As far as I know, the 3-4 times that I’ve come closest to dying in my life all involved being in a car. By sheer luck, none of them resulted in even an injury. I wondered how common this is, so am starting this poll.
Always deer vs car. They are out to kill me, I swear.
I’m also T1 diabetic. I’ve had few problems because I’m very careful. But the threat is always present.
I’ve lived a very very safe life. I had to think hard to come up with an example. The only one that comes to mind is a couple of instances where another driver’s road rage COULD havd led to some sort of violent attack but, again, still a far stretch. Or maybe the times when I got hyponatremia or someone momentarily threatened to hold my family “hostage.”
Really, nothing.
Slipping on icy rocks on a sheer drop.
Something else…Multiple:
Automotive - fell out of a car moving at highway speeds as a little kid. Lost control of a car on an icy road and almost drove off a cliff.
Medical - anaphylaxis due to penicillin (ironically, taken for a lung infection), hypoxia due to flu.
I did take a deck-dive a few months ago. It ‘could’ have been really bad. One end of my deck is really high. Somehow I landed flat on my back. Bruised up my shoulder and broke my toe. I felt lucky I didn’t break my fool neck.
Falling off a skateboard at high speed. Broke a wrist, sprained the other, and had a concussion that knocked me out for a few minutes. All the times I’ve been in car accidents I haven’t gotten a scratch.
I chose “something else.” While I did have a medical one (I had something and waited–hoping whatever it was would clear up on it’s own–until I could barely stand before going to the doctor and finding that it was double pneumonia–I got a shot ans a bottle of horse pills, but if it wasn’t for modern antibiotics I likely would have died) the closer to death one was when I was home alone and eating chicken with rice–a chunk of chicken got trapped in my airway and I couldn’t breathe at all. Earlier, I had herd my neighbors a couple of hundred feet away talking on their porch, so I ran outside hoping that there was someone there and they could Heimlich me. When I was half-way across the yard I managed to loudly cough it up. (The neighbors were still there and stared at me pretty hard, but I slunk back in without going over to explain things to them.)
The closest I’ve come to death was the day I was born. Family lore has it that, being it a Catholic hospital on Easter Sunday, the nurses were loath to interrupt the doctor on a holiday*, so they waited too long for what clearly should have c-section. Things were so dire that dad was asked “if we can only save one of them…” but doctor got us both through okay. There was so much concern about me being in serious distress that I was apparently given O2 before I was fully delivered.
*said doctor loudly berated these nurses in front of my parents because she was Hindu and didn’t even celebrate Easter!
The closest I’ve been to death was when my appendix ruptured. I lived a few blocks from a hospital, and I managed to stagger there late at night. They diagnosed me as being constipated, and sent me home, telling me to come back in the morning if it still hurt. By morning I had a very high fever with excruciating pain and delerium. I returned to the hospital. They rushed me into surgery. I was in the hospital for two weeks, and they told me I actually died during surgery, but they managed to bring me back. They also managed to use the wrong kind of stitches inside my body, the kind that don’t dissolve. I had a tube in me for two years, so the stitches could work their way out.
This was Long Island College Hospital, which since has been shut down.
Idiot teenaged girl on a cellphone turned left in front of me while riding my motorcycle. Some very nasty results which I shall spare the board.
What was she doing on your motorcycle?
In my ill spent youth, when I was doin’ all my druggin’ drinkin’ n drivin’ way to fast. A buddy and I had aquired a large number of Bartles and James wine coolers. We were out tear-assin’ around on some unpaved back roads in the foothills. I was driving and power slid that old pontiac 6000 through an S turn with a 50 foot drop on one side. Made all the way through but it was a close thing going through the second half of that S. The car was (it seemed like, there was booze involved, details may be distorted) more than half off the road. You’d’a thunk after that common sense would have kicked in and told me I’m drunk, take it slow and go park somewhere to finish drinking and sleep it off. Nope, common sense was in a ditch a few miles back in an alcohol induced coma
I had to go get myself arrested and hour later for DUI and a ticket for no seatbelts while going 50 mph in a 35 mph zone. I was pretty sure dad was going to replace me in the cell soon after he posted my bail. Yep, when I walked out of the jail, thought I was looking Death in the eye in the shape of my Father.
when my gallbladder was dissolving due to gangrene …….heaved all night in pain thought it was just cause of spicy food for dinner ….normal stomach stuff didn’t help …went to the er at 7 am after I heaved all over the er they moved me to the top of the list …
they gave me morphine and something to stop the heaving and an ultrasound and they said gallstones and id only be there overnight because they could dissolve them with medicine…
well while getting a shot of the previously mentioned meds and drinking milk so the morph wouldn’t make me barf more I barfed twice all over the poor nurse
she just sighed and them made a face walked over to a urine sample cup and scraped enough off to fill the cup and sent it off …
45 minutes later I was wheeled in a room and told that my gallbladder was so gangrenous that it was dissolving and I was about 45-90 minutes from expiration but they were pumping a gallon of stuff to clean out the poison and gave me the biggest morph shot they could legally give me
they told me there wasn’t enough of my gb left to keep but I did get a nice container of gallstones…
This far >< from jumping off a 10th floor balcony.
On a bus that went off a cliff in the mountains going from Mexico DF to Oaxaca.
So that’s one for “mass transit vehicle.”
Strange you’ve got being a passenger, being a passenger in a mass transit vehicle but not being a pedestrian.
Cos that’s my closest: about 8 years old, late for school and no breaks in the traffic for several minutes (no crossings either; I was not in a grid-based town).
So I just did the kid thing and tried to bolt across not really knowing if I could make it, forcing a car to do an emergency stop.
When I got to the other side a woman immediately scolded me: “You idiot!”
That’s it though – while I’ve had plenty of scrapes in my life, pretty much only that one had a significant chance of actual death.
In 1980, riding with my pastor and best friend in the front seat and me riding in the back, the Honda Civic rose from the North end of Lake Tuscaloosa on US-43, heading back to Fayette County. It had been raining pretty hard, but suddenly, maybe 15 meters ahead, a gigantic lightning bolt hit the road surface in front of us.
We all survived. We all also lighted cigarettes and stopped at the last place to buy beer and wine in Tuscaloosa County. Imbibement followed.
There have been other incidents, but this one is most clear in my memory. Pastor has disappeared somewhere by now, and old best friend is coming to visit from New England in a couple of weeks. I am not hoping for a repeat performance, so we won’t be going near Tuscaloosa County (I hope).
Three times - only one vehicular, the others outdoorsy.
– I drove to the top of a blind pass in the Adirondacks in wintertime, and I slowed down to 15 mph because I couldn’t see the road ahead of me, and just as well because there was a patch of nearly 1 foot thick ice at the top, and even though the road was turning, I kept driving straight on the ice, just in time for a pickup to suddenly appear coming the other way, forcing me to try to keep in my lane, unsuccessfully, as after we had passed, my car kept going forward toward the cliffside: I did a full 360, then managed to swerve and avoid the cliff, then a full 360 the other direction, but keeping on the road the whole time. If I had been going faster I would have hit the truck or gone down the (not quite sheer, but still) cliff.
– Hiking Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park, there is a 15-30 foot section where you have to walk along a 6 inch ledge above a 300 foot or so high precipice, which is slightly easier than it sounds because the ledge on the other side is angled in so you can lean on it, yet nonetheless I took my time traversing it, and my caution paid off again because I slipped on some black ice halfway through. Had I been going faster I might have fallen.
– Walking in Chautauqua Creek I unwisely messed with some hanging shale rocks, which dislodged a boulder bigger than my head which almost fell on me. And that wasn’t the worst part of it: the cliff face was then visibly unstable. Keeping the safety of future hikers in mind, I stood across the creek, as far away as I could from the cliff face, and threw a skipping-stone-sized pebble at it and a 40 * 30 foot section of the cliff surface collapsed all at once. It enveloped me in a moving dust cloud distinctly reminiscent of the debris from 9/11 (except several years before that event.)
Motorcycle skidded off of wet pavement taking a curve around 40mph.
I was alone, in a rural area 300 miles from home. Ended up in a ditch.
mmm