I thought I was going to die!

[ShibbOleth]

I have a couple of counter-examples:

A good friend of mine decided to retake up bike riding to get back into shape. On a curve, not far from his house, he had too much speed and went off the road. Flew off his bike and landed headfirst, against a rock. He was wearing a helmet, but still fractured one of the vertebra in his neck. He was very scared by this, especially as he woke up and couldn’t move his body at all. He was just off the road, but among some weeds, and lay there for hours until finally someone passing by noticed him and got help. He could have literally starved/died of thirst there. He had to go through surgery to fuse the bones in his neck there, but did regain use of his limbs. Sadly he later fell down the stairs at his home one Friday night, and lay “in his own juices” for a couple of days until his coworkers noticed him missing the following Monday. The reinjury caused more damage, and now he lives in an assisted living facility, in the prime of his life. Didn’t die, but certainly could have, and not much he could have done would have affected the outcome.

Sometime later a colleague’s parents were on a vacation tour in Brazil. Their tour bus went off the road and several people died, including my colleague’s father. Her mother was in intensive care for sometime. My colleague’s mother didn’t speak English or Portuguese, so she flew down to be with her in the hospital. Even sven’s story reminded me of this, is all.

I’ve had a couple of near brushes, I guess. In one case it was on a dive trip and I was getting nitrogen narcossis, and thought, “Gee, I’m probably just going to drown down here.” Not excited at all, but that might be just the particular circumstance. And then, of course, I didn’t. In the only traffic accident I’ve been in I know that it never even occurred to me that it might be fatal. I was too busy steering, downshifting and braking the car to avoid the idiot that thought it might be cute to turn in front of someone coming at them on rain slicked roads at 50 mph. They started to turn and then stopped in a moment of bizarre indecision. So I wasn’t sure whether to juke left or right, had about 2 secs of response time, and was able to avoid a fully head on collision. Since this was in a 1986 Hyundai, I guess we were lucky to survive. The car didn’t do so well, but I was basically unscathed. Mrs Shibb was bumped up a bit but also okay.

I think I get more nervous/anxious in situations where it’s out of my control, like close calls on airplane flights and riding as a passenger with idiot drivers. I think saying you were close to death is often just a harmless exaggeration, and probably more often after the fact.

[Kythereia]

I’ve told this story on the Dope before, but what the fell.
Lil!Kyth is pedaling along on her bike one summer day, in the sunshine and breeze, watching the colours blur and the cars stream by. She turns onto a nearby avenue.

She loves biking on this avenue, because it’s absolutely the best hill around–starts out slow, a gentle easy slide, and then gets steeper and steeper until you’re flying and all you can feel is the wind in your face. She turns off her brakes, grins nervously, and lets fly.

The problem that Lil!Kyth doesn’t realize: this is a residential street. There are houses along the side. And where there are houses there are driveways, and where there are driveways there are always cars.

She’s zooming along, faster and faster, shrieking with delight–when a car pulls out at the very bottom of the hill and turns onto the street.

There wasn’t any flashing of her life before her eyes. There was, however, a very intense, sudden, blinding concentration on every single second that followed. Of all my memories it stays etched clearest into my mind.

She yanked on her bike and skidded about five or six feet to a stop. The bike crashed onto its side, wheels spinning uselessly in the air, literally two inches away from the car. There was a horrible screeching noise as the driver jammed on the brakes.

And then I remember getting up, shaking and bruised all over and crying a little, and the driver and her mother staring at me with huge eyes, and a random passerby on the street–middle-aged, dark hair, suit and briefcase–stopping in his tracks to stare and ask if I was okay.

I still haven’t gone down that street since then.

[uglybeech]

In my experience, even if your brain is slow on the uptake, your body most definitely knows you could die. Every near miss I’ve had the first thing I process afterwards is that my heart is going 150 bpm. Then I think “I could have died.”

Anyway most of wht you all are talking about is not some magical force that keeps you from contemplating your own death - it’s just simple time constraints. Accidents happen really really quickly. It takes time to process your situation and think about the possibility of death. It takes much less time to react automatically to a car coming at you, so that’s all you have time for in an accident. In a slow enough near death experience you will almost surely consider your mortality.

[Hampshire]

My worst experiences are when you are in those moments when you know the inevitable is about to happen and you can’t fathom any type of escape from that fate. It’s that horrible feeling of “oh god, I am so f*cked.”

First one was when I lived across the street from the Atlantic in Florida. Even though I was terrified of drowning when I was a kid I eventually got over it and when I moved here as an adult I loved to swim in the ocean. Especially when there were big waves. Good exercise, lots of fun.
So I get home from work one day and the waves were a good size. I run across the street and immediately swim out about 50 yards. I’m having fun in the waves till I notice there are some awful currents running parallel to the shore and out to sea (not a rip tide). So, I start swimming back to the beach, …but I can’t get there. Between the currents and the way the waves were breaking I couldn’t make it. So, I tread water a bit, and go for it again. Can’t do it. This goes on for about 15 minutes. After a couple more trys I’m getting winded and start scanning the beach for help. Nobody there except a couple of Canadian seniors who would be of no help. So, I start getting that feeling of “oh god, I am so fcked."
One last time I give it all I’ve got, fighting the current, gaining 5 yards, losing 4, not stopping since I know there won’t be another chance, arms and legs burning, deeep breaths. Finally, I reach the shore and just layed on the sand for 20 minutes totally exhausted like I’ve just been through 12 rounds of boxing. No one around.
I dragged myself back to my flat, collapsed on the floor, and held my head thinking “jesus, what did I just do?” for a couple of hours. I didn’t go back in the water for about 3 months and after that never went alone.
The second one was getting into a traffic jam (due to an overturned semi) out in the middle of nowhere at about 1 a.m on I-75 in southern Florida. I approach the stopped traffic and get in line behind the other stopped cars, and sit.
Then I see it in my rear view mirror. A car is approaching fast (probably doing 90 since thats what I and everyone else does down I-75 in the middle of the night) and doesn’t see us all stopped right away. He’s not slowing. By the time he does the guy panics and hits his brakes. Now he’s fishtailing down the interstate at about about 70+ heading right for me and the guy in the lane to my right. You can hear his tires screeching and headlights fast approaching. No way he has room to stop. All I could do was brace myself and start thinking "oh god, I am so fcked”. So, right before he nails one of us in the back, he runs off the road and flies by doing about 50 about 10 feet to the left of my car and continues skidding down the grass another hundred yards. I just remember looking at the guy in the car to the right of me and his eyes as huge as saucers.
Then the guy that skidded off the road, since he didn’t hit anything, drives back up onto the interstate, back past all the traffic he just flew by, and gets in line behind me like nothing even happened.

[Ghanima]

I had nearly the same experience with swimming in the sea and nearly drowning. I thinkl the realization that I was about to drown gave me the adrenaline to reach the shore. Scary.

Another time I was driving while it was raining, just normal rain, nothing scary. Then all of the sudden I get to a part of the highway that was inches deep in water, causing traffic to slow, water flying up on my windsheild, etc. I try to turn up my wwipers but while I’m doing that the person in front of me hit the major puddle, causing so much water to go up on my windsheild that I literally could not see anything. Knowing I would hit the same puddle, I let off the accelerator but was afraid to brake because I was worried about hydroplaning or getting rammed by the car behind me. I literally just let go of all controls and waited blindly to find out what would happen to me. I thought for sure I was about to be in a major multi-car accident. Amazingly, everyone handled it well, no one’s car spun out, and I came out of the puddle, the wipers let me see where I was and we all just continued as though nothing had happened. It was interesting that I calmly resigned myself to my fate.

[Ogre]

Saw an interview last night with a teenage girl in Tennessee who was in her house when a tornado plowed directly through it during the storms a couple of days ago. She was picked up and hurled through the air along with the rest of the wrecked debris of her house.

Her subdued “I though I was going to die” struck me as neither underreaction or overreaction. It was simply a terrified, shell-shocked little girl turning slightly away from the camera as she said it, quite obviously uncomfortable with the attention.

Shit, she probably should have died. Not one in a hundred people would have survived.

[Testy]

Does it count if you were small? Assuming it does, I’ll pass along this one. A bit of back story to start. I’m 50 now but was 7 in 1962. My mother was driving through West Ky. while my father rode shotgun. My sister and I were in the back. Ancient Chevy with huge bench seats and no seatbelts, of course. The morning was grey and drizzling rain and the two-lane highway ran across an embankment, maybe 35 - 40 feet high.
The car slid and rolled off the embankment. We rolled 2 or 3 times before stopping, on one side, in a swampy area on the flat at the bottom. The curious thing to me was the slow-motion aspect of things. Each roll seemed to take forever and the G forces pressed me into the upper rear corner of the car. Neither the rolling nor the direction of gravity changing were terribly alarming. Unusual, certainly, but not frightening. We finally stopped rolling and I fell off of where I’d been stuck into the bottom of the car.
I sat there for a couple of minutes and then managed to get the window on the upper side open and climbed out.

The odd thing was the slowness of the rolls and the calm acceptance of what was going on. No “life flashing” or anything like that. I didn’t even to seem to see anything dangerous in it. To this day I’m not sure whether this was a symptom of calm in the face of danger, or, the less flattering option of simple stupidity.

Regards

Testy