By the way- I don’t intend this thread to be a downer, but please share anything you’d like.
For me:
Spring break, 2000, South Padre Island, Texas with roommate and two other friends. My roommate and I had periodic “tests of manliness”, often involving alcohol. The seas were rough that day, my friends. Roommate says he can make it out to the third sandbar, beer in hand. He goes out, comes back a half hour later, exhausted. He says the third sandbar is more than 6 feet deep- so you can’t stand on it. About 4 or 5 beers into the morning, I say that I can match the feat. I think the surf may have gotten a bit rougher. I make it to the 1st sandbar, no problem. The 2nd, and I can keep my head above water. My beer is still in my hand. And I start out for the third. Perhaps halfway there, I realize what a bad idea this is. I can barely keep my head above water. I lose my beer and my sunglasses. I am very close to panicking. I can’t see the shore behind the waves. I imagine dying, and I cry for help. I take a gulp of seawater. Then I remember what my dad told me- if caught in a riptide, swim parallel to the beach. Somehow, I find the strength to keep my head above water, and swim sideways. Eventually, I get back to water shallow enough to stand. My lungs are burning. I haul my ass ashore, and somehow I’m a mile or more down from where I started. When I get back to my friends, they tell me they were already discussing how to tell my parents that I had drowned. I had been in the ocean for at least an hour, with another half hour to walk back.
My lungs hurt for a week. I had nightmares about drowning for months. And I don’t go into water deeper than my neck any more.
When I was 6 years old, I was in a rollover car accident while sitting in the back seat not wearing a seatbelt. When we finally came to a stop, the vehicle – a Chevy Bronco – was upside down in a creek. We saw it a few days later as it was finally being towed away, and it looked like something large had stepped on it and squashed it.
I survived with only a large gash in my left knee. My most vivid memory of that night is the actual rollover, which reminded me at the time of a funhouse ride where the walls are spinning all around you.
Stage 4 lymphoma. Blood pressure dropped to near zero a couple times in the ER. My brain was pretty much shutting down - full on delusional hallucinations, slipping in and out of consciousness. It had spread to the bone marrow and I was generating virtually no red blood cells. Eventually they stabilized me but I lost consciousness for about a week. Woke up in the ICU. Lots of transfusions later, and chemo, but no bone marrow transplant amazingly, and I’m fine now 10 years later.
It got that far because I knew I felt bad for a long time, but attributed it to stress. By the time it was obviously not stress, it affected my brain enough that I was too out of it to realize that something was seriously wrong. They said if it had been an hour later, I’d have been visiting the morgue, not the ER.
I died [no heartbeat for 2 minutes] on an operating table once. Close enough for my taste.
[No lights, sounds, visits from angels, demons or relatives live or dead. I do not remember a damned thing, and did not develop any spiffy psychic abilities]
Earlier this year, I was a passenger in an SUV in Costa Rica. We were going down a hill on a narrow road. A car started coming towards us…since we had just passed a cross street, the driver decided to back up. He turned the wheel as he was starting, and…it slipped off the side of the hill. We get out of the car (both on the drivers side…because, well. the passenger’s side was dangling in mid air…over someone’s roof).
The car was tilted - driver’s rear tire was in the air because the passenger’s front wasn’t being supported by road any more.
Luckily, some locals came out…someone drove their little sedan out…tied a strong line between the two vehicles, and pulled…with some help from people pushing on the front, we got it back on the road. They scattered so fast that I had a hard time stopping one to say thank you, and to give them a little tip for their trouble.
As it was…no damage done. Had we been another inch or two over…I could have died.
(Later, we found out that someone else on the trip actually came closer to death…but that’s a story for another day…)
-D/a
I experienced a dry drowning in fairly rough Puerto Rican surf (a rip tide got me, and not knowing how to handle it like I do now it pulled me out)-spontaneously woke up on a surfboard, thanks to the local surfers who rescued me.
I broke my arm, and the recovery was very slow. One day I was feeling ‘funny’ so my DH took me to the ER. While in the ER I had a cardiac arrest.
If you ever have a cardiac arrest, do it in the ER. They are equipped to handle such things.
They jump-started me and I spent the next few days in Intensive Care. Yes, I did have an “out of body” experience as part of the whole event, but that is not what the OP asked.
I was nearly a civilian death of the Bosnian War. I am alive because a barely 18 year old soldier from a Serb militia pulled me to safety and got me to a medic.
A couple winters ago, I was walking to the Adler Planetarium. The main sidewalk was closed for construction, so I had to walk along the north sidewalk of the aquarium as seen in this view.
It had been warm the day before, resulting in some snow melting, but then it refroze that day, making the sidewalk extremely slippery. Also, there was no guardrail at the edge of the sidewalk. It’s about a 15- or 20-foot drop into the lake. I slipped on the ice and had to do a spread-eagle motion in order to stop my slide towards the edge. I did have plenty of space left over when I finally stopped. The drop wouldn’t have killed me, but the cold water definitely could have.
Birth is the closest I’ve ever come to death. They asked my dad if he wanted them to try to save me or mom (he claims he didn’t answer, and I’m okay with not knowing if he picked and saying he didn’t is a lie), but the doctor managed to save us both after all. I recommend against being born on a religious holiday.
I bet it’s happened a lot and I never knew it. Went back to the house to get a bottle of water for the road and therefore was not on the interstate when that truck crossed the median, etc. Hmm, I did have a minor glitch after surgery decades ago when a tube of some sort was crimped. I remember not feeling particularly needy in terms of breathing and the nurse sounding somewhat insistent that “You have to breathe! Breathe now!” but it’s a blur.
In a storm in the North Atlantic, about 500 miles off Cape Cod. I was on a 180 foot, three-masted barque. I think the waves got to about 20 feet. I probably wasn’t all that close to dying; we lost one person overboard, but I was below decks at the time.
Endocarditis resistant to vancomycin and ceftriaxione nearly did me in during 2008. I think I’ve mentioned it here before. I got desensitized to penicillin and it done did in the bacteria. A few months later my heart and lungs were stopped for several hours during surgery to repair the damage.
About 10 years ago, I was playing tennis when i fell on the hardcourt going for the ball and my left hand got a half dollar size chunk ripped out of it due to me trying to break my fall. I cleaned the wound, put some antibiotic cream on it and bandaged it up myself.
Cut to 4 days later, about 10pm at night i notice that my entire left arm up to the bicep is inflamed red and hot to the touch. I thought it might just be sunburn since it was the middle of the summer, but the other arm was fine. My roommate convinces me to go to the ER that night to check it out and sure enough i had blood poisoning. The doctor gave me a huge shot of antibiotics and unknown to me started to draw up consent papers because if the inflammation did not start to go down within the next 30 minutes they would have had to amputate my arm to try to prevent it from going to my heart which would have killed me, and they needed my consent. Luckily the antibiotics worked.
If i had gone to bed that night or waited another hour i would have almost certainly died according to the doctor. The strange thing to me was there was no pain in my arm or even on the original wound, just the red color and warm to the touch.
Well to tell the truth which I always do, One night when I was 38, my husband of 22 years was working the night shift, at OPD and I went out after work, got a little tipsy, therefore I waited to sober up before coming home. Well to make a long story short, I walked in the door to find my husband holding a gun pointed at my head. Without going into too much detail, my husband who normaly just beat the hell out of me was ready to end my life and when he said he was going to kill me, I told him to go ahead, I really wanted to die right at that moment. I wanted to die, my life was a nightmare.
Instead he walked out the door. If I had died at that moment I would have never discovered the reason my life had become a nightmare…Terrible things happen in everyone’s life, we can not run or hide we have ro face the truth…
I don’t know, because I’ve done some stupid things with regard to drugs, drinking, and risk-taking, but the closest that I know of is when I had my hysterectomy back in '04. I was recovering in my room after the surgery, and the nurse came in to “check” me and realized I was bleeding quite heavily. TMI, but they did the surgery through my vag rather than through an abdomnial incision, which was good, but this aspect was bad. An hour or more went by and after three or four other nurses and people checked me out they decided to call the doctor and surgical team back in. I had to be put completely under again while they fixed the “bleeder.” According to the doc, it wasn’t serious, but from what my family tells me I looked real bad before going back in, and I wasn’t making sense at all and having some weird hallucinations.
But I didn’t have any blood transfusions, so I don’t think I could have lost as much as they think. Still, it fucking sucked to wake up that second time. I was sore before, but after being under general anesthesia twice in one day for hours both times I felt like I had been hit by a truck. And I had to stay in the hospital an extra day.
They are equipped to handle such things.