Without a doubt my best friend/roommate who shot himself. I walked in to my appartment, and I found him laying there, making chocking sounds. There was about a three foot pool of blood, goo, and some sort of clear liquid by his head. I shoved my other roommate out the door and told her to run to the payphone and call 911. I then yelled at him “what the fuck did you do?” About then, I looked over across the kitchen floor and saw my gun(it actually belong to the security company I worked for…they were most amused) lying on floor covered with blood and other stuff. I picked it up, kind of in a daze, and opened it. It had been fired once. I then put it on the table and ran out to the payphone where other roommate was screaming hysterically into the phone and talked to the 911 operator. Damn…Its been ten years and I still get emotional thinking about this.
A distant second was finding my Great Dane dead of bloat on my back porch…and then having to deal with the question of what does one do with a 160 pound dead bloated great dane. By the time I could get anyone over to help, it had been sitting in the 100+ texas heat for half the day. You know the old saying, friends help you move, real friends help you move bodies…At least I had a couple of real freinds. I called up my vet, described what had happened, and she said more or less that great danes just do that some times. They should come with a warning label.
January 1997, rural northern Minnesota, front passenger seat of a Dodge Neon, my girlfriend behind the wheel. We were broadsided by some big SUV, damned if I can remember what, on the driver’s side. I got nicked by flying glass, she died within the next forty minutes while waiting for the helicopter to the trauma center.
I was kept overnight in the local hospital up there for observation to make sure I didn’t have any internal injuries. It felt like such a surreal dream. I woke up in the morning and saw my coat hanging on a hook; the left shoulder and sleeve were splashed with blood. Either someone fucked up, or just didn’t notice it, and left it in my room with me.
Still a tossup whether the horrifying part was seeing Erin unconscious in the immediate aftermath of the crash, or waking up and having it all feel so real again by seeing her blood on my jacket.
Oh, my god. I can’t even think right now, after reading everyone’s posts. I want to express my deepest sorrow to those who suffered and lost loved ones.
I’ve seen some things in my lifetime, but again, I can’t even see straight right now, so I’ll post later.
I must be one of the many who have avoided looking at this thread, then had their own thoughts, maybe started to reply, then backspaced out of it.
I was lead 5-Ton Truck in a convoy of Marine Corps vehicles in NC. An El Dorado crossed the centerline on a curve and smacked into the front left part of the truck. Our driver did everything possible to avoid the accident (poor kid). The man in the El Dorado did not die right away, but was very messed up. He never regained consciousness, thank God. I’ll leave the details out. That was my convoy.
In the Gulf War there were plenty of Krispy Kritters on the other side, and I actually got used to that. One driver of an Iraqi armored personnel carrier was not toasted, just dead. The BMP was kind of nose down into a tank hole (it had apparently run into it). The driver seemed to have a leg wound on his right thigh. The impact of his head to the cupola rim had sheared off the top of his skull, and these were drippings from his brain on his leg. He looked fine except that and the flat, loose skin on the top of his head. Didn’t bother me then, bothers me now.
A Marine was back from a patrol and in a group of five guys, a hand grenade fell from his flak jacket and the spoon flipped off. He fell on it. I didn’t see gore and much blood, I was about 100 yards away and didn’t actually SEE it happen. But the image and the thoughts of what that guy went through make me both proud and horrified.
Just reading the descriptions of these horrifying images makes me want to cry. I hope that those of you who have been through traumatic losses of family members/friends/pets have healed from the tragedy.
I try to avoid seeking out horrifying images. I know the curiosity is bound to be easier to cope with than the horror and revulsion of looking. Although I was curious about how and why Bud Dwyer did what he did, and therefore looked at pages about it online, I have always very consciously avoided looking at the actual photos/movie of his suicide.
Firsthand, I guess one of the worst things I’ve seen was last winter when my Dad developed a extremely painful and gruesome leg infection due to severely restricted blood flow in his leg (such things tend to happen to diabetic smokers). Ultimately, he had to have an amputation. It was deeply traumatic to see the pain he was in, especially since I had been warning my parents for months to get the leg treated before he had to have it amputated. Since the long hospital stay after the amputation forced him to stop smoking finally, I just pray that nothing like that will happen again.
The only possible silver lining is the hope that every time I talk about the nightmarish experience in public, someone out there may have second thoughts about continuing to smoke before something equally horrible happens to them.