Ever have one of those lives? It didn’t end with childhood.
Still, reading through these makes me feel lucky. I never received more than a few scratches. In some of these stories the people got seriously hurt. Heck, they could have died!
So that’s how he got into my pajamas.
I once tried playing “light-saber” with a fluorescent tube. Much bleeding ensued.
Ah childhood, what a magical time filled with near-death experiences. The closest I ever came to being in the running for a Darwin Award was when my cousins and I were monkeying around in the pool with stuff that floats. We realized that one of those heavy plastic Playskool-type wagons is hollow, and will float. In reality, it floats for a while, because it is not water-tight and eventually it fills with water and sinks. The strap on my bathing suit got tangled up with some part of the wagon, and I went down with it. I still remember that moment of clarity when I realized that (a) I was stuck to the wagon and (b) it was heavier than I would have guessed. Somehow I managed to wait until the wagon settled on the bottom of the pool, and then I kicked away from it as hard as I could with both feet against the bottom and fortunately I became unstuck. The plastic thing scraped a gash across my shoulders, and for the rest of the summer it looked like I had been literally whipped.
As these things are wont to go, when I came up, I advised the other kids that we probably shouldn’t play with the wagon in the pool, and it was only when we were dragging it out of the pool that the parents saw what we were doing. Spankings all around.
When I was 9, I gave a present to my parents for their anniversary. I believed that electricity made things “shake”. So I put a stick inside a styrofoam cup, wrapped it with a piece of wire, and poked a hole in the side of the cup from which the wire protruded. I wrapped the other end of the wire around a penny, thinking it was a similar size to a standard plug. I thought it would make a good mixer :smack:
I was seven years old, enjoying a caravan vacation on the picturesque Isle of Sheppey with my mother, her somewhat unstable boyfriend (who I was terrified of, for good reason) and his two sons (who I was merely scared of, but for equally good reason). One evening, desperate for some kind of entertainment, the adults loaded us into their van and drove us to a nearby pub. When we arrived, I, in a burst of youthful enthusiasm, started running directly towards the pub entrance rather than following the path around; unfortunately in the twilight I had not noticed that the grounds were surrounded by a shabby fence, which consisted of a length of wire strung between fenceposts at the same height as my neck. This wire had evidently snapped in the past and then been tied together again, leaving two sharp rusty prongs very much like barbed wire. This was precisely the section of the fence I ran into.
I remember bouncing back and hitting my head on the floor and this being more painful than the laceration across my neck, from which large quantities of blood was spilling onto my T-shirt. I remember crying “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry” to my mother’s boyfriend: I was much more scared of how he’d react to me spoiling his evening than I was of my injury. And I remember an excessively long wait for the ambulance, apparently because the Kingsferry Bridge was up, so I was able to enjoy the interesting experience for a good 40 minutes before the ambulance crew arrived.
I had avoided slicing open anything important, but my neck was a ragged mess requiring skin grafts, several weeks in hospital and, a few years later, plastic surgery. My mother managed to sue the pub owners for about £13,000. The money was put in trust for me until I was 18; I’d spent it all before I was 20, I have no idea how. I still have an impressive scar and used to try to convince people that I’d had my throat slashed escaping from a serial killer.
I have never returned to Sheppey since this incident; I am quite certain the isle is waiting for a chance to finish its grisly task.
Well, if something happens to obliterate the Isle of Sheppey in the future, we know who to blame. 
I was always gashing, slicing, and bruising myself. I was, however, a very stoic kid and rarely told my parents. Two episodes that stand out:
One of Grandma’s lodgers left a bike behind that I inherited. It was jet-black and seemed to be made of iron or some other unbike-like material. It was very sturdy, but not an ideal bike to take over sweet jumps, like the one my neighbor set up for us to fly over the ditch. I did manage to fly over the ditch, but my bike tire came off mid-air and the front wheel forks planted themselves about 3’ into the ground. Magnificent flippage and then bruising ensued.
The other event occurred when I was 12. We were at the annual family reunion in Canyonlands (Utah) and I took off for my usual day-long hike. Several hours into the hike it began raining and I put my head down and ran for cover. I ran blindly for about 50 yards and then noticed that I had run out onto a 3’-wide natural stone arch that spanned a terrifyingly deep canyon :eek:
When I was in third grade, I apparently tried to jump over a bench. I say apparently because I have no recollection of this event, as my foot caught on the side of the bench like a hook and caused me to slam my face into the ground. I had a concussion and the right side of my face was pulverized. No scars, which is good. The last thing I remembered was the recess bell and the next thing after that I was in the nurse’s station in very bloody clothes.
When I was 16, I stepped out of an idling car to get a cigarette from a passing friend. My foot became wedged between the tire and the road (I was in the back seat). A “pressure explosion” (the doctor’s terms) created an Oreo sized hole in the side of my left heel. I was on crutches and Vicodin for week.
Also in third grade, we were playing dodgeball and I tripped, knocking off about 2/3 of my right bicuspid. That required a root canal and a crown.
In high school, I got into a “pencil fight” with a friend. We were laughing & joking, wielding pencils like knives. I still have two small pencil ends embedded in my left forearm. No amount of prying with tweezers and needles could coax those bad boys out.
…Fun times.
My husband as a pre-teen was walking across an old, abandoned railway bridge that spans the Red River in his end of town. Halfway across he had a sneezing fit, got disoriented and fell off.
He landed in a “deeper” part of the river (luckily) and got away with not even a scratch.
This same idiot also used to jump from pick-up truck bed to pick-up truck bed on a local highway.
Ahhh boys.
I have a few:
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Plugged in some Christmas tree lights while mom was doing something with the fuse box and had told us not to touch anything. A blue flame shot out of the socket singing off my eyebrows a lot of my hair and burning my hand. Mom came upstairs after hearing screams only to be hit with the aroma of charred child. I told her my brother did it. She checked him out, but realized I had to be lying–I was standing in the bathroom running my hand under water while smoke was coming off me. I got in a lot of trouble for that one. I was 5 or 6 at the time. My eyebrows have never fully grown back.
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At age 7, I tried to climb up to my room on a garden trellis (as I’d seen in the movies). I was a small child, but this trellis must have been very weak or rotting. It broke when I was half way up. I told mom my brother broke it, but I was limping from a sprained ankle and had several cuts and bruises. That kind of gave me away.
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Hung a bag filled with my wet swimming suit and towels from the handle of my bike. This was back when no one wore bike helmets or pads. As expected, the bag got wrapped in the spokes of my bike wheel and I was launched several yards only to land on the sidewalk. I was 8 or 9 at the time and still have slight scars on my shoulder and over my left eye (a scar that would be covered by my eyebrow had I not had the injury mentioned in my first bullet).
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Decided, at age 8 or 9, that there was no reason kids shouldn’t be allowed to drive cars. So I got the keys and started up my parents Dodge Dart. I have no idea how I got the car started or managed to drive it as far as I did (since I probably couldn’t reach the pedals), but drive I did–until I crashed it into the ditch at the end of our driveway. Once again, I tried to tell mom my brother did it, but she was wise to me then.
Man, that’s almost exactly my story, right down to my age, Annie Oakley, the rock and the long drive from the toolies to medical attention. I missed out on the cool stitches, though. Instead, I got a bitchin’ fractured skull and concussion.
Reason for the panicky gallop? Bus horn blast.
It probably didn’t almost actually kill me, but:
My dad and I were throwing a tennis ball back and forth to play with the neighbor’s full grown black Lab, which was attached via its leash to a clothesline that ran between two trees.
The dog hadn’t been able to get the ball in a while, so when I dropped the ball, the dog made a dash for it, and between the dog’s lack of understanding of physics, and my bending over, the chain wrapped about 3/4 around my neck and flipped me over.
My dad still somewhere has super8 movies of the mark on my neck at age 7. I’d like to see those again.
Not near-death, but some pretty good injuries, all in the name of youthful optimism and naivete.
I was about six. My parents only allowed us a half-hour of television per night but somehow my friends and I had all caught the same cheesey Tarzan movie. Or maybe they were different Tarzan movies. Who could tell? The main thing that stuck with us was the absolute coolness of yodeling our infant lungs out while–this was the killing neat part–nonchalantly zooming through the air from vine to vine. Yelling while flying. What more could life offer?
It was a much more innocent time, and we were blessed with acres of fields and hilly woods around our little island of suburban houses. And we gleefully roamed them at will. There was this really, really spooky old derelict farm house that was haunted, with real bats and everything, when they gave you a gazillion shots right in your stomach for rabies…but that’s another story, and a quite different trip to hospital emergency.
Anyway, in our explorations we found a really deep, steep gully. It had a little stream at the bottom (rich in tadpoles and crawdads) then loomed up in rough layers of shale to a canopy of leaning big ol’ trees…with vines trailing from them.
It was perfect.
So…thus invited, I grabbed a vine, backed up–way up–then took off at a dead run run, while of course yowling the scales like a pipe organ played by a drunk. Nailed the lip of the gully in perfect launch and flew perfectly…for about two seconds, when the dead, brittle vine snapped. Who knew those Hollywood wimps used ropes, and that southern Ohio didn’t run to flexible vines?
I kept flying but my trajectory suddenly sucked. Instead of landing insouciantly on the other side, I slammed right into rock wall of the gully and slid. Fortunately I landed about a third of the way down so I only rasped against rock, twigs, icky stuff and more rock for about ten feet or so. Landed flat in the creek, scared the and just bled for a while. The disappointed outrage hurt more than all the cuts, bruises and scrapes. My gallant cohorts helped me scramble out of the gully but we only made it a little way before we all got spooked over how badly I was bleeding.
Sandy and Tom, partners in adventure, volunteered to run home and ask my parents for help. (That was true heroism.) My dad–bless his memory-- hiked to where I was huddled, calmly picked me up and carried me all the way back home, all without a word of reproach to any of us. Thus followed another trip to hospital emergency to be stitched up. We were on a first-name basis by then. In this day and age my parents would suspected of child abuse.
In terms of actual danger, this doesn’t even rate compared to the time my sister tied a bathroom towel around her neck and dived face-first over the basement stairs, emulating Superman. She landed head-first on the concrete floor and was unconscious for hours. I don’t know how parents survive kids.
Learned to swim at about age 4 and you couldn’t keep me out of the water after that. Once, on vacation with my parents at a motel with a pool, and about 9 years old, I got up early and went for a swim. I was the only person at the pool. Had a great idea! Climb down the ladder on the deep end, lay flat on my back at the bottom of the pool and hold my breath. To keep me flat so I wouldn’t float back up, I would simply stick my legs under the ladder, against the pool wall. Worked like a charm…flat on my back at the bottom of the deep end, legs stuck under the ladder and looking up. OK…time for air…hmm…legs are stuck…yep…legs are really stuck behind the ladder…getting dark…need air…
To be honest, I don’t remember how my legs became unstuck as all I really remember is holding the side of the ladder, gasping for air and waiting about ten minutes until I had the strength to climb the ladder and get out of the pool. Didn’t swim the rest of the week we were there, much to my parents’ amazement (never told them my little story.)
And to prove kids never learn:
About two years later, decided to make my first jump off the high dive at the local pond. The dive was about three stories high. Inhaled, held my breath and then jumped…might have been wiser to inhale on the way down, as by the time my feet entered the water, I was pretty close to being out of breath. Needless to say, was frantically trying to swim upwards for air as my body was still sinking downwards in the water.
When I was six years old and a latchkey kid home alone, I watched a Bugs Bunny cartoon… yadda, yadda, yadda… that’s how I learned Hefty Bags don’t make good parachutes.
People claim that all dogs are alike. I disagree. There’s a generic similarity, but they have vastly different personalities and traits. Some dogs wouldn’t hurt a human for any reason. Others are touchier than cats.
And some are just plain obsessed over something.
When I was a toddler we’d had two dogs. Sheba and Jay. Sheba was my father’s dog, and a rather laid back bitch. Except about one thing: her son, Jay. (While they’d lived in Pennsylvania she’d gotten fed up with her pup still being around, and so took him up on the mountain behind the house they were living in at the time, and left him there. She was rather upset when he managed to find his way home some hours later.) Jay, however, had only one love in life: food. As a young pup he’d been regularly deprived of the food from his bowl by a neighbor’s cat. This went on until Jay realized that as a mostly grown German Shepherd Dog/Husky mix he outmassed the cat by a signifigant margin.
My parents managed to train him to be relatively civilized about food that wasn’t in his bowl, but once food went into his bowl - it was his, and Og help the dog, cat, person, or angel that tried to take it from him.
So, what does this have to do with risk to life and limb to me?
Well, as a toddler I tried one day, after looking at the opportunities for supper, to get something better for supper. My parents had little sympathy for my pleas that what they were eating was unsuitable, and that I wanted (I think) a PB&J sandwich instead. So they told me that if I didn’t eat what was offered, I was going to go without. Then they told me that they were going to give my dinner to the dog. I said, please do - he’s stupid enough to drink out of the toilet, so why should he object to this crap you’re trying to feed me?
For some reason, there was little sympathy for my pleas, no matter how insistent I was about them. I can’t imagine what might have prejudiced my case.
Well, they cleared the table, and put my portion into the dog’s bowl, and gave it to him.
And I thought about it. And realized I was hungry, and if they really weren’t going to give me anything else… maybe, just maybe it wasn’t as bad as I’d been saying it would be. So I went to discuss the situation with Jay. Perhaps he would see reason.
I was not, perhaps, using my intellect to actually consider all the ramifications of this decision.
I have to take my parents’ word for what happened. I used to have vague memories of this incident, but they’ve faded, and I can’t recall what happened, vice what I’ve been told happened.
As my parents tell the story, the first they knew of my decision to reclaim my supper was when they heard the argument coming from the back porch, where the dogs’ bowls were kept. It began with my toddler’s reasoning about why Jay should relinquish his claim to the food in his bowl, by right of my prior ownership: “Mine!” Jay responded with a rather pointed commentary about possession being nine-tenths of the law, and if something was in his bowl, he had possession of it: “Grrrrrrrrr.” The learned debate did not rise to a more elevated level after that.
By the time my parents managed to stop laughing enough to move, they’d heard several iterations of our respective arguments and were justifiably worried that Jay would take our disagreement to the uncouth level of physical confrontation, since he couldn’t make me budge on my the merits of his own argument. It didn’t help that, by this time, we were each pulling the bowl to ourselves as we repeated our learned debate.
“Mine!” Sound of bowl being dragged half a foot towards me.
“Grrrrr!” Sound of bowl being dragged half a foot back towards Jay.
“MINE!” After all, if one’s argument isn’t sufficient on its own merits, perhaps an increase in volume will do the trick. Sound of bowl being moved back to it’s proper position.
“GRRRRRRR!” Jay, too, knew the winning power of volume when added to an already irrefutable argument. Sound of bowl being moved back to his own proper position.
“MINE!”
“GRRRRRRRRRR!”
Finally they got up, and seperated us. And confirmed Jay’s possession of my meal.
And then gave me that PB&J sandwich.
It wasn’t til I was much older that I’d realized just what a risk I’d taken that day.
That is SO kid- years before Eddie Murphy said “It wasn’t me, baby,” we had ALL used the brother/cousin/best friend line!
When I was 9 or 10, my cousin (one year older) lived close to a very steep hill in San Clemente- we called it Beach Hill because it led down to the beach, duh. One of the older bikes in my cousin’s garage had no chain, and it was fun to ride it around the driveway, pedalling crazily and going nowhere.
Someone got the bright idea to ride this bike down Beach Hill, not realizing that no chain = no brakes. Being the people pleaser I was, and desperate to show I was brave and cool, I volunteered.
So I take off and pick up speed very quickly. My cousin and younger brother are flying down after me, sitting on skateboards (at that point I think they realized it was going to end badly).
As I am passing driveways and plantings, I realize that I am going incredibly fast, and that if I fall, I’m dead (a neighbor who saw me fly by estimated that I was going at least 30 mph when I passed her driveway) About this time, the bike picks up a wicked shimmy. I decide I will have to bail and hope to hit some soft plants off to my right, but I look over and see iceplant. Forget it, too pointy, I think.
At the bottom of the hill, there is a long cul-de-sac going both ways. I decide I should just ride around and around and around until I slow down enough to jump off. Great plan, except that when I get to the bottom I find I can’t turn the bike.
I slam straight into a curb at the edge of a vacant lot, hitting my head, right elbow and left knee (I have no idea in what order). A neighbor calls my uncle, who runs down the hill. I am bleeding profusely, already in shock, and hysterical. I make him carry me back up the hill because I’m scared of driving in a stranger’s car! 
Endgame- Aunt & uncle can’t find a medical release (my parents were gone for the day) so the hospital doesn’t want to treat me, and apparently my cousin scored the beating of a lifetime, as my uncle assumed correctly that he put me up to it.
Final tally of injuries- concussion, a permanent lump on the right side of my forehead near the hairline (hair has grown in white there ever since) & permanent ugly scar shaped like the state of Texas on my left knee. And family ridicule forever, of course!
Which reminds me of my little sister’s first experience at the pool, at age four:
**Skald’s Sister ** (at poolside): I can swim.
Skald & his siblings: No you can’t. (ignoring her)
Skald’s sister: I can swim! (inching closer to the pool)
Skald & his siblings: No you can’t.
Skald’s sister: Yes, I can swim! Watch!
SPLASH!
Skald’s oldest brother: Holy crap! (Immediate dive into the water to rescue drowning sister.
Hmmmm … dads don’t always tell moms, so I wonder if he really called mom at work?
When I was 4, I wandered away from my father while at church - I got curious as to the whereabouts of one of my brothers. “At communion” made no sense to me, perhaps that meant he had gone back to the car? When I discovered he was not at the car, I headed back to church. This entailed crossing a busy street in front of the church - somehow I’d survived the first leg of that journey, but I wasn’t so lucky on the return. The car that hit me just bumped me, no damage done. Dad evidently didn’t mention this to Mom, as I discovered 15 years later when I referenced the incident in a chat with Mom. Who promptly tore Dad a new one!
Couple of years after that incident, age 6, I thought it would be interesting to put a safety pin into an electrical outlet. Fortunately, my only injuries were slightly burnt fingers. It was a couple of years before I’d go near an electrical cord after that though.
I really shouldn’t be alive right now, y’know?
One of my earliest memories: Fucking with a water mocassin (Cottonmouth snake) while on a canoe trip in Louisiana. Snakes must like peanut butter and crackers as much as I do, right?
Launched myself off of the 3rd or 4th story landing of an apartment building we were living in when I was three (four?) ala Superman. Hit one of those big green electrical boxes, walked all the way back up the stairs, looked for mom in all the different rooms, then finally found her and only then started to cry.
Mom told me to look both ways when crossing the street. So I did, but I forgot that I didn’t live in the UK, so I looked right first as I pulled out on my Big Wheel from between two parked cars. Looked left just in time to kiss the bumper of a station wagon. Was told I flew about 20 feet before hitting the ground. Went to the Emergency Room where my cuts and bruises were looked at and the x-rays done. Helga-of-the-North nurse tried to scare me into good behaviour and told me never to return to the Emergency Room.
Was reading a book on the floor in my room and hooked my foot into my bedside stand. Heard some noise behind me (it was the lamp sliding off the table) and turned around just in time to get hit in the temple by a heavy wooden object. Knocked out and blood everywhere. Went to the Emergency Room. Saw Helga. SCREAMED to everyone to not take me in there as she was going to kill me! I suppose Helga felt bad after everyone worked out what happened.
Bike flips? Check.
Falling off walls? Check.
Getting clotheslined by a tree branch in the dark? Check.
Hit by a car on my bike? Check. (with bonus points added for style - I did a perfect flip over the hood).
Almost drowned at pool? Check.
Almost blow face off trying to make a bomb out of model rocket engines? Check.
Climb up steep cliffs without any protection? Check.
Jump off high cliffs on a dare? Check.
-Tcat