danceswithcats It was my thread that inspired this one but I must tip my helmet to you. Compared to your experience mine tis’ merely a flesh wound. How are you doing,did you regain full function or do you some impairment?
Gach, Beadalin, have you been tapping into my phobias or something? You lived through my two worst fears: giant waves coming onto the beach, and heights :eek: :eek:
::whistles in awe:: wow, glad you made it, danceswithcats.
Mine is a bit ironic:
Valcourt, Quebec, circa 1989. Jump # 23. Solo freefall jump from 9,000ft. LZ was a series of fields bordering a 500 foot hill covered with sugar maples. My planned opening altitude was 3,500 feet, 1,300 over minimum, just because I was a very cautious, and very novice, jumper. I dump the pilot chute, feel the yank, and then start start spinning violently. Looking up, the left rear corner of my canopy is collapsed, and the slider is still stuck up there. I pump the brakes twice. All that does is unlock the brake (previoulsy stowed at 50% for opening) on the good side and I spin even faster. It feels like I’m pulling two or three g’s, and it’s accelerating. I let go the brakes, and all those mindless repetitions of the reserve drill pay off. I look and see my cutaway handle & reserve ripcord, push my left thumb through the reserve ripcord d-handle and clutch the cutaway. I take a deep breath, think “Jesus, this is it, I’m actually dumping my main”. and pretend I’m punching someone in front of me with a right-left combination to the gut, while arching my back & legs like crazy. There’s a split second feeling of weightlessness, like jumping off a diving board, then the blessedly hard yank. The spin must’ve launched me pretty hard. I look up and think:
- It’s nice and round, fully open, MY God, that’s a lovely sight.
- Oh good, I’ve still got lots of altitude. (around 2000)
3 Hmm, that round reserve’s awfully small for a parachute. Damn, I’m gonna hit hard, like those crazy paratroopers.
End of story right? Text book malfunction & reserve activation, right? Well, here’s where the irony comes in. This reserve is round, and it steers about as well as a hot air balloon, which is to say not at all. So I’m looking at where I’m going to land, and it becomes apparent that I’m going into the maple grove.
Shit.
I go into tree landing position, right foot on top of left (so I don’t straddle) right hand covering face so arm prevents branches in throat or eyes, left hand covering family jewels, elbows tucked in tight . Green sea comes up way too fast and I close my eyes tightly. I hear cracks, and it feels like an entire hockey team is trying to win first place in a slashing contest, and using me as the target. Then it’s quiet. I open my eyes.
F$$K.
I’m 60 feet above the forest floor, hanging like a Christmas ornament. My goggles take over 2 seconds to hit the ground. And I think : "great, just great, I handle my first malf like I was right out of the textbook, and I’m gonna die falling out of this bleepin tree. " So I’m hanging there, perfecting my immitation of an overly ripe apple, and it’s hot. It’s damn hot here, below the trees. I feel a breeze coming on, thinking it’ll feel nice, and I see the tree tops sway a little bit.
And prompltly drop two feet.
Uh-oh. I look up. My canopy is draped over three adjacent trees. Everytime the wind moves them, I drop a little. I’m smack in between all three trees. The only wood I can touch is thinner than a pencil, holding up a single leaf that’s tickling my nose. I grasp it with thumb and forefinger of my right hand. Whatever I do, I don’t want to break it. I pull myself gently by 18 inchess; grab the branch where it’s a bit thicker. I gradually pull myself to the trunk. Which, as far as I can see, is as smooth ( and as big) as a phone pole, except for the branch I reeled myself in on, 2 feet above my head, and maybe as big as garden hose. No way it would hold me. I wrap my legs and arms around the trunk, and wait. And hope my strength will hold out.
Now I finally have enough time to wonder about the search & rescue operation. I notice the drop plane, a Cessna 280, has me spotted, and is flying alternate N-S and E-W passes intersecting over my position, gunning the throttle as they pass over me. The gound parties, invisible from the air under the trees, use it as a beacon. After 20 minutes, and completely loosing feeling in my right leg below the groin from the harness compressing the femoral artery, I hear faint cries, scream my head off, and they’re here.
It takes them 20 more minutes to break out & put on climbing gear, and get to me. By then I’m weak, lighteheaded, dizzy, not very coherent or courteous to my rescuers, just basically shocky from the adrenaline, muscle fatigue, and compromised circulation from the harness I’ve had on for over an hour now. The climber, who’se also my principal instructor, finally reaches me. He rotates me 120 degrees on the trunk, and tells me to let myself slide down a bit. I slide down another two feet, and find myself sitting astride the most comfortable branch in all of Christendom. The pressure comes off my leg straps, circulation is restored, fear dispelled, and I snap out of my funny state in about a minute. Then he says “Hey trupa, watch this” and he pulls on my reserve riser lines, also with just thumb and forefinger, and the whole canopy effortlessly slides off the trees and stops, dangling, below me. :eek:
They finally got me down with a simple pully system they had devised for just such an occasion. It turns out I was the first jumper rescued by the system. They were all happy, as I weiged about 240 lbs at the time, and they felt the sucess was a conclusive inauguration of their system.
So skydivers have a traddition that whenever a jumper has a “first”, they are to buy a case of beer for the campfire party that evening. For me it turned out to be:
-first malfunction
-first reserve ride
-first tree landing
-first jumper rescued from a tree on the new system.
I dropped off a couple of cases later that evening, and told the guys they would get the other half next time I was down. But my instructor, who had me do all those mindless "Look - Locate - Activate - Right - Left"drills, the guy who climbed up that tree and got me down, he got a nice single malt. A very nice one. 
I’m not 100% and never will be, yet the vascular surgeon (he was Chief of the Trauma Team when I arrived via helo) who orchestrated my reassembly cleared me to resume duties as a firefighter in the fall of 00, while urging me to do so on a reduced duty basis.
While I’ll still crawl the hall, full board truckie tasks this almost 50 year old body, but I’ll do my best to protect and serve so long as Og grants me breath. 
Similar to Trupa:
Years ago, jump #13 (urk), a short solo freefall. Arch, look, reach, pull (just as taught) and…nothing.
Look over shoulder to break the burble that the pilot chute is hanging in. I can see it standing right on my back, flapping about and going nowhere.
Look over other shoulder. Still no dice. I am now somewhere around 3000’ (maybe less) or less doing about 120mph with nothing out.
Momentary freakout, flail hands at my back. Then as clear as day I can hear the safety & training officer’s voice in my head as I flash back to all the emergency drills that we did while hanging in a harness on the ground:
“Total malfunction! What do you do?”
“Feet and knees together! Look at the reserve handle. Grab with both hands, arch hard and pull!”
Reserves are meant to open quickly, not comfortably. There’s a bang and I come to a stop in midair…120mph to about 10mph in what seems like 1 second. Spend a second or two gasping for breath, then look up.
Round canopies have some “inherent malfunction modes”, one being the partial inversion & line-over, aka “Mae West”. My round has come out that way, I’m looking up at a malfunctioned emergency canopy. Main d-bag has come out of the pack and is hanging down below me by the suspension lines.
Recall how to handle a line-over from first-jump class, identify the line that is over the top and then flip it off the smaller end of the canopy. That’s nice except that 200+ pounds of me are hanging off those lines, you can’t “flip” anything. Canopy makes horrible alarming flapping noises and oscillates wildly when I try, I figure that’s a Bad Thing and while I am coming down in a slow circle, I’ve got plenty of fabric over my head. Landing may hurt but it’ll sure be better than highspeed dirt.
Look down, I am heading for a farmer’s field right beside the airport. Farmer is out there in his tractor tilling the soil. Good luck for me, that means nice soft dirt and not hardpack. I may be able to walk out under my own power.
Ground is coming up fast, certainly faster than I’d like. Feet and knees together, prepare to do a good parachute landing fall…THUD. Best damn PLF I can imagine but the impact is still hard, such a slap that I’m sure some internal organs must have burst.
Then a crosswind hits, untwists the canopy and it inflates, giving me line burn and starting to drag me across the field. Stops in a tree and I stand up, gathering my gear up and wearing a huge shit-eating grin as three cars zoom out to meet me.
Feeling good until later when the owner shows me the reserve canopy…as I was hanging there under my lineover, swinging back and forth, the line in question was steadily sawing the canopy in two. I can see the big burn holes in the fabric. “You should have been working like crazy to fix that lineover, all the way down!”
Ignorance was sure bliss there. At the time of the initial malfunction I was probably 15 seconds from making a crater…I made sure to get a ramair reserve when I bought my own gear later…
Seven years old. In the great Pacific Ocean in the old country:
I asked to go to the beach, and they let me, but my family thought the other parent was going to the beach too, instead of just wading I did go deeper than I had before. I was alone, and then suddenly I was not touching the sea floor.
Then, I could hear on the distance frantic screams from my family that finally noticed I was missing and just saw me being taken away by a rip tide.
Of course being ignorant then (One needs to swim parallel to the beach and then swim back when you are out of the rip tide) I swam towards the beach, or tried (I think then I was still getting a handle on swimming); of course I was getting exhausted, and then naively changed strategy.
What happened next was just luck so I would discourage anyone from trying again:
I sunk down, and made contact with the seafloor, let my breath go to then stand firm on the submerged beach floor. I should never have made it. A combination of walking and swimming and a weak riptide is the only thing I can think it happened then, because then I felt air in my face.
I opened my eyes and my family was running towards me, while I was crawling towards them.
I never did go alone to the sea again.
I’ve posted it before but here goes:
It’s Manchester, 1999. Wilmslow Road just south of Withington. It’s raining hard. I’m on my way back from work to my lodging. My car is sitting just on my side of the centre line, indicating that I want to turn. I’m waiting for the oncoming traffic to pass. A car tries to pass me on the inside at speed. Unfortunately
[ul]
[li] The car doesn’t have its lights on.[/li][li] The road curves at exactly this point.[/li][li] The road narrows[/li][/ul]
Needless to say, the car fails to undertake me, hitting my car on the rear left quarter. At this point the laws of physics take over. Remember that it was raining? The layer of water on the road means that the road offers no resistance as I go sliding diagonally across the road into the oncoming traffic, where I make the acquaintance of a big 4WD car the hard way. My car crumples nicely around me. Fortunately the fire brigade are 100 yards up the road, and I am quickly cut out of the remains of my car and taken to hospital. I escape with bruises galore and whiplash, but had I not been wearing a seatbelt, I would be dead.
In 1977, while I was in the Army in Korea, I was part of a unit returning from a trip to the field. There were six of us riding in the back of a covered deuce and a half, sitting on tope of a bunch of our gear, plus some other assorted junk. I was sitting farthest in, up next to the truck cab. The road we were on was elevated about four feet or so above the surrounding fields. Wheels of the truck got too close to the edge and the edge crumbled, tossing the truck over on it’s side. That was scary, but luckily we weren’t seriously hurt. but I had to be pulled out of a mess of ropes, tent poles, tires and such. My head was wedged between two poles. Can anyone say “Nutcracker”? I got lucky I guess, as some extra pressure on the ends of the poles could have squished my cranium.
Me - about 20 years old, managing a coffee shop.
Coworker - about 17 years old high schooler working part time at said coffee shop.
Instrument of near death - a large freezer on wheels that was stored in one location when shop was closed and moved to another location when the shop was open. (to make room for storing tables and carts at night that were outside when we were open.)
Closing the shop at night, I rolled the freezer over to it’s position, grabbed the plug tightly with my left hand and the end of the heavy duty extension cord with my right hand and pushed them togther. Now the plug for this freezer was one of those big metal heavy duty three pronged thingies. (?? 240v instead of 120v ??) and the extension cord is likewise oversized to match.
It feels like an invisible giant has clamped his hands over my fists, locking them in place, as my hands, arms, and chest are filled with lightning bolts of pain. Cow-orker (normally a nice guy but in this instance… Cow-orker fits) just stands there looking at me and does nothing, as I SCREAM my head off.
I clearly recall that I had time enough to draw a lungfull of air, scream it out to the last gasp, draw a second lungfull of air, scream it out, and draw a third full breath and scream it out too. Cow-orker stands there doing nothing.
During that time, I was trying to unclench my hands, first the right, then the left, then even trying to move a single finger. No luck. Ok, moving outward. Can I move my wrists? No. Elbows? Shoulders? Neck? Back? No to all of them. Can I move my legs and thow my body backwards? Still no.
Finally I realised that I could collapse my knees. That dropped me to the floor and pulled the cords out of my grasp. I sat there gasping and shaking for a while, and finally cow-orker came over to ask if I was ok, and what was wrong? Idiot.
Minor tingling and soreness in my hands and arms for the next day, likely from muscle fatigue. The boss replaced both cords.
I still wonder if I hadn’t been able to move my knees, would I have just stood there screaming until my heart stopped?
When I was about 9 or 10 I went on holiday to Tenerife and there was this kid there who was a real jackass (if I met him now however I would bite him). One day he got accidentally hit in the face with a snooker cue and it knocked out his tooth.
Later that day I was walking past him at the poolside and he pushed me in for ‘laughing at him’. This was the really deep end of the pool and I couldn’t swim. Luckily his father jumped in and dragged me out otherwise I pprobably would have died.
He was a fairly big man, and apparently I told my parents I was saved by the man with the boobs. 
My friend also tombstoned me once and my head hit the floor and I swear I felt my neck compress. That would have ‘only’ been a broken neck though. :rolleyes:
Yes, you would have.
In my line of work I tie in electrical power nearly every day. Standard for a lighting rig is 400A 240V 3-phase power. Although most of the time we are able to do this before we are made hot, occassionally that isn’t possible. In case of this, we always make sure a piece of 2x4 is nearby. On one occassion I did indeed have to smack my boss’s arms as he got bit while trying to connect our bare wire ends to the lugs inside the distro box. Even a split second of high voltage electricity is sufficiently unpleasant to make anyone think again about the use of tasers. (Yes, I’ve been bit a bunch; I speak from personal experience.)
I am so glad that we all made it through our various ordeals.
I have too many to count from the years I spent traveling in the Chinese countryside in the 1980’s.
The number of 99% guaranteed to be fatal vehicle accidents probably were in the hundreds. One I still distictly remember was on a packed long distance bus in the Liangshan Mountains in Sichuan Province and bordering Tibet. The narrow unpaved mountain road that skirted a very deep (1-2000 feet cliff) was so muddy that the bus slid around like in snow. And the back of the bus slid in very slow motion toward the cliff edge. Everyone on the bus could feel the inertia pulling us over. The slide and the bus finally stopped. Everyone carefully and slowly got out of the bus with zero pushing or shoving as is normal (I mean pushing and shoving is the normal part). We were inches from going over. The bus driver very carefully put on the heavy snow chains on the tires and got the bus away from the cliff. I was on the mountain side of the bus and didn’t have to look strait into the chasm as we slowly slid over that way.
I was hanging out alone with a group of yak herders in the Aba Tibetan Autonomous Region of northern Sichuan Province. A couple of days hike from the nearest village. they had a contingent of mongrel herding dogs, and a Tibetan mastiff guarding camp that was chained up. Tibetan mastiffs are terrifying animals, really loud, vicious, and all muscle. No one in Tibet goes anywhere without a dog whapper, big knife or something owing to these things. Broke it’s chain, and the first inclination I had was seeing it silently charging me from about 10 feet away. The 10 herding dogs immediately also set on me (hence the origen of the phrase dog pile became blindingly clear). I backpeddled kicking furiously with hiking boots while drawing a 2 foot long knife that I carried when backpacking. The 5 or 6 nomads immediately grabbed sticks and indiscriminately waded into the snarling mass of dogs beating anything that moved. The mastif managed to chew my pant leg pretty well but didn’t break flesh and backed off slighly as I tried to stab the fucker. Owner grabbed what was left of the chain while another nomad started to beat it with a stick about the size of a baseball bat.
Things settled down then. I hadn’t been bitten and everyone had a good laugh. They beat that damn masif for at least 10 minutes while trying to stake him back down again.
I also had a few incidents stemming from backpacking solo in Tibet without a real map (serious maps didn’t exist except for satellite maps that I could not get my hands on in the pre-internet days of the 1980’s). These were stupid self inflicted things like trying to take a shortcut off of the trail.
The dumbest stuff I ever did though was being 16 and seeing how many redlights me and my buddies could run on Folsom Blvd from the California State Capital building in Sacto and our home in Folsom. We were also drinking. :eek: Whilst not an excuse, drinking and driving was tolerated back in the late 70’s. Getting busted with an open container often meant nothing more than having to pour out all the booze in the car and a warning.
How do we survive our youth?
China Guy, have you posted some of your other travel stories anywhere? They would be fascinating reads!
And the rest of ya’ll… I hope you have life insurance
Yeah, WE made it through. Makes you wonder how many potential Dopers were out there who for lack of a second or an inch didn’t make it and therefore couldn’t post here.
My particular story didn’t require any exotic landscapes or machinery. It was my own body that nearly killed me, though some inefficiency on the part of the hospital and the slowness of the on-call back-up surgeon didn’t help.
For the squeamish, you may want to skip this story.
I’d had problems with bleeding hemmerhoids for several years. Finally my doctor decided that surgery was needed. He tricked me by scheduling a check-up at the hospital, instead of the clinic where we usually met, and then not showing up. He had them give me a phone # and when I called he talked me into agreeing to the surgery. He described the procedure as minor. I’d be home in 3 days.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS MINOR SURGERY. Minor surgery is surgery performed on other people.
The surgery was performed that evening and went very well. As predicted, in 3 days I went home. I was warned that I could expect blood in my stool for a few days but not to worry about it.
I’d been home for about 18 hours when I had to, putting it delicately, move my bowels. The water in the bowl afterwards wasn’t pink. It was red. I called the doctor immediately. He told me not to worry, that it looked worse then it was. I went back to bed feeling that maybe the doctor was being a little patronizing. After all, I was the one bleeding, not him.
Several hours later I needed to have another b.m. This time when i stood up, i staggered because I felt so weak. I called out to my wife that I think we had a problem. The next thing I remember is coming to on the bathroom floor. I must’ve fainted and had missed hitting my head on the rim of the bathtub by inches. There is blood all over the floor, toilet and tub. My wife is crouching over me and telling me not to move, as if I could because I’m so weak from loss of blood. She stuffs my underpants full of sanitary napkins and somehow gets me into the car after spreading a towel on the passenger seat. She doesn’t bother with pants or shoes. We take off for the hospital which is about 20 minutes away. Fortunately, since it is 8 pm there’s not much traffic. I keep fading in and out of consciousness.
When we get to the emergency room, they tell her she can’t park there. She explains that I seem to be bleeding to death and she was damn well going to park there. She’d move the car after they got me inside. Initially, they didn’t want to provide a wheelchair and told her I’d have to walk to admitting. She got them to get a wheelchair and bring me inside.
I spent the next FOUR HOURS on a gurney in the emergency room. Initially, the nurse who was supposed to set up the transfusion needle refused to do so because all my veins had collapsed due to blood loss. Her supervisor eventually got a shunt working. They begin transfusing and give me 6 pints over the next few hours with 3 bags going at once. Periodically, I have to move my bowels and what emerged is huge amounts of blood that has gelled and clotted in my intestines. Finally, the intestine had all the blood it could hold and I shit it out. This happened at least 3 times and maybe more.
Meanwhile, I’m semi-conscious and more or less aware that I’m dying. I’m almost completely detached from what’s going on around me. I occasionally ask when is the doctor going to get here to fix whatever’s wrong. I am a little embarrased at dying in such a stupid fashion. Mostly, I just don’t care about anything.
They finally got me into the operating room about 4 hours after we’d arrived at the emeregency room entrance.
What had happened is that the original sutures that were supposed to dissolve in 10 days lasted less than 1. The doctor later told my wife that he’d never seen anybody lose as much blood as I had and survive. My recovery was very slow and extremely painful but they kept me in the hospital for 8 days this time, part of which was spent in the Intensive Care unit.
I considered suing but decided not to.
Were you flying through a thunderstorm? Is the Tucson airport near the mountains? I’m just trying to figure out whether it was a microburst or wind shear from the mountains. (They fly 747’s into Tucson? Wow. But then I’ve seen a 747SP landing and taking off out of Lindbergh in San Diego; mighty impressive)
Wow. Just wow. There are some very lucky people here.
My brush with death seems pretty lame now. It was due to the stupidity of the young. I didn’t even have the intelligence to be scared! I was just pissed off.
I headed down to the “wrong” part of town to go drinking and hustle a little pool. This was in the late 70’s in the Montrose area of Houston. I was late teens-early twenties.
I had to park my car on a dark street, about two blocks from the main drag. A car pulled along side of me and asked me a garbled question - how to get to mumble, mumble. I stepped closer to the vehicle in order to hear better, and the passenger took out a gun. He didn’t point it at me, just showed it to me, parallel to the car door. He said, “Give me all your money.” Well, I was just about to go partying, and didn’t want to give him my money. I’m standing there all cocky, with my thumbs in my back pockets, arguing with him. Telling him, “Aw, man, you don’t want to do this!” He gets pissed, (ya think?) and says, “If you don’t give me your money, I’ll shoot you in the leg!” Huh? That seemed kinda hilarious to me. I didn’t actually laugh out loud. That probably wouldn’t have been too wise. So as I was standing there, I felt a couple of extra dollars in my back pocket. (My main money, around $30, was in my left front pocket.)
So, not quite willing enough to just walk away, he did have a gun after all, I threw the $2 in his face and said, “You want my money? Here!” I then walked to the strip, the opposite direction the car was facing.
He didn’t shoot me.
I called the cops, and described the guys and the car (I forgot to get the license plate.) They told me that’s what I got for hanging out in that part of town. 
That was about 25 years ago. I don’t think I’d do the same thing today.
Since this thread seems on the verge of expiring, I guess I´ll add one mine. (I´ve got several):
Back in my ferry pilot days (in the ´60´s, which will give some idea of how old I am) I was delivering an old Aero Commander (twin engines, eight seats) to Oslo, Norway from upstate New York. The owner didn´t want to pay for temporary longrange fuel tanks, so I was taking the short-range route: clear customs at Houlton, Maine, to Goose Bay, Labrador or Gander, Newfoundland, depending on the weather, then to Sonderstrom or Narsarsuak, Greenland, also depending, then Reykjavik, Iceland, Shannon, Ireland and finally Oslo.
Got in and out of Goose Bay OK, but ended up stuck in Narsarsuak for three days on account of zero-zero ice fog. There isn´t a lot to do in Greenland in late November, and besides I was in something of a hurry, so when a little patch of sky appeared on the fourth day I took off, although it was already way past noon.
By about four it was pitch black night outside, which in the North Atlantic in November is very very black, and cold, and about then the electric system failed, so it got even darker inside the aircraft. Also colder, as the heater stopped working. And the autopilot and the radios and the navigation equipment. I spent what seemed like a long time but was probably just a few minutes digging out a little flashlight from my flight bag, pushing circuit breakers and joggling switches and so on, which didn´t help any. I was pretty sure that I was going down, since there was no way I could find Iceland without at least an omni fix which I wasn´t going to get.
There was an old highfrequency radio in the emergency pack of mostly useless stuff if you were planning to ditch in cold water, and eventually I managed to dig it out, and founf that the batteries were, somewhat miraculously, still holdng a charge. Hifreq only works over long distances, and needs a very long (like fifty feet) antenna, so I got a side window open (making it even colder in the cockpit) and trailed the antenna wire with a lead weight attached out behind. Eventually I managed to raise a weather station in Ireland; they called Reykjavik on the telephone (!) and relayed instructions to me. Iceland traffic control had me fly triangles until they figured out where I was (transponder didn´t work, of course) and then talked me down to landing, which I was relieved to accomplish.
As an aside, and please forgive the hijack, while I had a couple of very unpleasant hoiurs and lots of time to contemplate my probable cold and wet demise, I didn´t get religion.
Had no more impulse to beg for mercy from some invisible sky god than I would have had to sacrifice a goat and examine its entrails for a heading to Reykjavik, assuming I had had a goat with me, which I didn´t. Make of that what you will,
I just had one this evening, on my way home from work. My rear tire blew out on the expressway while I was going 70 miles per hour, and I lost control of my car and careened off the road. Luckily there was a grassy median that was just wide enough to slow me down and keep me from crashing into oncoming traffic, or I’d be a Big Bad Voodoo Fire-Roasted Corpse. I got stuck for a few hours waiting for a tow truck since I got stuck in some mud and couldn’t move my car out… and then my spare tire turned out to be deflated… all while I was still 45 minutes from home. But for about 20 seconds today, I had my most recent near-death experience. Pretty lame compared to some, but I live a pretty risk-averse lifestyle.