30 or so years ago when I was young and bored I was wasting time just driving around on a curvy 2 lane county road. No sholders to the road and barely 2 lanes wide. I became suddenly overwhelmed with the need to pull off the road. An irrational almost panic attack.
There was a little room on the inside of the next corner, so I pulled over. Just as a large truck came roaring aroung the corner using the middle of both lanes. High bank on one side of the road and steep drop off on the other. It would have been a certain head on collision, no escape room for my small car. I believe I could have died.
I have no explanation for the feeling that made me pull off the road just at that time. But I did learn to follow my hunches. I got a little tremble now writing about it even after all these years.
I posted a thread awhile back about how I was target shooting and fortunately noticed (<bang!> <bang!> <pffft>) when I got a squib round lodged in the barrel of my gun. Life would have been less happy if I’d fired another round.
Dead tour '92. RFK parking lot (RFK, old Redskin’s stadium, in Washington DC). Three of us. Several sheets of blotter in each of our pockets. Few oz of kind bud. One tank of nitrous in the car. Ah, Dead tour.
Security busted us, called for the cops, including reading the plate over the radio.
I have no idea what prompted the question: “Can we just put everything away and leave?”
I have no idea what prompted the answer: “Just get it off my lot.”
I have no idea where our Stupidest Question in the Universe prize is, because someone asked “what, do you mean off the entire parking lot or just your section?”
No, we weren’t quite thinking straight at that moment. He said something like “just get it off my lot” again, with unknown quantities of menace in his voice. We moved the car about … about … I have no idea how far, maybe one of those pie-sections, and reparked, locked it up, and headed to the opposite side of the lot. Nothing ever came of it.
I’ve told this story here a few times before so I’ll give the short version . . .
Was arguing politics and eventually racial issues with a guy I didn’t know at a party. It started to get a little bit heated and normally that wouldn’t bother me but it was my brother and I in a house full of people we didn’t know, in a sort of bad part of town (long story how we ended up there) and when they broke out the coke and started doing rails we decided it was time to high tail it. Fast forward a week or two, the guy I was arguing with gets arrested for 1st degree murder*. Beat a guy almost to death, cut off his finger to get a ring, Hollywood style, and then threw him in his trunk, drove a couple hours outside of town, and threw him off a cliff to finish the job. This was before I met him, by the way-- it took them awhile to find the body and figure out who did it. To top it off, it turns out the guy was a white-supremacist gang leader. Yes, I had a heated argument about race with a homicidal white supremacist gang leader in his own house, while he was intoxicated.
*He’s since been convicted
Have also told this story here on the boards, but still gives me the chills.
I was with friends on Crete and decided to go off, by myself, and just wander along the high cliffs and look down at the sea below. Stood on one overhang and looked out - quite beautiful. Walked off that ledge and about 100 feet further stepped to the edge to look out again.
Suddenly, for no particular reason, that overhang where I had been standing just a few seconds ago? Broke off and fell hundreds of feet into the ocean!
If I had dawdled even 30 seconds longer where I had been standing, I don’t think they would have ever even found my body.
When I was thirteen my then girlfriend wanted to have sex. I told her “no” (I was 13).
A couple of weeks later she called and told me she was pregnant, and that it was mine. I laughed in her face then explained to her why it couldn’t possibly be mine. Then I told her never to talk to me again.
This is really interesting stuff. Thanks to all who have posted (or will post). My story about pulling away from an expired meter just as the meter maid rounded the corner pales in comparison…
I was hiking down a cliff to get to a lake when I slipped and fell. I kept sliding down and was having a heck of a time slowing myself down. Anyway, I finally stopped at the edge of a thirty foot drop off.
You want karma…he left her 6 weeks later for another woman here in the same city.
She then had the balls to ask if she could come back.
I told her I would consider it when she cleaned up the unpaid bills she left. She then announced she could not believe I would “put a price on our relationship” and hung up.
I was walking down the steps that led from the top of Vernal Falls in Yosemite park. (These are the falls that have a railing at the top, next to the flowing water disappearing over the lip of the falls, with a sign that says, “If you step in this water you will die.”)
The steps of the trail were irregular and partly covered in sand. There was no railing against the chasm to my right. I slipped on a step and landed on my butt, almost sliding over the edge. After a moment of surprise and catching of breath, I got up on my hands and knees. I looked over the edge at the water far below as it foamed amidst rocks the size of Volkswagens and houses. If I had slipped just a little more, I would have gone over the edge and died.
It was about 9pm and I was driving. I was arriving at an intersection that had some construction going on. My light was green. For some reason though, my foot went down on the break and I entered this intersection slower than I normally would. Out of nowhere a biker came flying past a building on my right and off the curb in front of my car. I missed him by maybe 3-4 feet.
Had this subconscious action not have taken place the biker would have definitely been eating asphalt for dinner. When I say flying he was doing 25mph or more, and with no helmet on.
Other than that…
When I was 15 I had a stomach ache that was unusually more uncomfortable than others. I insisted I go to a doctor and my parents figured it wouldn’t hurt to get it checked out and there is a chance that I may have appendicitis due to the symptoms I was experiencing. Upon getting to the doctor they tried whatever they could to get me out of the hospital trying to refute the fact that I was sicker than usual and that I’d like to at least have a CatScan and some other testing…
At this point in time my appendix had already ruptured badly. I began getting really pissed off at the decisions by these doctors and so did my dad. After several minutes of sort of making a scene they decided to let me drink the Tang to fill my body with the ink? traceable by the CatScan. This took me nearly an hour to accomplish as I kept vomiting it up.
Only after my CatScan, and 3-4 hours of hell being in the ER, they finally had the result that my appendix had in fact ruptured.
Had I not made it explicitly known that I was in dire need of help these jerks would have sent me home and I probably would have not made it throughout that night, or came in the next day much, much worse. Going home and hoping for the best wasn’t my best option being that a lawsuit wouldn’t bring me back from the dead.
I had one of those once except I was 16 and closing up the convenience store where I worked. When I came back inside the store after locking up the car wash, I really, really wanted to close the store early and actually said out loud to nobody “I should just lock up right now.”
I didn’t because, even though it was only about 20 minutes, I was worried a regular or somebody would show up and mention to my boss that the store was closed early. Not even five minutes later the place got robbed.
How old are you, EpicNonsense? I don’t know when it was discovered, but nowdays there is a really simple, instant, non-invasive test to tell if your abdominal pain is appendicitis. You press on a certain spot. I don’t think it’s 100%, but it’s more than enough to get a doctor to take you seriously.
On edit: Looks like the guy who discovered it died in 1927 so, if your story is accurate, it sounds like your doctor was a fucking dangerous idiot.
While I’ve had several near almost fall-to-my death moments, the thing that sticks out in my mind is work related. I was really pissed off at work a few years ago, and decided to start interviewing. Gateway had just opened a new headquarters only three miles from my house and I interviewed there for a marketing job because of the short commute. Something about that job didn’t sound right, however, so I passed. Meanwhile, Gateway folded their San Diego operations (and their buildings are still vacant all these years later), and the small company I was with, which was employee owned, was acquired - providing me a nice payout in the end.
Stories like that are mentioned in *The Gift of Fear *by Gavin de Becker. Basically, you may have seen something that your instinct recognized as danger, but you decided not to “be silly” and ignore it. He mentions a woman who was waiting in the car for her boyfriend to get done with the ATM, and she felt an overwhelming urge to lock the car doors. After she was rescued from the carjackers, she realized that she had seen something blue out of the corner of her eye in the side-view mirror coming up way too fast. It was the carjacker, wearing a blue shirt.
Not me, but my brother. We were going to run into town on our motorcycles. I was 16 and he was 18. And being 18, he did not have to wear a helmet to be legal in WI. He did, however have to have eye protection. We needed to get going and he couldn’t find his sunglasses. Rather than make us any later, he grabbed his full-faced helmet and we took off down the road. Not a half-mile down the road, his back tire slid out on gravel and then his bike high-sided when the tire caught again. It slammed him - head first - into the pavement. 1/4" deep gouges in the back of the helmet were proof of this.
He got out of the deal with a broken foot. If he had found his sunglasses, he would have been dead. I witnessed it first hand and there is no way he would have survived it without a helmet.
Edit: Would have been 14 for this surgery. Had a surgery on my 15th birthday also so I get them confused often.
FTR, I am 23 at the moment.
And yes, doctor must have been a complete fucking idiot. I went through hell waiting to get that CatScan. My mother recalls me looking like an “old man dying” while in the hospital bed waiting… I guess I looked like shit.
One thing is certain, if I tell myself I have to get to an E.R. it means I’m seriously ill, or getting there… I’ve only been there a few times but all of them turned out very serious even when I went in with minimal symptoms.
ETA: This “abdominal pressing”… would it be effective even AFTER my appendix had ruptured?
In my case my borderline paranoid mom saved me from a far worse fate.
I was 12 or so and was playing football in the snow with some friends. Chasing down one guy he slipped and his leg flew back and kicked me in the shin. I dropped from the predictable shot of pain that caused, got over it and went on playing.
Move forward a few days and my mom saw me looking at my shin which was yellowish. I figured it was just a remnant of a bruise I had gotten from being kicked. She decided we should have our doctor look at it. I thought she was nuts. I felt fine and it did not hurt at all. But she’s mom and mom’s win such things so off I go to the doctor.
Our doctor was not really up on orthopedics so tells me to go across the street and wait in the Emergency Room and he’d call an orthopedist friend of his to come and have a look (waited in the ER because it was convenient…not because it was an emergency at all).
Orthopedic guy comes and looks at it and 30 seconds later tells my mom I need to be admitted immediately.
WTF!?
Next thing I know I am in the hospital, having all manner of tests being done while feeling fine. Have to admit to my 12-year-old eyes nuclear medicine seemed pretty cool and the whole body scan (of some sort) was interesting.
What was being kept from me so as not to scare me (but I found out later) was I had something that was (or almost was) osteomyelitis. My whole family was home for x-mas and the lot of them, except me, were sick. Apparently the bug was in me too and when I got kicked in the shin my leg essentially caught a cold. I guess this is a Very Bad[sup]tm[/sup] thing and they were wondering if they’d have to amputate my leg.
As it happens they caught it in the early stages and some strong antibiotics and a few days later I was fine and skipping out of the hospital.
I can say for certain if I had been on my own I never, ever would have thought to see a doctor about that at the early stages. My mom’s paranoia in this case almost certainly saved my leg and perhaps my life.