Put me into the “saved from drowning as a toddler” column. A neighbor from down the street where I grew up pulled me out of the pond I was swimming in.
I had a dog save my life once. When I was about 3 or 4 years old, the family (Mom, Dad, older brother, family dog, and I) were driving to my grandparents’ house late on a Friday evening. The dog was in the back seat, where my brother and I had (seemingly) fallen asleep - nothing unusual about two little kids laying down in the back of the car and sleeping after dark. Shep, however, started whining and raising Cain - really unusual behavior for him. My parents, thinking that the dog just needed a bathroom break, pulled over on the side of the road to let the dog out. That’s when they realized that my brother and I were unconscious, not asleep. Turns out, the car had a bad seal or gasket on the exhaust system, and we had been overcome by carbon monoxide. If Shep hadn’t alerted my parents, my brother and I would almost certainly have been dead by the time we reached my grandparents’ house over an hour later.
Actually, another family dog had already saved my brother’s life a couple of years earlier than the CO episode: When he was a toddler, he was toddling around in a brushy area near our house, with my mother nearby and taking care of me. My brother apparently stepped onto some rotted wood, which was covering an old well. The Airedale terrier, Jack, yipped once - which alerted my mother - and then managed to grab a strap of my brother’s sunsuit, holding him long enough for Mom to rescue the toddler.
I think I may have saved lives twice: once, when my aunts took a whole gang of us to the beach, my younger sister, a younger cousin, and I got caught in a rip current. I was the strongest swimmer of the three of us, and managed (at age 9) to pull the 5- and 7-year-olds back to a sandbar. And when I was about 19, I was involved in a traffic accident that involved an inattentive driver who took a left-hand turn into the right (passenger) side of my car - the other driver had pulled to the shoulder of the road after nearly missing her turn, and didn’t even look before attempting her turn. As the other driver was hitting my car, I was steering as hard as I could back toward her, because I was trying to avoid being pushed into a head-on collision with an oncoming car. I have almost no recollection of the other driver or car involved in that wreck, but (more than 20 years later) I still remember the oncoming mid-80s model tan Crown Victoria, being driven by a man older than my grandparents… he was wearing a gray wool fedora, and his (wife I assume) passenger was wearing a tan cardigan, neither wearing seat belts. They’d have been very badly hurt, if not killed, in a 45-mile-per-hour head-on collision with the 1978 Chevy I was driving!
Another saved my heart in San Francisco here. At UCSF. House like thinking by Drs Jacobs, Cohen and Fast (go Jews!!!) killed an endocarditis bug that vancomycin and ceftriaxone were useless against. Later on Drs. Hoopes, Merrick and Cohen (go Irish!!!) fixed my broken heart. Let’s hear it for public hospitals.
My BFF’s brother was only a year behind us. When we were in 7th grade, him and his friends (all of them our size or bigger) would follow us during school breaks (grades 6-8 could leave the yard) and on our way home, using the shells of bic pens as blowguns. A grain of rice shot from one of those can leave an impressively big bruise on a buttcheek.
We’d told them to stop time and again. Threats wouldn’t have worked: since we were older, any attempt at violence on our part would have resulted in us two taking the blame; on the other hand, if the “smaller kids” (smaller mine gluteus maximus!) attacked us, like they were doing, we were expected to take it patiently and ask them to stop.
Only it wasn’t working.
One day the yard’s doors were closed, as there was some political act in town, so BFF and me sat down with some other girls from our class to chat. Her bro and friends started up with the blowguns. We jumped them, didn’t grab them but BFF managed to grab her brother’s blowgun. He asked for it back. She gave it to me. He started getting purple and demanding it back. We asked whether he wanted us to lift our skirts as well for better aim, since we were at it. I dropped the blowgun and put my foot on it. He said “you step on it, I kill you.”
I stepped on it.
You know, when someone is trying to strangle you, not only do you get funky colors and end up with fingerprints on your neck, but your eyes really feel like they’re trying to escape the rest of your head.
It was his own friends who managed to get him off me, he was too strong for us girls.
And of course, BFF and me got detention for “picking fights with the smaller children.” You can’t say the rules at that school always made sense, but hey, they were consistant.
You know, now that I think of it, the doctor who put me in the oxygen tent during an illness also saved my life, as did my mother when I fell downb a flight of stairs & landed head first on a nail.
By OG! Amazing I made it!
Yes, due to botched surgery in 03 my stomach ripped itself open in 05. My surgeon saved my life that day - although he has said that he had “outside” help doing so.
I was at the corner getting ready to cross the street when I heard a car brake’s slam. That sound makes me instantly stop.
A car had turned the corner with no warning and without slowing down. It went by me at about 50 miles per hour about an inch from where I was standing and a second after I stopped.
The brakes were hit by the guy behind him, whose car was now on the sidewalk We just stared at each other, drop jawed.
If that second car hadn’t been there behind the first one, I definately would have been hit and probably killed.
Oh, I forgot one - I’ve told it before, but last year when we were trying to get my boyfriend’s camera store open, we were using a pressure washer to de-grossify the bathroom. We thought it was sufficiently well ventilated and it wasn’t. I was back there where the carbon monoxide was the worst, and I started to kind of take naps against the wall while I was vacuuming the water off the floor - I kind of mumbled to my boyfriend that I had a headache and could probably use some air, but I didn’t do anything about it (and he was addled from it himself) so when he’d gone outside and cleared his head a little he realized something was probably seriously wrong with me and went back and pushed and prodded me into going outside. I was just resting my head on a shelf for a minute, you know? Probably would have died.
My mom’s boyfriend at the time saved both me and my younger brother from drowning in the river when we were kids.
Years ago, I fainted and fell at work. When I came to, I was at the clinic across the street with an IV in me. The nurse said my BP had dropped to 40 over something (another low number). He didn’t say “You almost died” but the look of relief on his face made me think so. (Never did figure out why I fainted.)
The EMT crew who stabilized me, hauled me up the rock face and transported me to the hospital after I fell 30 meters in a skiing accident. Nothing like hearing the little bones in your neck and back going crunch …
The ER crew and ortho surgeon and ICU crew after getting to the hospital.
The rehab guy for insisting on the extra steps every day … no matter how much I whinged 
Every boyfriend (of mine, that is) has likely saved mine on more than one occasion. I, unfortunately, step out into the path of oncoming vehicles like a 3 year old child. It has happened a half dozen times at least. I am an intelligent 40 year old medical professional, very good driver, capable of good split second decision-making. I can’t tell you how shocked I am every time the man I love grabs me by the arm and jerks me back to safety with an incredulous look. It usually happens when we’re out of town for whatever reason. And no, I don’t have kids. At work we often joke about getting hit by a bus because we know it really does happen. It’s been nice knowing you all.:smack:
My friends and I were white water rafting on the Youghegheney river, as careless, inexperienced teens. Our boat hit a tall flat rock and tipped. None of us could get out of the current. One kid couldn’t swim. I am a super strong swimmer but was having a hell of a time keeping my face out of the water.
Some kayakers were hanging out in the current and pulled us all out. I swear to Og the guy who grabbed me had his name, Bob Suerte, on the back of his life vest. Suerte means “lucky” in Spanish. I could be making that up but I still think that Lucky Bob the Kayaker saved my life that day.
We’ve all been invited to go rafting several times since then, and none of us ever agrees to go.
Wouldn’t your blood pressure dropping be the reason why you fainted?
I was cleaning machine parts in a degreasing tank. The tank was about 4’ high and 3’ in diameter, and had about 8" of chlorinated organic solvents in the bottom, and I was bent over the edge so I could reach down into the solvent with parts and a brush in my hands. Of course, this put my head down in the part of the tank full of solvent vapor. I lost consciousness and slumped into the tank, and the part and the brush fell from my hands and made a little noise hitting the bottom of the tank.
A guy who was on the phone in an office about 40’ away heard the noise, and it occurred to him to wonder what it was, so he came out and walked around the corner to where I had been working, saw my ass sticking out of this tank, pulled me out, and revived me. He couldn’t even see me from where he had been sitting. I think I would not have survived, if he had not been observant and thoughtful enough, even while handling a phone conversation.
Another one.
My mother was infertile. Promise. Totally barren, doctors said. So when, after 4 months of no monthly visits and morning sickness, she finally went to the ObGyn, he said it must be a tumor and wanted to scrape it off right then and there. The nurse pointed out “doctor, she’s a married woman, shouldn’t we run a pregnancy test first?”
Doctor: “bah, there’s no way she’s pregnant!”
Nurse: “:halo: but Doctor, she’s a niece-by-marriage of Don Julio :halo:”
Doctor: “Don Julio? :eek: Uh, ok, let’s run that test…”
According to my grandmother, who was a lady and therefore refused to know the meaning of certain words, “when your mother came to tell us about the visit and Julio heard that, he called the other doctor right away. I didn’t understand most of the words he used, but the nicest ones among those I did understand were ‘murderer’ and ‘butcher.’”
I was saved at age minus five months by a nurse and my doctor great-uncle’s reputation of having a temper that could have made nuclear bombs cower 
I also got made after my parents hadn’t seen each other for two months, on Uncle Julio’s orders, so in a way and if part of the problem was low sperm count on Dad’s part, he also was partially to blame for my being made in the first place.
Oh, and I have two younger brothers. Barren my left foot.
My father performed the Heimlich Maneuver on me in a restaurant when I was in my early 20s. I was choking on a piece of crab meat that I had just followed with a sip of beer. When I realized it wasn’t going to clear on its own and started to panic, I stood up and pointed to my throat. My dad acted quickly and came behind me and did the maneuver, the crab and beer flew out and I could breathe again. Thanks, dad!
That reminds me: When I was a little kid, my mom saved my life by performing the Heimlich on me after I choked on a brussels sprout. (I had been successful swallowing spaghetti-0’s, mac and cheese, and peas whole, so a small brussels sprout was the logical continuation of the experiment :smack:) I couldn’t swallow even chewed up brussels sprouts for a long time after that, unless I had a large piece of cheese chewed up in my mouth along with it. I didn’t make the connection until I was much older - I just thought I randomly started to hate swallowing chewed up brussels sprouts.
Interestingly, my little brother also, as a small child, was saved by our mom (also a rescue-by-heimlich) after choking on a brussels sprout. No word on whether it was accidental or if he was trying the same stupid shit as me.
About eight years ago I was wading thigh-deep on a windy beach in Cancun, thinking of nothing but my next shot of all-inclusive tequila. Suddenly a sinkhole opened up beneath me and I was swept out to sea in a riptide. Oddly enough I didn’t realize this was happening; I thought I’d merely been knocked over by a large wave until I tried to right myself and couldn’t find the bottom. When I got my bearings I was what seemed like hundreds of yards from the shore, and I swim like a rock. That’s why I stayed in God’s shallow end, damnit! Even as I pathetically waved toward the distant lifeguard tower I knew it didn’t matter, because by the time anyone reached my non-swimming ass it would be to collect my body.
Death by drowning is rumoured to be peaceful and I was certain I was going to find out for myself, but then a man popped out of the waves a few yards away. He threw me a red “Baywatch”-thing-on-string floaty thing and spent twenty minutes helping me fight the current back to shore. Eduardo is the name of the lifeguard who saw me dragged under and immediately hit the water, fighting for my life before I even knew it was in danger, and when we hit the beach I vowed I live every day as though it were my last. Then I wrapped my arms around myself in a bear hug because I’d lost my bikini top.
This is the reverse, but I grabbed the front coat of a young woman in our church group as she started to fall backward into a good-sized bonfire, having tripped on the fire pit itself. Time just seemed to slow down, and I grabbed the first available thing as she went past me. I got a fistfull of coat, and pulled her back to her feet, not in the fire.