explosion and fire a few years ago. It was an acetylene plant and a few cylinders caught fire, igniting more cylinders, which, well, you get the idea. The cylinders are designed so if they get hot, a plug will melt in either the top or bottom and “safely” vent the gas. Safely in this case means they won’t explode. What they will do, however, is catch fire quite spectacularly. We had a few dozen tanks firing into the air, ablaze from both bottom and top, looking for a place to land. And you can’t use water to put out the fire, since acetylene is produced by mixing calcium carbide (we had multi ton drums of the stuff nearby) with water! I think about every fire company in the county showed up that day.
Fell donw a flight of basement stairs at age 3. Landed head first on a nail.
Skull penetration!
Mom threw me in the baby buggy (pram), went 1 block down the road to the Fire Station, & we boarded the ambulance there.
Chicago had good surgeons back in '66. I lived.
About 20 years ago I worked for a car dealership. I worked in the car rental dept. with another guy who’d been with them for years and was a little off, but he was nice to me. One morning he came in with a loaded gun, ready to blow away the Gen’l Manager, the GM’s secretary, our boss and yours truly. He was angry with the others when they passed him over for a promotion and they gave it to me, and he was doubly angry that I’d recently gotten married, thwarting his perverted dreams of our imminent marriage. :eek:
They were able to clear the bldg. of everyone but the gun waver and myself, and after talking to him for about 3 hours, I managed to talk him down long enough for his brother to come in and disarm him. For months afterward, he would randomly call my house and threaten suicide, letting me hear the gun clicking as he pulled the trigger.
Every once in a blue moon he calls our house, or drops me a postcard to let me know he still knows where I live and can take me, or my children, out at any time. Before you ask, yes the police are aware and each time he contacts me they go and have a little talk with him.
I was with a friend down by San Diego on a Hobie Cat, enjoying a real nice off-shore breeze when the breeze stopped. Can you say doldrums? 
Then we noticed we were also out of sight of land. Then we also noticed the fog settling in. Shit! No wind, no sense of direction, no contact. Nobody else really even knew where we were. After about 30 minutes we heard the splash of a boat, and a voice saying “What the hell are you guys doing out here, on that?” A couple out for a sail had seen us from a distance before the fog set in and managed to find us. Otherwise we probably would have wound up somewhere around Seattle.
Stupid. Young. Lucky.
Well, there was that. But;
I’ve had guns aimed at me twice, once in anger and once in stupid, by a drunk. The latter squeezed off three before I kicked him in the balls. That pissed him off, if you can believe it.
But the worst time was when I did get “The Look” from a biker in a bar in Bakersfield. He turned to me and said “Buy me a beer, sister”. I said “Fuck you”. The place went silent. He turned on his stool to face me and looked at me for way too long, while his cohorts gathered around. My ass was in for a stomping. and I knew it. These guys don’t just toss you out the door like in the movies. After a long minute, at least, he said “You’re scared shitless, ain’t you?” I said “No”. He said “You’re a lying fuck, but you got balls” and bought me a beer. Believe me, he wasn’t really impressed, he just didn’t wan’t to be bothered. So he laughed it off. I was lucky, guaranteed. He didn’t care if I lived or died. He just wasn’t in the mood to get off of the stool. After I had mostly finished the beer everybody ignored me, and I knew it was time to go.
When I was 13 or 14, I was hanging out with some neighbor kids and one of their cousins brought over a loaded .45. The two cousins started to argue over whether or not the gun was actually loaded, and the gun’s owner proceeded to randomly fire it. I heard the bullets fly past my ear. Thankfully, they hit a tree behind me, but a little to the left, and I would be dead.
Another time, when I was about 15, I got into a fight with my sociopathic boyfriend. He pulled a gun on me, and chased me several blocks to a marshy area. I ran out in the muck, and hid while he stood on the shore screaming and firing the gun out in my direction. Needless to say, the police arrived pretty fast.
That’s it from me, but I think that’s enough.
Oh yeah! I’d forgotten. I was flying back to Bakersfield with my boss many years ago, at night, when this ghostly object passed right in front of us, close enough to wobble our little two-seater. I mean he was right there, close enough that our lights reflected off his plane. We were in one of those little things with the V tail and our shoulders touched each other and the doors. His statboard wing looked like it passed over our engine. I’m getting all excited just talking about it. Funny how something like that can hide in your mind.
Oh yeah, I forgot. I’ve told this story before, but when I was a little kid, my family often went sailing on Lake of the Woods (on the Ontario/Manitoba/Minnesota border). One time we were on a cruise organized by the yacht club when a tornado struck us. I remember comforting my (equally) freaked-out little brother in the V berth as my parents ran around frantically on deck trying to keep our 24-foot sailboat from sinking or capsizing.
Two kids in a cottage died in that storm, one of the boats in our regatta ended up beached, and we ended up with our neighbours’ bowsprit through our porthole and our dinghy in their cockpit.
Ok, well…
Fell through the floor of a burning building (while putting it out) into a basement filling with water, landing on a nail that narrowly missed penetrating my spine.
Walking down the street on Chicagos’ south east side, near 87th and Commercial for those familar, and got caught in a cross fire from two seperate cars, the shoulder of the coat I was wearing had a through and through hole in it, which I found after I climbed out from under the pile of rubble i hid behind.
Several years later, working at the defunct US Steel plant in that same area as a security guard, I worked midnight shift, and got stuck working NYE. I went into the admin building with my patrol truck (there was a small garage) about three miuntes to midnight. Left the building at midnight just as the shots began to start. They were ringing and zinging off of the building i was in.
I was visiting Seattle when it snowed 20 inches. All roofs, pavements, whatever were that deep in heavy snow.
At the motel, I was walking toward the office when a section of the cover over the walkway way down at the far end suddenly crashed to the ground. My reaction was just, My look at that way down there.
Then the section next the first one crashed, and my reaction was still, This of course has nothing to do with me, it’s just an interesting thing to look at, HOWEVER just to be boring and grown-up I will step out from under the cover at my end. And BOOM, the whole remaining roofing came smashing down, missing my heels by an inch (I’d tripped on the snow and was on my hands and knees in the parking lot). Undignified, but it’s quite a rush to not get killed.
No one else was outdoors when it happened. But afterwards all the rooms had someone looking out the door.