What was your "closest call"?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Day after my tenth birthday… the scene, the Sultan’s Armed Forces Beach Club, a little outside Muscat, Oman. Dad didn’t notice the jellyfish warnings everywhere, and so little dutchboy208 goes off to paddle in the warm blue water… then the large Indian box jellyfish (not quite as large or as lethal as the Australian variety, but still quite capable of killing a healthy adult) got stuck between left arm and left side…

Ran screaming up the beach and into the beach club bar, where thankfully someone was well-versed enough in jellyfish lore to pour vinegar all over me. Some other helpful soul also pulled off my board shorts so they could make sure I hadn’t been stung… er… down below. My first brush with death was also my first brush with public indecency…

Anyway, endured an hour long ride in the back of Pops’ Toyota 4Runner at about 120 miles per hour, screaming the entire way… was rushed straight into the ICU upon arrival at Khoula hospital, but got back from the brink thanks to the massive antidote shot they gave me.

My right arm was eight inches around for almost a month afterward.

22

Sorry, that should have read right arm and right side. I’ve still got a nice scar that looks a bit like a birthmark, if anyone wants to see.

23

Close calls? I’ve had more than I care to remember.

I’ll recount a couple:

The very first time I almost died was on a school trip to a private pool resort place (don’t you love my school already? It was actually sponsored by the school but it took place on the summer), this was elementary school, I forget which year, but I was quite young. My mother and my best friend came along on the trip as well.

We were having a blast in the kiddy pool most of the day but later my best friend and I decided to chase each other around the adult pool. During one of my turns around one of the corners I slipped and fell into the pool. This was before I learned to swim.

I panicked and spalshed around trying to keep my head above the water. I saw my friend extending his hand out to me and I grabbed it with all my might. The poor guy came crashing into the pool as well. Lucky for him, he knew how to tread water, and did so.
I, on the other hand, began to sink, down, down, down. In my head I was already saying goobye to the world and the people I knew, I was 1 second away from letting out my last breath and taking in the water when from out of nowhere my mother appears above me with a spash and carries me to safety :wink: Gotta love my mom.

Another time, many years later while I was in highschool, I spent the night over a friend’s house. It was him, me, and a couple of other guys from school. We were chillin’, playing guitar, smoking MJ, eating funny brownies and sucking down Southern Comfort (his parents were gone on vacation).

Everything was going fine (and everyone was way wasted) until my friend’s girlfriend called. He spoke with her for a bit, and then went downstairs to check on the brownies. I was drunk, didn’t even know he had been talking to his girlfriend, just noticed the phone off the hook, so I picked it up.

A nice chatty girl was on the other side so we started to chat for a bit. One of the other guys who was also there thought it would be funny to go downstairs and tell my friend I was flirting with his girl on the phone. Well my friend didn’t think it was funny. I guess it was the dope and the alcohol, but he came upstairs with a 6 inch kitchen knife!

I tried to reason with him (I quickly sobered up), but to no avail. He lunged at me with his kitchen knife and thank god for 2 years of karate because I managed to send him right through the window into the porch.

Well laughed afterwards, but I never did hang out at his house again.

24

I was once visiting, alone, the French Indies island of Guadeloupe. The western half of the island is mostly a huge national park with lots of mountains, volcanoes, waterfalls, etc. I was driving a little rented Peugot, and really needed to pee, so decided to turn off the main road, into a visitors’ center. The driveway to the visitors’ center was blocked by two tourist buses, so I decided to just pull over onto the shoulder, and walk.

Well, I *thought *it was a shoulder, with just some weeds and a few small shrubs. All of a sudden, the car started to roll to the right, and kept rolling til it was at a 45-degree angle, at which point it was literally teetering. I looked to the right, and noticed that I was at the top of what looked like a very tall cliff, and those little useless shrubs were the only thing between me and a very nasty plunge. And any further movement, forward or reverse, would have put me over the edge.

I tried to open the door, to see if I could maybe jump out and get clear of the car before its demise, but because of the angle I just couldn’t do it.

All I could think of was the fact that I was traveling alone, and it would be a long time before anyone (probably the car rental company) would start looking for me. If I was lying dead at the bottom of the abyss, or injured and incapacitated, who knows how long I might be lying there before discovered. So I figured if I’m going over I’m gonna make damn sure someone sees me.
So I started honking the horn, to get anyone’s attention.

All of a sudden those two tour buses totally emptied, and about 30-40 men came running to help. (The women and kids stayed behind to photograph the whole show)

They turned out to be French tourists. They stabilized the car enough for me to get out, found someone with a truck and rope, and got the car towed back onto the road.

With my limited knowledge of French, I just kept repeating “merci beaucoup” and “je suis tres stupide,” and before I knew it they were back on the buses and gone.

Needless to say, I no longer needed to pee.

25

Hmmmm, my close calls are pretty lame.

Im 17, so I just got my driving license within the last year. This past winter I flew to California to visit my aunt and cousins who live in LA. Nice vacation, but I had to take the red-eye on the way back and got no sleep that night. Seeing no danger in driving myself home, I retreived my car that I had left in a long-term lot. Unfortunately, while I was driving, a snowstorm emerged, and I kept dozing off for a few seconds at a time. While on Rt. 62, I fell asleep and my car drifted into the left lane. I was awakened by the horn of the truck coming in the opposite direction, and quickly steered out of the way.

More recently, I had a few friends over and we were hanging out at the local park. I was joking around on the teeter-totter with another friend when my buddy Scott came over and repeatedly and rapidly lifted the teeter-totter up and pushed it down on the side opposite me. When my side was quickly going up, he suddenly pushed the other side up, forcing my side of the teeter-totter down. Unfortunately, my body did not follow. I held on to the bar in front of me and my body swung so that I hit the ground on my neck. I passed out for about 30 seconds, but when I woke up I was fine.

26

I almost hit some kids as they were crossing a cross walk on a YELLOW light so it wasn’t all my fault…except for the speeding/looking at my radio/having secret urges to run over the brats with my motor vehicle. THe end would be i came about an inch away from the brats cause my brother screamed at me and i looked up in the ‘nick’ of time

27

I was a 15 y.o. girl hitch hiking in the south for several months.:smack: Those stories…

I was on a hallucinogeinc drug in some old mining caves. I looked down through a crack and could see on old mining car on a train rail in the shaft below. What I couldn’t see was that the crack I was looking through was actually the edge of the ledge that I was on. I fell, probably 20 feet. It was totally dark, but everything was a cobalt blue color. Somehow I climbed back to the ledge I had been on before. I had no injuries and have no idea how I got back there. The other people that I was with became convinced that I was a witch or had supernatural powers, and distanced themselves from me for the duration of the “trip”.
Some people who went to this area for the same recreational amsusement at other times were not so lucky. A group went swimming in one of those caves and one of them drown there when they could not find the way back to the enterance. Sadness.

28

Anaphylaxis, two times.

In both cases, I was away from a hospital but lived because someone had some intravenous adrenaline on hand.

Nothing can quite match that unique feeling of the adrenaline hitting your system. It’s all over your body in seconds, but for me, there was a distinctive sensation in the backs of my knees. Strange. Also, the numbed out psychological feeling of ‘wow, I could have died just now’.

29

I was flying in a Cessna Queen Air with 12 other skydivers. There are no seats other than for the pilots and we pack ourselves into the plane just like giant sardines with funny hats. As we were about to turn onto jump run, I suddenly found myself (and everyone else) stuck to the ceiling of the plane. This was quite disconcerting for a moment but then we entered a state of weightlessness where we were all floating about the cabin in mid-air. I remember thinking “Hey this is kinda cool…way to go pilot!” Things werent quite so cool though, when our pilot pulled out of the dive and we all came crashing down into a jumbled mass on the floor of the plane. Ouch.

What I didnt know at the time was that we had just dove about 40 feet under the left wing of an L-1011 commercial passenger airliner as it banked out of a cloud on its approach into SLC International. Our pilot / co-pilot later recounted the look of shock and horror they witnessed on the faces of the airliner pilots. That was when I completely realized just how narrowly we had avoided a mid-air collision. The air traffic controller had radioed our pilot to take an immediate evasive descent and we began the dive just as the jet was “in our face”. Had it not been for the controllers warning it would have been a head on collision.

Our combined closing speed was nearly 700 mph! It doesn’t take math to figure out that even a fraction of a second of hesitation on our pilots part, would have resulted in this incident being posted on CNN instead of The Straight Dope.

Everyone was pretty rattled at that point but we continued on to the drop zone and made our jump as planned. It was quite a relief to jump out of that plane…

30

I have one more to post.

When I was a teenager some friends and I decided to explore an old sugar beet processing plant that had fallen into disrepair. There were some large storage tanks, like grain elevators, that were about 12 stories tall. We found our way in and began to climb the ladders. You would climb about 20 feet up a ladder to the next platform and then go to the opposite corner and there would be a ladder there. This alternated back and forth all the way to the top. There was also an elevator shaft with doors blocking access. There were 8 of us but we only had 2 flashlights between us. About halfway up I reached a platform and stood with my back to the elevator door while I waited for the light to catch up. When he got up to me he said “Shit hold still” Thinking that there was a bat or a rat or something I looked down at my feet. There was no elevator door behind me and my heels were overhanging the edge of the shaft by an inch or so.

Never quite forgotten that feeling. I often wonder how I could have gotten so close to falling down the shaft without actually doing so.

31

Could have been arrested: On my way home from hanging out with my dealer/friend, I stopped at the Kwik-E-Mart for something, probably Doritos. Reached into my handbag, pulled out wallet, dislodged baggie, which landed plop on the floor. And oh yes, there was a cop in the store. But he was at the coffee dispenser, and the proprietor either “didn’t see anything” or really wasn’t looking. Fortunately, the baggie was a ziplock, so without missing a beat, I stuffed it back into my handbag, paid for whatever I was getting and strolled out.

Could have been gangraped: Was at a rave, fairly drunk and had smoked up before I left home. Guy saw me wobbling around and suggested I lie down. Was lolling on a mattress when a totally different guy stuck his head in the door and said, “Look, you’re gonna have to leave.”

Could have been disfigured: Fourth of July at my sister’s house. Late at night, tenants of the other half of the duplex finally remember they have fireworks (how can you “forget” that you were going to set off fireworks?) and knocked on the door to invite us to watch. Stuck my head out the kitchen window for a better view. BIL grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and pulled me back in, seconds before a bottle rocket zoomed up and past me. The other tenants were setting them off from their balcony, below Sis’s kitchen. Yikes.

And one from Mr. Rilch: Could have died in a ditch. 17-y/o Mr. Rilch was driving home from work, at night, after a bad encounter with a customer. Did what he now tells teens you should never do: let emotions take over when you’re at the wheel. Started driving recklessly, went over loose gravel, spun out and ran car off the road. Slight concussion. Got out, inspected car, then woozily decided that it would be a good idea to rest before trying to flag down help.

Meanwhile, a family of four was out deershining. Deershining, for the uninitiated, is the activity of driving on rural roads and shining flashlights about in search of deer. Instead of a deer, they spotted Mr. Rilch’s car, with him sprawled out on the back seat. Drove him to hospital.

32

Geeze, mine are all lame/nerdy compared to your guys’ experiences.

I almost died by Anaphylaxis, twice. One time I ate some chicken strips at a restaurant and they had something my body didn’t like in them (some spice or herb) and that night I walked into my parents room because I could barely break. My throat was swollen to where it took effort to breath and my face started to swell. My eyes had swollen so much and stretched out the skin in my eyes that when I came home after the hospital and the Epinephrine shot I looked Asian since my eyelids were so puffy.

Another close call was when I was at my computer and my brother was about to shoot air at me with his paintball gun. He walked up behind me and pointed it at my head (I was clueless to what was going on) and he decided for some reason not to fire. He later found out there was a paintball still in the chamber. A paintball going about 300 feet per second coming point blank at my head would do some nasty redecorating on my brain.

33

I hate trucks like that. Some are nice and move over so that the stream of water isn’t being sprayed on your windshield, and then you have those jerkoffs who think they are king of the road and invincible. No wonder there are so many truck accidents.

34

Fell unconscious inside a big solvent tank. A pump part I was holding fell and hit the bottom of the tank, and a man working in an office about 30 feet away heard that sound in the background and thought it was odd. So he decided to investigate. Good idea - he saw me and pulled me out.

Now whenever I think something sounds odd I have to go investigate - but still haven’t paid back my debt by saving someone.

35

Car crash for my part. I was cut out of the car.

36

I was driving along a 2-lane highway one evening behind a slow car. I could see headlights in the distance, and I wasn’t certain about the passing distance until I saw a set of headlights swing out from behind the other car. “If he thinks there’s enough room, there probably is,” I thought, so I pulled out from behind the slow-moving car and floored it.

I was alongside the car I was passing, doing around 70mph, when the two sets of headlights ahead of me merged into one. I hadn’t seen one car passing another, I had seen one pair of headlights that for some reason I interpreted as two pairs. Closing speed: 120mph+ Distance to oncoming car: less than 100 yards.

I couldn’t complete the passing maneuver, nor could I hit the brakes and swing back behind the car - there wasn’t time. I swung onto the left shoulder as the oncoming vehicle passed on my right.

I sat there and shook for a while.

–Patch

37

I was fished out from a hole at the base of a very small waterfall just as I was blacking out. I had kayaked off of the drop uneventfully, and turned back into it to play at its base. It got the best of me, and left me out of my boat, being churned round and round in the hole where the water was so aerated that I could not swim in it, either up to the air or down to the flushing bottom current. A friend had to paddle out and troll back and forth across the face of the hole with a rope. As soon as I felt the rope, I wrapped it around my wrist a few times, so he was able to pull me out despite my being barely consciousness. The pics in the middle series are of the fellow who saved me running and playing at that drop: http://www.geocities.com/Yosemite/4444/temphoto.html (click to enlarge).

38

I took my dad’s sailboat out singlehanded one sunny afternoon back in 1984, departing Falmouth, Maine for an afternoon around the Portland LNB (Large Navigational Buoy) and back. The trip normally took about five hours round trip and made a nice, relaxing afternoon.

I had seen the weather report eariler in the day and I had seen that they were calling for a slight possibility of thunderstorms late in the afternoon, but that they really weren’t expected until the next day.

This is where you say, if you’ve live in Maine for any time at all, “Gee, TVGuy, you know that weather moves faster than it’s predicted sometimes - especially around these parts.”

So I’m about 3 miles from the LNB when the sky begins to darken and the winds drops off to nothing. Not good. Especially when wind is your primary boat fuel.

I continue to putter along to the LNB and round it about 2 hours later than I had planned - it’s now about 5:30 in the afternoon. The sky is getting darker and darker. NOAA is now talking about squall lines, high winds, damaging hail and other generally nasty summertime weather.

In this partciular sailboat, we had a 9.9 HP outboard in the lazarette that required a bit of preparation to use. You had to get the fuel hooked up, get it primed, spend time getting it started, etc. before being able to motor. I didn’t do any of that and it suddenly became too late as the first squall line hit me with 35 to 45 knot winds and the seas picked up to a good, solid 12 feet plus. I dropped the main and sailed on a heavily reefed roller genoa - no time to get the storm jib up and no second pair of hands to do it.

For the next four hours, I pounded that damned boat through some of the worst conditions I’ve ever had to deal with. There were several times where I wasn’t sure where I was in relation to known rocks and spits of land among the islands of Casco Bay. There were at least three occasions where I was abcolutely certain that I was going overboard and the boat was going to end up on top of me.

As I got into the lee of a couple of islands, I was finally able to rig the anchor, get a sea anchor out, get the storm jib up and get one reef of the main up. I limped in to a little cove just south of Portland Head Light at about 11:30 PM. I checked the depth sounder and threw the anchor overboard, then made sure it has caught. Then I got the sails in to some semblence of order and crahsed for the night.

At first light, I found that I had managed to anchor pretty much in the middle of the channel and amongst a slew of lobster pots, but being very early on a Sunday, nobody was around.

I prepped the motor, stowed the sails and motored all the way home in a moderate fog that offered a whole 1/4 mile visibility.

To date, I’ve never come as close as the years I spent on the water on the coast of Maine.