Who else has had a terrifying, almost killed story?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Can’t compare with most of these stories, but still scary at the time:
I was crossing a railroad bridge at a park. Everyone was doing it – you got a great view of the area and the very, very shallow river far beneath. I’d almost made it to the end of the bridge when I heard:
HONK! HONK! HONNNNNNNNNK!
from in front of me. Then I saw the train come around the bend, a lot faster than I’d have liked. There was no time to get to the end of the bridge between me and the train, so I turned around and started running the other way, trying not to trip.

Unfortunately, it soon became clear that I wouldn’t be able to reach the other end of the bridge in time, either.

Jumping was not an option. I got as close to the edge as I could and let the trauin rumble on behind me. There was enough room, but certainly not comfortably enough room.

22

In High School, I was in a car with 3 other people, none of use wearing seatbelts. Going about 65 MPH we were forced off the road (friends of ours were trying to spray a fire extinguisher into our car and as we came up a hill, a car came the other way).

The car flipped several times. Me and two others were thrown from the car. I was somehow fine. One guy was unconcscious. They kept him in a “drug induced coma” for a week. The girl broke her collarbone and her skull and ended up under the car. The guy who stayed in the car was fine.

The car, while flipping, glanced off a HUGE tree. If we’d hit it wrong, we’d all have been squished.

It was kind of weird, I think I passed out for like a few seconds. Both my shoes were off, and by the time I walked up to the road, the guys who had forced us off had parked way up the road, but had made it back most of the way to where we were.

The local paper printed a picture of the car the next day. I wish I had a picture of it. It was destroyed.

23

Har!

Really, making it longer doesn’t make it more interesting: I was in high school, got a summer job with the building’s management, checking air-conditioning units. One apartment housed a classic Knife-Wielding Fiend, who chased me down two hallways before I found an open door and dived in.

24

I was in high school and went to the pool often, where I dove off the boards frequently.

A neighbor down the road had an above-ground pool, probably four feet deep, that they allowed us unlimited access to. So, we were down there swimming one day and I apparently was so used to diving I somehow FORGOT I was diving into a very shallow pool.

I cracked my head on the bottom, and got a horrible ZING down my spine. How I managed not to break my neck I’ll never know, but I thank God and my guardian angel for being with me that day!

25

Tech note for this story: The partial pressure of oxygen (PPO2) in normal air is 0.2 atmospheres. In scuba diving, the recommended safe limit is a PPO2 of 1.4 to 1.6. At a PPO2 of 2.0 or higher, oxygen toxicity sets in – you can die from too much oxygen.

Last week, I was on a diving trip in Belize. One of Belize’s top dive spots is the Blue Hole, a collapsed cave system. A back niche of a cave survived the collapse, and the cave starts at 105 feet of water. The cave has beautiful stalagtites, about 35 to 40 feet high.

During my trip, I had been using oxygen-enriched air in my scuba tank. For this dive, due to the depth, we all switched over to normal air. I analyzed my tank and found that it contained 22% oxygen, just over normal air’s 21%. I programmed my dive computer accordingly – or I thought I did.

My computer had a quirk: If I didn’t program it with the oxygen content before each dive, the computer reset to an oxygen level of 50%. Somehow, the computer reset its oxygen level for this dive. Either I didn’t program it, or the programming didn’t hold.

So we all got in the water and started our dive. Pretty early on, I noticed that the computer was reporting that my oxygen loading was going up too fast. Soon the computer reported a PPO2 over 1.4. I knew this was wrong, but (stupid me) I continued the dive anyway. By the time we reached the cave, the computer was flashing an oxygen level alert. I should have acknowledged the problem with my equipment at this point and terminated the dive, to fix the problem back on the boat. But instead I stuck to the dive plan, knowing that my computer was no longer reliable.

We spent a conservative 8 minutes in the cave, due to the depth, then gradually made our way upwards.

When I got back on the boat, I found that my computer reported a PPO2 of 2.67 and an oxygen content of 50%. According to the computer, I had died of oxygen toxicity while in the Blue Hole.

I sat out the next dive to let the computer calm down and decide I was alive.

The lessons here: Always check your life support gear, and make sure the computer is programmed correctly. If there is any malfunction, abort the dive until the problem can be resolved.

26

When I was about eleven or twelve I was playing in the woods with a friend of mine. We played in these woods all the time. We knew them very well. One day we decided to climb up the side of the waterfall. (picture at least 80 feet of slate rock with a slow/medium water running down it) It was fun and we had no problem getting to the top.

We went home for lunch and decided after that we would go back and wonder around the woods. After a while we ended up at the waterfall and decided since we climbed up the side so easily that we should climb DOWN the side. I started to go down first. I lost my footing and slid down 80 feet of slate rock. The last thing I remember before becoming unconscious is my friend calling my name and seeing grey rock. My friend said I hit the bottom and flipped over and landed between a rock and a log. If I had not flipped I would have landed in about 6 by 6 foot pool of water that was at the base of the falls that was at least 4 foot deep.

The next thing I remember is my brother and his friend waking me up. They had been walking down to find us to come home for dinner and my friend told them what happened. My friend ran in my house (which you just did not do) and yelled to my parents “Tina fell down the waterfall” My dad and mom rushed down to get me and carried me out of the woods and took me to the emergency room.

I had lost of scratches and my eye was scarlet purple inside and out. I could not open my left eye at all for a week. I also had a broken wrist and a cracked knee cap. I wore a leg brace for two weeks and I was not allowed to run for three months.

I missed the first two weeks of fifth grade.

27

Mine’s pretty boring compared to these, but scary at the time.

We took a family trip to the Washington State coastline when I was in middle school. My brother is 4.5 years younger than me, and he and I decided to walk along the beach at the base of some very steep cliffs. We found a gravelly little switchback trail that took us down to the beach, and spent quite a while wandering along, losing track of time.

Then we realized that the tide was coming in. REALLY coming in. Huge breakers were rolling in and the strip of beach was getting smaller and smaller, and we couldn’t find the path back up. When water was washing over our ankles, we finally decided to just freeclimb up the cliff to the top – it was either that, or drown or get smashed into the rocks by the waves.

Climbing up was scary as hell. The cliffs were mostly crumbly shale, and every little shelf and crevice had small cactuses (cacti?) growning in them, so finding secure handholds was difficult and painful, and the whole climb was slippery. I was convinced that my brother was going to fall and die and it would be my fault. I was so very glad to get to the top.

Not very dramatic in the telling, but I haven’t maintained such a galloping heartbeat before or since.

28

You’re extremely lucky. A kid from my high school I’d known since kindergarten did that and wound up a paraplegic.

I’ve told my story before and it doesn’t sound that scary in retrospect but it was pretty freaky at the time. One winter night I was in the bow (front) of an rowing eight when I hear shouting. Turn and fifteen feet off our bow is a large, poorly lit pontoon boat and we’re headed right under it, between the pontoons. We frantically attempt to stop the eight and I turn to try and take the impact with my shoulder. The impact knocks me off my seat and into the girl in front of me and twists my right foot, breaking it. If the guys in the pontoon boat hadn’t shouted, we would have hit it at full pressure and I would have taken the impact across my lower back. I have no idea what would have happend but, man, it kept me up for the next few nights…

29

I don’t know if this counts. It was my brush with death, though.
About 12 years ago, I was unemployed, out of money, and living in a friend’s basement. I tried to pass off that I did have a job, and started eating less and less. SOmetimes I wouldn’t eat for days.

One morning I woke up paralyzed. I literally couldn’t move. After about an hour of trying, I could move slightly. No strength, and it felt like I’d pulled every muscle in my body. I dragged myself (literally) upstairs. By the afternoon, I could move normally, but with great pain.

Paralysis is DAMN scary, by the way.

The next morning, same thing, and my friend insisted I go to the hospital. We got there, and they did some blood tests. They pretty much told me my potassium level had dropped to the point of paralysis (yeah), and that if I’d waited another few hours, even my involuntary muscles (say, my heart) would’ve stopped.

Eeek!

30

I have three.

First, when I was about 12, I struck up a friendship with a boy named Richard in 6th grade. He invited my brother and I to spend the night at his house one weekend. We had a great time. The next weekend, his mother flipped out over a custody ruling in a divorce and killed Richard, and his brother in their sleep. She then went and killed her ex-husband, his girlfriend and her parents. I’m just glad we didn’t wait a week to go visit.

Second, I had a nast car wreck when I was 19. I was going too fast and panic-braked upon seeing a curve after I topped a hill. My car flipped over in the road and twice more in the ditch. My door was ripped off. I was not wearing a seat belt. I walked away.

Third, I was in the Navy when I was about 25. I was on the Aircraft Carrier USS Kitty Hawk when a fire broke out behind the island on the flight deck. That’s where they store all the missles and bombs waiting to go onto the planes. If it hadn’t been for people literally running through flames to pull out pallets full of ordinance, we would have ended up a training film.

31

After 61 years and what with having been in the military, flown small planes for a living, riding motorcycles, doing some rodeo, doing a lot of sailing, solo and other wise, SCUBA diving, lots of time on the roads in all kinds of vehicles… well, Been real close to death a lot of times.

Life is all about inches and seconds …

What I’ve found is that there is a big difference between fright and fear. That difference is time.
Been so close to death or causing death many times but is mostly involved fright. Things happened so suddenly or unexpectedly that all the shaking was done afterwards.

The real fear for me was trying to run carrying my injured and bleeding son and realizing I could not keep running and no help was near. I just kept going as best I could and eventually got to help. My son is fine, has some scars but it turned out ok. That half hour of watching him approach death and realizing that my own inability to move faster could cost him his life was a time of real fear for me because had plenty of time to be aware of it.

One time I was doing some strip photography from the mouth of the Mississippi to some off shore platforms in a Cessna –180, a single engine tail dragger type. When we turned back to the North, we were presented with a wall of thunderstorms that had built fast behind us and there was no dry place to go that wasn’t through the storms. Approaching that wall of storms and looking for a way through seemed an eternity…

The having to make a decision and then live with it and all you can do it wait, that is when it becomes real scary.

Miners in a cave in, sailors in a sunken submarine, anyone who has to make the choice and wait or just wait for hours or days, these people have had the scary time and events IMO.

Equipment failure at 90 feet while SCUBA diving was one memorable combination of fright and then fear as I had way too much time to think and see how far it really was and not knowing if I was going to make it.

I’ve had near misses in aircraft that were literally inches or partial seconds from disaster.

The important thing IMO is that we go on, overcome the lingering fear and not let it rule our lives.

YMMV

32

When I was about 12, I slept over at a friend’s house while my mom was away for the weekend. She decided that she wanted to go bike riding, and I was given her old bike that had no brakes whatsoever. She then wanted to go riding in her favorite spot, a sidewalk on a very steep hill. What I didn’t realize until I was about halfway down the hill going full speed that the hill ended abruptly at a very busy intersection. I somehow managed to not get hit by any cars.

33

I was driving home from work, which at the time was a Subway inside a gas station just outside Golden, CO where I was going to school. My drive home was usually this little windy stretch of sideroad that went past the Coors brewery, with some houses / embankments on the right (as I went home) and a drop on the left down to the floor of the little valley into Clear Creek.

Well, I was coming to this turn, maybe a little faster than then speed limit, but not excessively so. It had rained that afternoon, and there was a puddle at the beginning of the turn. I didn’t much think of it and was just going to go through it, until my brain flashed “red alert” and reminded me that the puddle was right at the spot of a pretty large pothole that I’ve been having to move around for the past week.

I was close, so I cut pretty sharply to the left to the avoid the hole. My front right tire still went into the pothole, bounced out, which ended up pushing my front end more to the left. Then my back tires (it was a rear-wheel drive) hit the water, and skidded until I was even more misadjusted. I ended up skidding to the left shoulder before I got enough control to straighten out. Although things weren’t completely steadied down yet.

This was just in time to see an SUV coming down the other direction, at this point directly in front of me, and coming up fast.

Well, I was just at the edge of where the hillface really started to slope down, there wasn’t enough space on the shoulder for me to avoid her at the speed I still retained, and it was soft dirt so I couldn’t really brake effectively. The only option that presented itself was to use my current momentum to get back over onto the right. My car ended up on the right shoulder (missing the SUV), and got caught on a good sized rock in front of one of my back tires, yanking me to a halt.

I’m not 100% sure how long I sat there with a deathgrip on the steering wheel before the other driver came over to check on me. She had stopped over on the shoulder where I had to cut back across, and walked over, possibly to make sure I wasn’t going to pass out (the rearview mirror showed my face even paler than my normal fair complexion). I had kicked up shoulder dust for a good 30 feet, and I couldn’t tell you how much distance I had been out of control since the originating pothole. Maybe 50 to 100 feet?

Then I couldn’t get going (I didn’t initially discover the rock that had brought me to a stop). I almost broke down crying, but finally got out with the help of the other driver and her husband. I went home, called the…division of roads (I can’t remember right now, but whatever city department was in charge of road repair) to report the pothole, and took a long shower to rinse off the caked on road dust.

The pothole was filled in when I went to work a few days later.

34

I was a passenger in a small early 70’s Datsun pickup that was t-boned by a very large late 60’s Cadillac. Fortunately the point of impact was on the pickup bed just behind the passenger door. The guy driving the Caddy never lifted off the gas and pushed the Datsun across 5 lanes of a busy road and into a fire hydrant. I suffered some internal injuries, a dislocated right shoulder and broke a tooth when my face hit the steering wheel when the truck came to the sudden stop. The guy driving the truck suffered a total dislocation of his left leg from the hip, broke his right leg and neck, and a bunch of other so called minor injuries. It happened the day after Christmas of 1986 and I spent my paid holiday vacation in the hospital. When the case went to trial 2 years later, the driver of the Datsun was still confined to a wheelchair. The officer that investigated said if the Caddy had hit the Datsun a split second earlier, both of us in the pickup probably would have been killed instantly. The driver of the Caddy, a 27 year old unemployed fisherman at the time was upset because his father had just cut off is living allowance and he was going to have to get a real job. The two of us in the Datsun were compensated very generously by the guy’s family for our trouble.

35

Stuck under a waterfall, but eventualy fished out while blacking out.

36

Two that I can recall:

I was on a camping trip in the mountains. We were camped near where a semi-fast moving stream turned into a waterfall, plunging about 30 metres into a shallow pond, with a very rocky bed. I was crossing from one side to the other when I slipped on mossy rocks - I fell about 3 feet away from the drop! I don’t think I’d have survived had I fallen.

Then there was a case of false diagnosis, of dengue fever. Again, camping trip, got bitten by a mosquito. The desease has a longish incubation period, so it was a while before the symptoms started showing. It started off as a weakness, which turned into a high fever and throbbing headache. I thought I had caught the flu, so I took appropriate medicine and precautions. When I didn’t get better for a few days, I went to see a doctor who came to the same conclusion and gave me a few shots. I felt better the next day, but the day after that the fever was back, and it brought with it a strong abdominal and back pain. That was soon followed by extreme weakness. Then suddenly the pain was unbearable, and I began vomiting anything I ate and drank. That’s when we realised something was seriously wrong. I was in the hospital immediately, on a drip. Blood tests confirmed dengue, and I was kept on the drip for a full week before I could begin to eat or drink anything! My blood platelette count had fallen dangerously low, and the doctors said a delay of another day or two in bringing me to the hospital could have been fatal

37

Mine didn’t amount to much, but could have been much more:

While I was walking home one day, I passed a shopping mall parking lot. There was a car around 25 or 30 feet to my left, which I expected to 1) see me, and 2) stop.

The driver, apparently, didn’t do 1), as he certainly didn’t do 2).

Fortunately, the car had basically reached a stop, so all that happened was that his bumper hit my left leg. I was able to walk home, and, as it turned out, suffered nothing other than some minor leg pain.

Had that guy been going just a little faster, however…

38

My mom experienced a nervous breakdown when I was 12. I didn’t know what to do except stay with her, because I felt that without me along for the ride she would have no one to take care of her and keep her safe (pretty much true, just the two of us in the city really, and that’s how you think when you grow up the way I did).

So we drove around L.A. for a night. Like, all night, until 5 AM. The bad parts and the good parts. She chose which way to go based on her hallucinations, so it’s a wonder we didn’t get more lost and in worse neighborhoods than we did. We were stopping in any motel we saw, getting a room, then splitting after 10-30 minutes because of more hallucinations that would convince her it wasn’t safe. Did I mention I was 12? So she was the one doing all the driving and decision making and with the only access to funds. She was convinced the police were “in on it,” so wouldn’t listen to my suggestions to stop at a police station and ask them to protect us from what she was seeing.

At 4:30 or so, she started imagining fluid was coming out of her ears, and asked me about it. I saw no fluid, but lied and said I did and that she had better get to a hospital. We drove to the nearest payphone and she lay in the car while I called 911… the guy thought it was a hoax or something, he refused to send an ambulance. So we drove to a hospital. Except we couldn’t find one nearby, so she got on the freeway to drive back to the town we lived in and go to the one we knew about. I think… 30 minute drive? 45? I don’t remember clearly, but in the middle of the freeway she starts going into these strange convulsions. She somehow managed to keep her hand on the wheel, though she swerved a lot. After a while the convusions settled down and we made it to the hospital.

We didn’t wreck, get lost, robbed, shot, or anything like that. I have no idea how.

39

I tried to find my story in the archives for linkage, but apparently it can’t be found.

In June of 00 my truck was at the trans shop for a rebuild. They finished it late in the day, and my neighbor wasn’t home yet so I figured on riding into town on my mountain bike, retrieving the truck and stopping the next day to settle the bill.

Part of the ride involves a rather steep descent followed by a hard right and an equally steep ascent, so I allowed speed to build until the thought of braking seemed prudent. At that point, I suddenly learned that there’s a certain velocity on tar and chip roadways at which you’re bouncing enough that control inputs have minimal effect. When the road turned, I didn’t and stopped the old fashioned way, by striking solid objects after exiting the roadway.

First recall after coming to rest was a badly broken right tibia/fibula (bone showing), so I kinda moved myself around to put the mangled and bleeding leg uphill (poor man’s Trendelenberg position). I called my neighbor on the cell phone, but he still wasn’t home, so I had to call 911. They sent an officer to search but he couldn’t see me (off road and down in a ditch), so he told county radio to mark the call unfounded. Thankfully, local FD had also been scrambled, and a fire officer in a higher profile vehicle spotted my bike.

His facial expression told me I was in worse shape than I’d thought, and the pitty-pat of helo blades about 20 minutes later confirmed that. Airlifted to the local trauma center, I lost contact about 3 minutes into the flight after the drugs told Mr. Brain to have a nap. Tip to flyers-request first class as they cut off your good Carharrt shorts in coach. :eek:

About three weeks + or - later, Mr. Brain awakened enough for me to perform a moderate self-assessment. Hmm. Arch bars in my mouth-broken jaw. Upper body proximal splint-likely vertebral damage. Whistling-I’ve been trached. Within a few days, I could focus my thoughts sufficiently to actually read my chart and intake assessment.

The damage list: compression fx C5,6,7,T6,7,8, quad compound lower mandibular fx, depressed plate fx right tib/fib (repaired with 7 screws), along with lung collapse, cerebral impact issues, and overdose of unplanned deceleration. :wink:

Aggressive rehab and extreme good fortune had me back home alone within 2 1/2 months although I still have some numb spots and rewired nerve tissue. The young man in the next bed at the rehab hospital had suffered far less in terms of physical insult, but he’s paralyzed from mid-chest down.

40

In a plane landing at Tucson.

We were on the final stage of approach before landing, landing gear down and really close to landing. All of a sudden the plane, a 747, gets slammed by a big down draft of air/wind that drops the plane what felt like a couple of hundred feet, though I don’t know. It left the plane about a hundred feet, again I’m guessing … I always get a window seat, over the runway. The plane was left pitched upwards, nose up, at an angel of almost 45 degrees, but we were level. The pilot slammed the engines to full throttle, you could tell this by the sound of the engines at full throttle, whining a terribly, and the god awfully loud roar. It felt like we hung there for an eternity, with plane pitched at that terrible angel going no wear. Finally we started slowly moving, flying again, making a nice slow clime and leveled off as the engines came back to a normal RPM. As we were passing the airport the pilot got on the PA and all he said is “OK, were’re just going to circle around and try that again!” I don’t think he knew what to say after getting his heart out of his throat. We circled around and made a perfect, flawless landing. I know everyone on that plane had knuckles as white as mine. Everyone was dead (no pun intended) silent, and stiff boards during the second, successful attempt at landing. We all spontaneously let up a big cheer and round of applause when the wheels were finally, safely on the ground even though we were still breaking and slowing down.

I thank God (or whatever powers that may be) for having a good pilot that day.
And no I’m not afraid to fly. I fully believe that statistically, I have a far greater chance
of dying a car accident. I got right back on a plane at Tucson a week later and returned home.

I had been visiting my parents…I don’t think I’ve ever given them such big hugs as when I got off that plane!