Did he keep wearing a helmet?
AFAIK, he never gets on a bike without one.
He kept* that helmet as a reminder.
*as a souveniour. Motorcycle helmets are a one time use thing.
I was in college, living with my pothead boyfriend. Before we moved in together, I smoked pot from time to time, but wasn’t what you would call a regular user. Once we moved in together, we were both high pretty much all the time. My grades started slipping, but I didn’t care. We started making plans to get married and manage a Dominoes together(we were both working delivering pizzas at the time, but his brother managed a different store and said he could help us get a spot in management somewhere).
A while later I met and fell for another guy. I felt terrible breaking my boyfriends heart, as I still cared for him a lot, but I was head over heels for the other guy. Me and the other guy didn’t last all that long, but once I was out of the relationship with the pothead boyfriend I stopped smoking so much. My grades improved, I got my motivation back, and I graduated college and now have a good career.
I don’t have a problem with weed, and still smoke on occasion, but I was definitely doing way too much back then. I lost all desire to better myself. If I’d stayed in that relationship I’d probably be working at Dominoes, barely making ends meet, high all the time.
When I was pulling out of the stub road where our office is located onto a major thoroughfare, the light turned green for me but I hung back a bit…aaaaand then a huge semi went blasting through the intersection against the light, his horn blaring. Had I stepped out smartly when I got the light, he’d have t-boned me right into Valhalla.
We lived around Toms River, which was about 30-40 minutes away. I was a wee bit younger that year, but I had a similar experience. I was 8 years old. It was the first year I was really into roller coasters. We had gotten season passes again that year. We often met my father there after work on Fridays. He worked in construction, so the other weekdays were “out” because he’d have to get up early. Weekend days were crowded. Friday nights were our nights. And Friday, May 11, 1984 we were supposed to be there, but Dad had to work overtime and was going to be home too late to go.
This part may be a “false memory,” but I distinctly remember wanting to go to the haunted castle again. I recall being scared the first time, and wanting to be brave this time. I also peed my pants on Rolling Thunder, yet I still like that ride today.
Not so much a “bullet dodge” because it was off by a year, but my friend got married in NYC in September 2000. We stayed at the Marriot (?) WTC on September 11, 2000.
The physical findings of appendicitis can be classic, and the diagnosis can be straightforward, but they can also be unclear and misleading. After the appendix ruptures, the pain may no longer be focal and in the right lower abdomen, but can be more diffuse and spread around.
If the person presents with straightforward appendix symptoms, great, off the OR they go. Otherwise they try to figure it out in more detail before they subject someone to the risk of surgery, because surgeons hate to open someone up without a damn good idea of what they’re going to find. CAT scan is used to try and get more information. Lots of things can mimic appendicitis, and its a drag to start surgery on someone with, for example, Crohn’s disease, thinking its appendicitis.
Minnie Luna’s response reminded me of someone else’s dodged bullet.
One of my best friends in NYC and her boyfriend frequent a local bar on the Upper West Side. One of the regulars, a nice guy who had been unemployed for a long time, finally got a great job interview lined up. He was going to the interview the following morning - Monday, September 11th at the World Trade Center.
In the days following, no one at the bar heard from him and after a week, they were all prepared for the worst. She told me this story on a phone call a week after the events. Then, suddenly a week later, they see the guy walk into the bar! Relieved, but in shock, they asked what happened. Of all the times and days, that Sunday night after leaving them all at the bar and heading home to bed to get up for his interview, he had a pain in his abdomen. It got bad fast and he went to the hospital. He was immediately checked in for an emergency appendectomy. He never made it to his interview that fateful day.
Life is all “inches & seconds” and we all have many of the ‘I did not do something’ or ‘I did not go somewhere.’
But how many have, “I’m alive because this happened and I did the only thing that could have saved me because I was well trained and well prepared?”
As a pilot, SCUBA diver, ARMY survivor and a sailor, I have a few of those.
One:
Bad decision: It got me on top of a solid overcast, unable to go higher in a sick airplane with no instrument equipment at all.
Good Decision: Listened to a guy who had been there / done that.
Application: I got down through 7000 feet of solid IFR overcast with rain to a point 400 feet AGL and out of the clouds, was able to follow a power line to clearing skies and open fields suitable for an emergency landing if needed.
To gain good judgment, it is imperative that you survive your bad judgment.
'Twasn’t me, but my husband. He used to have UTIs often, but this one was different. He did not have regular health insurance, but is service connected for a knee injury, so he would see the VA when he had to see a doctor. The doctor told him to drink a lot of fluids, take his pills and it would go away. But as I said this one seemed different. He was not peeing as much as he should have. I took him to the VA hospital which was quite far away, and he wheedled his way to talking to a doctor. The doctor was with a gaggle of med students being arrogant as hell implying that there was nothing really wrong at all. So my husband, who is very mild mannered most of the time, kind of taunts him and the doc decides he will demonstrate to the med students how this is all in my husband’s head. Med students are all for scoping this out because it is a procedure. So, they lubes up the scope and thread it up my husband’s penis and it stops. Dr. Arrogant steps in and he can’t get it to go further with normal force. He gets permission from my hubby to use more force (it is either that or exploratory surgery and hubby is scared of sharp objects). He rams it home and is soaked as my husband overly full bladder empties on him. The now not quite so arrogant doctor explains that the bladder was likely close to exploding and them ramming past the blockage likely saved him a much worse fate.
I wasn’t hurt. Scared out of my mind, but at least he didn’t stab me.
I think it’s possible the guy who held me up was actually lurking around behind the store while I was back there shutting the car wash down. I’ve always thought that I saw somebody back there but it was hard to remember after the fact whether I actually had and, if there really was somebody, if they’d been the same size/wearing the same jacket/whatever.
That doesn’t really account for the totally random “I wonder what I’d do if I got robbed?” thoughts I had all that day. The job made me super nervous anyway (a friend was taken from her convenience store job and killed just a few months before I started (different store, different town) so I was always very aware of the danger) but I’d been there for something like four months and hadn’t worried like that since the first month when this huge guy in the green trench coat came in like five minutes before closing and almost gave me a heart attack reaching for his wallet to buy a pack of Camels. I know he saw the absolute panic in my face, poor guy. I laugh now but I don’t think I’d ever been that terrified of anything (or, like in that case, absolutely nothing) in my life.
Anyway, he came back and robbed me again like 9 days later. A friend who was just pulling into the parking lot chased him down the street as he ran to his getaway car and memorized the plate number. My mom, who had been hired part time to make me feel better and was with me the second time, picked the owner of that car out of a line up and he got 68 months (I think he plead out and was only sentenced for one of the robberies).
I wonder if it ever occurred to him that he was about to sell 5 years of his life for a few hundred bucks?
He wrote a letter to me not too long after that. Thread here.
Ahh, memories. Hijack over.
About 15 years ago, we had a couple of tropical storms and large thunderstorms pass through the area (Eastern NC) within a few weeks of each other. When we found out that we might be in the path of a hurricane (I forget which one), I decided to go out and move my car (currently parked with the other family vehicles underneath an enormous, ancient oak tree) to a more open part of the yard. Not ten seconds after I drove away, I heard a very loud cracking, then crashing sound - the entire top half of the tree - about 40 feet long - broke off and slammed into the ground right on the spot where my car had been parked.
Another one, partly related - in December 1988 my best friend, who was studying in London, called to let me know that she was thinking of delaying her flight home for the holidays by one day so she could meet her new boyfriend’s parents. I agreed that she should stay the extra day, so she cancelled her flight home for the 21st and rebooked for the 22nd.
The flight she cancelled? Pan Am 103.
This thread is making me slightly nauseous, in a good, interesting way.
I’m sure there have been more, but the only two specific ‘Hey I almost died’ incidents I can recall are: running across the tracks to beat one train only to almost get hit by another, which was hidden, and having a large window smashed with a baseball bat within inches of my skull (some primary school friends and I were having a field day in a dark, abandoned house – apparently someone brought a bat, but no brain).
On of my favorite sayings is, experience is what you have right after you need it.
IANAD, but must add my 2 cents. My daughter had appendicitis which did not present pain in the usual manner. Nor did she have any particular amount of fever. She was also about 8 years old, not the usual age for appendicitis. After a consultation with the pediatrician, hospitalization, and exam by a surgeon, they were still not sure that was the problem. However, as the doctor advised, if we operate and it turned out to be unnecessary that would be bad. But if we don’t operate and it *was *necessary, that would be far worse. They operated, the appendix was in bad shape, and she was fine in 2 days. The doctor told us that abdominal pain is one of the hardest things to diagnose for a variety of reasons including what’s called “referred pain,” pain in an area of the abdomen far removed from the actual source of the problem.
Pretty mild in comparison…
There’s a trail that runs along the cliffs above the Golden Gate in San Francisco. It’s pretty mild, but there are a few cliffs. A couple friends and I were riding our bikes along the trail, I hit a bump and lost my balance, and fell over the edge of the trail… right into a bush that was growing out the side. My memory may be more dramatic than actuality but I remember thinking that if I’d lost my balance a second earlier or later, I’d be dead.
Also, I was hanging out with an ex-girlfriend and a mutual friend of ours, when the ex casually (and almost proudly) mentioned she’d been cheating on her current boyfriend. Mutual friend and I were thrown off a bit because even if she were cheating, why on earth would she tell us? Looking back now, I can think of at least one person she probably cheated on me with, and that doesn’t take into account the summer she spent at UCSD (no proof of anything, though). I consider the fact that my hoo-ha-dilly is, and always has been clean as a whistle to be a dodged bullet.
Not me, but my niece. My sister related this story to me last night.
My niece was sitting in her car in a parking lot last week. She had just finished eating something, and opened the door to brush away some crumbs. When she opened the door, there was a young man standing right there.
“Hi, can you give me a ride somewhere?”
“Uh, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Oh. Can I sit in your car for a while? You have air conditioning, right?”
“Uh, I don’t think that’s a good idea either.”
“Oh. Then can I use your phone?”
"OK, but I’ll dial the number for you.
His phone call was essentially “Dad, please come get me, I’m lost and can’t find my way home.” Lots of pleading.
About an hour later, my niece got repeated calls from the police. They had squad cars and helicopters looking for the escaped mental patient that she had just been talking to.
This was many years ago, not long before my husband and I got married. We were driving from my hometown, across the state, to the city where we’d met and gone to college together, to meet up with friends and celebrate the impending nuptials.
We were on a “country highway” - fairly fast speed limit (45 or so, I don’t recall), straight road, one lane each way and a gravel shoulder, lots of hills. There were also lots of cars going both ways. Needless to say, traffic can jam up sometimes if you get the proverbial Sunday drivers out there, and some people get impatient. It wasn’t bad, though, and we were driving along enjoying the trip and each other’s company.
My husband was driving, and we were going up a very slight, long incline, approaching a spot where the road leveled off. At the head of this slope, I had the following impression - I was certain that we had dozed off and drifted across the yellow line, because I knew no other reason why there would be a car coming straight at us, maybe a car’s length away.
We hadn’t fallen asleep, though. It was (probably) an impatient passer coming from the opposite direction, which had disregarded that it was a no passing zone, and cut into our lane, heading right for us. Maybe he had actually dozed off. I don’t know.
Then we were on the right-hand gravel shoulder for what barely seemed like any time, and then back in the lane. We heard squealing brakes and my husband glanced in the rear-view, and that car had cut back into the proper lane, sending someone else veering onto the shoulder trying to avoid a collision as he cut in, and causing the cars behind us to weave and brake in panic.
We looked at each other - only for a moment, as taking our eyes off the road wasn’t a good feeling at that point - and asked if that really just happened.
My husband doesn’t remember the split-second “decision” to swerve off onto the gravel shoulder, or cutting back onto the road. I don’t remember him having that much time. Maybe terror just freaked us out that much, or maybe it was literally just a very well-controlled split-second reaction. Most of the rest of the drive, we were very much in “We’re alive! Woohoo!” mode.
I always wear a helmet when I ride, but usually I take it off as soon as I get down. One day I’d been jumping my horse and there was mud in the arena. When I finished riding I wanted to get his bell boots off before they chafed his ankles. I jumped down without taking my helmet off and crouched beside him to take off his boots. He reach up with a hind leg and kicked me hard right in the temple. I think he was trying to brush at a fly, since he’s never kicked me before or since. I was bowled over several times, but got up. The farrier said that he’d seen a guy get killed just that same way.
StG
Well amid these tales of escaping bludgeonings, literal missed bullets, narrowly escaping falling off a freakin’ cliff, and nearly being kicked to death by a horse, mine is lame.
I work for large, faceless Corporation X. I used to work in department A, which was relocated to a different city in a different state. All department A workers whined and moaned about losing their jobs, even though they were shuffled into department B, which was located in the same building, and did no one received a pay cut for doing a “lesser” job. I actually took this as a crisitunity to get away from a place I hated, and found a job in the much more enjoyable and better paying department C. I just found out maybe a week ago that the entire department B has been laid off. Some of them have been working at Corporation X for eons, and are all soon to be out of a job.