Almost drowned in an underwater sink hole of sorts when I was 7, My brother saved me!
2.)When I was 15, I was chased out of a park by a litter of gangbangers (I guess they were all umm… (edit: with) the same girl I was) and was shot at (missed) while dodging cars in the street. Like Frogger with a bullet.
3.) Age 20 (arguably the closest I came to death). On a highway downstate near Ottawa Illinois, I was sitting passenger with a chick who knew my friends who were driving in front, going to some party, Its icy as hell out and since she was driving already like an idiot, I told her to slow down and don’t hit the brakes (black ice and all) too hard. She does the exact opposite, we spin out missing (i mean within mere feet) a car and a tractor trailer and wind up in road ditch (funny, the car was stuck there til morning, we still went to the party, dude at the party wound up breaking his leg on ice, then had some local help pull out the car, a tail-light and bumper hanging off and bent exhaust, sucks for her)
I do not have a good track record so far. I’m 29 and the car thing was the last near death experience. I’ve been very careful ever since.
I’ll keep it brief. I was 15 years old, on summer trip to Turkey with a few of my Turkish teachers and a couple of classmates. The whole thing was arranged by the school. We were staying in a shoddy hotel on the outskirts of Izmir, and had just got back from a long day of sight seeing.
A friend a I had just finished swimming in the hotel pool, and were taking the elevator back up to our rooms. The elevator had no traditional elevator doors, just the standard kind which swing outwards, and they weren’t attached to the elevator but rather each floor hat its own. You would just watch the wall and doors glide past as you rode it. I guess there’s no such thing as OSHA in Turkey.
Of course the elevator gets stuck with an approximately 9-10" gap between where the elevator floor is, and the ground floor’s ceiling (can you see where this is going?). So we yell for help and eventually get a hold of someone. We’re told that the maintenance person is working on a repair and that the elevator should resume moving shortly. They leave the door open.
About 30 minutes goes by, and we’re still stuck. My friend is somewhat overweight, but I’m pretty skinny; I figure I could squeeze through the gap and free myself. This is obviously very stupid, don’t ever do it. So I get down on my stomach, and starting with my feet, I begin inching out of the elevator backwards, like a worm. After maybe 15 seconds, my feet reach the floor, I turn my head sideways, and I’m out!
I turn around and begin telling my friend that if he were to lay off the donuts, he too could be an escapologist. However, no sooner than 30 seconds into my banter, the elevator resumes moving with absolutely no warning. I have no doubt in my mind that it would have cut me in half, had I waited just a little while longer to escape.
Too many times to recount overall. Going strictly with whitewater kayaking there were (at least) four times when I was thinking “This is exactly what a lot of paddlers experience right before they die!”
Driving over a windy mountain pass over a 0.75 lane road. It was either that or make a 6 hour detour. One side was a mountain and the other side at least 200’ straight down - no guardrail or shoulder, just void. At times it was so narrow I swear only half of the passenger side tires were on the road (not hyperbole). To this day I don’t know what I would have done had a car come down the other side: crank the wheel left instead of right while backing down and you’d have millimeters to recover.
Mrs Cad learned an important lesson. When I say don’t look out the window then DONT LOOK OUT THE WINDOW!
A couple of scrapes in Iraq, i had an IED go off near my car and one time I had to evacuate our office in Mosul after an attack, I was driving in the front cat as we left the compound and some took a shot at us.
I shared an apartment my senior year in college. The place leaked like a sieve. After Christmas, my roommates and I put up plastic over the windows and weatherstripped the doors to try to make the place habitable… and spent the next 2 months feeling wretched and tired all the time no matter how much we slept. Then we went away for spring break and felt much better after we came back.
It was decades later that I read an article on CO poisoning and realized what we’d done to ourselves. Fortunately even with the weatherstripping the place was apparently leaky enough that it “just” made us sick.
Aside from that, I’m a rank amateur compared with most of you. We were in a head-on collision on our 10th anniversary; we walked away from that with some very sore muscles and a hell of a tale. The kids in the other car… also walked away, but I swear the deities must have been looking out for them: Firstly, the passenger had not been buckled in until a few minutes earlier when something in his head said “hey, we’re getting to a curving bit of road, better fasten that seatbelt”… and secondly, given the configuration of the road there, had we not been there to stop their car, they’d have plummeted off the road and down a steep hill, and most likely been injured or killed despite their seatbelts.
I was born not breathing and then the idiot doctor almost crushed my skull with a pair of forceps.
I had a seizure at the age of 3-4 that they almost couldn’t stop.
Thrown from a horse and landed head first on the ground as a teen.
Almost died from Myocarditis.
2004 Totaled 4 wheeler doing 40 mph, no helmet, landed on a fence post wrapped in barbed wire
2006 Almost went off a cliff crossing the Rockies driving way too fast, no helmet
2014-2017 More close calls than I would like to admit while skiing - I now wear a helmet