Not my only brush with, well… serious injury at least, but probably falls into the “less common” category:
I used to have Citroen GS, which has a boxer engine that can - in an emergency - be crank-started by inserting the wheelbrace into a hole in the radiator grill, pushing it into a ratchet thingummy and turning it. When the engine starts turning faster than the wheelbrace the ratchet is supposed to eject it. After a while the battery died and (being lazy and skint) rather than buy a new battery I just got into the habit of crankstarting the car.
One day when the weather was cold and I was having trouble starting the car it ocurred to me to try pulling the choke all the way out (which also - by means of a split cable - pulls the accellerator pedal half way down.
DOH!
:smack:
The engine started, the (incredibly rusty) ratchet mechanism jammed and the wheelbrace started spinning faster and faster as the engine revved to 5000RPM, smashing the radatior grill to pieces before flying off and whizzing past my left ear. Turning around I noted that the wall behind me had one less brick than it had a few moments before.
This reminded me of the two times my mother has nearly been electrocuted.
The first time happened when she was making a cake. For some reason, the power cord broke off and came out of the back of the mixer. It plopped down into the cake mix. Without thinking, she picked up the cord and put it into her mouth to suck off the cake batter. The shock threw her across the room into a wall, leaving behind her slippers where she had been standing. I was just a tiny kid at the time, but I vividly remember seeing Mommy fly.
The second time, she was painting the exterior of a house. She was moving the aluminum ladder, and hit the line which brought power to the barn from the house. The plastic coating had been weathered off. When the metal ladder hit that bare wire, again she was thrown. My grandma witnessed this one and swears to this day that she flew at least thirty feet. A two-inch deep pit was melted into the ladder’s leg. (She spent some time in the hospital, but turned out to be okay. Needless to say, my mother is extraordinarily accident-prone.)
Last year, I was riding along on my bike, and the car behind me didn’t see me - I don’t know why, I had reflectors on my bike and besides, this was in broad daylight - and just drove straight into me. Thankfully, the car had begun to slow down, but in any case, I was thrown into the air and rolled over and over into the street. I went into shock, but strangely enough I wasn’t badly hurt. The driver of the car got out for a moment to check I wasn’t dead, someone in the car behind got out as well, passers-by stopped to have a look, and in the ensuing confusion, the woman who originally hit me quietly drove away.
1 & 2. Failed experiments while attempting to build an AC motor from scratch (wire, paper clips, rubber bands, etc.) at age 5. My father is an engineer, and hence had given me some children’s engineering books to read. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Crashed bike in middle of road in front of speeding car. Set world record picking self and bike up and getting the heck out of the way. Pure adrenalin. Age 8.
Broke nose on edge of pool when diving into deep end while swimming by myself in Coeur D’Alaine, Idaho. Age 10.
Hit by lightning while playing golf in St. George, South Carolina. Age 18.
Nearly crushed while carrying 2-ton festival float up flight of 45 steps in Tokushima, Japan. Age 25, and had started drinking at 8 am that day.
Drove the I-75/I-85 corridor in downtown Atlanta during rush hour. Age 32. Absolute insanity. Drinking should be required after that, but I drove another 4 hours to South Carolina after that.
I don’t remember this, of course, but Mr. Rilch says that during one of my seizures, I stopped breathing. This was the capper to several minutes of flailing around, with my tongue doing the Pentecostal thing (no offense). Said he (many times), “I thought you were gonna die in my arms.” He knew better than to try to put anything in my mouth.
The next day, I called the hospital where I’d had my EEG, but my tongue was so badly shredded, I could barely make myself understood. Every time I was connected to Neurology and said “EEG”, they heard “EKG”, and connected me with Cardiology. The fourth** time, I managed to gargle out, “ElechlroENFEFFELOGRAB! Not ElechloCAHDIOGRAB! A BLAIN thcam! Why n’n’t you ted me it wath abnorbal?!”
Well, unless you count the time the chain-smoking trio in the apartment below us didn’t bother to report a gas leak for two weeks… :smack:
One evening when I was about four months old, my mother discovered that I had a very high fever. She called our family doctor, who told her to put me to bed as usual and call him again the first time I woke up. Well, Mom went to bed, too, and woke up at about 5 a.m. She figured if I’d slept so soundly I must have been all right, but she went over to my crib (in an adjoining room) to check on me anyway… and found that I’d been very quietly puking and pooping away in my crib without waking anyone up. I had some sort of serious intestinal infection and was moving from moderately to severely dehydrated when I arrived at the hospital.
A water moccasin reared up at me while I was in a canoe at age 3, I think I was trying to offer it a peanut butter cracker.
A year later I jumped from the 3rd story balcony of our apartment after watching Superman on TV. I bounced off of a green electrical box, quietly ran all the way back up to our apartment, found my mom and then started to cry. Didn’t hurt a thing.
I was hit by a car when I was riding my big wheel at age 5. I pulled out between two cars and did what my mom told me to do when I crossed a street, unfortunately I got the order mixed up and looked right, THEN left. Got knocked quite far but was ok.
A few close calls on bicycles and such, including a very acrobatic flip over a car hood.
During flight training I was doing touch-n-go’s (multiple landing and take-offs for practice) and the flaps on my Cessna-172 got stuck in the 40 degree position. I had flipped the switch up after landing, then hit the power but the flaps didn’t retract. I was swerving down the runway wondering what the f**k was going on, but I suddenly popped up into the air and was riding in ground effect. The runway ran out as I was about to rotate further and I noticed the flaps were still down and threw the nose forward. My instructer finally stopped screaming at me to gain altitude when I told her about the flaps as we were heading straight for houses in town and couldn’t gain altitude (that’s Colorado in the summer for you, altitude and heat). She took over, dove to the ground to get into ground effect, turned away from town and we limped back to the airport at about 10 feet above the ground. We were SOOOOOOO close to stalling, we couldn’t have been doing more than 30 mph. The mechanics looked at the plane and the switch had shorted out.
My last brush with death was a motorcycle accident straight from a movie. On an off-ramp/on-ramp from I-25 to I-70 in Denver there was a piece of wood in the left side of the lane, I swerved to the right to miss it, but was now heading for a cement wall that curved to the left at 50 mph. I hit the brakes and my front fork seals blew causing my handlebars to rock back-and-forth wildly, eventually throwing me over them. I judo rolled onto my feet and ice-skated (was wearing slick soled cowboy boots luckily) for a few yards until I jumped off the road out of the way of my tumbling bike and the truck behind me. I was wearing sunglasses and a baseball hat, neither of which fell off, and only managed to scrape my knee. I remember thinking “I hope someone got that on film!”
The last time I felt my life was in danger was when 3 gypsies tried to rob me and my wife on a train to Slovakia a few years ago. They walked away after my wife said I looked like I was going to kill them.
I’ll paste the original here for your convenience:
The scariest bit is that everything happened about 40 meters from my house. I’m sure my father would have heard the cars hit (shudder).
Sadly, my brush with death has not given me super powers, has not made me a better person, and it hasn’t given me a new perspective on life sigh. Although I do get a little jittery when I make that turn without checking the mirror.
