OT: Close Calls - Things that should have killed you, but didn't
Driving into work today a few cars smashed into each other right in front of me. I had to do a pretty crazy maneuver at about 75 mph to avoid a head on collision and my car was sprayed with broken glass and plastic. This is the second time this month that I very narrowly avoided a serious accident and it has me thinking about my other close calls.
The closest I ever came to actually dying was when I had an allergic reaction to something I didn't know I was allergic to. It happened really fast and being 17 and invincible I was hesitant to seek assistance. Until I looked in a mirror and saw that my now lobster red face had swollen to twice it's normal size.
I drove myself to the nearest ER and my windpipe was almost closed by the time I got there. I'll never forget the look on the receptionist's face. It was like she was looking at a corpse.
What about you? Have you beaten cancer? Dodged a bullet fired by a jealous husband?
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Was at a track meet in college. Lewis University had the indoor weight throw going on with now cage. I was walking outside the boundary, but one guy f'ed up and threw his 35 lb steel ball completely sideways to the pit, 30 feet into the air and 50 feet away.
I vaguely remember people yelling "watch out" but woke up 10 minutes later with the paramedics cutting off my sweatshirt and shirt. Found out I ducked enough for the weight throw to hit my shoulder before smashing into my head. Walked away with a concussion and a bruised shoulder.
Next year, Lewis had a cage up and doubled up the roped off area. I was too young to think about suing them but I probably had a pretty good chance for some pain and suffering damages!
I was at my 1st high school keg party and I was hammered, stumbling around outside a barn. I stumbled and fell backwards, flat on my back. When I looked to my right a pitchfork was laying on the ground, forks up. If I would have stumbled 1'-2' that direction I could have been on 1,000 ways to die.
I-94 between AA and Jackson, 2 AM, driving home from U2 concert in Soldier Field (~96-97 maybe). No time to react, just yell "Shit" and slam into a deer doing 95 mph. Luckily it was on the smaller side and crumpled the hood/grill and bounced over the roof.
As a 17-year old from Westland (JGHS), my friends and I were joy riding at night in my dad's '74 Plymouth Duster on Napier Road, a narrow dirt road that ran north-south, ending by the old Elouise Mental Institution (at Six Mile Road?). I was driving, egged on by my friends in a classic case of peer pressure ("faster, faster!!"), and had the car up to 80 miles an hour. As we crested a blind hill, all I saw was two headlights coming the other way. As everyone started screaming, I did my all-time best collision-avoidance driving as we fish-tailed in the gravel around the certain head-on at high speed without crashing or running off the road into the trees. Then we pulled over and tried to get our shit together for the next ten minutes. My driving saved six lives that night.
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I want to know how you got it to 80...
Toronado at night on a two lane country road. The speedometer went to 140 mph and he had it pegged there. This was in the days of big engines. Seat belts were superfluous.
And you crazy people are lucky to be alive.
I was in the backseat of a Chevy Citation as a kid. That sounds bad enough, but to add to the story, my mom was driving down a hill that was icy. The brakes locked up and the car spun 360 and smashed into a large stone pillar, impact was just behind the driver's side front wheel. I believe Mom broke her window with her head. At the bottom of the hill was a very busy main road. If we hadn't stopped on the hill we would have ended up in the path of 40mph traffic.
On my birthday a few years ago I was lighting a recalcitrant barbecue grill at my in-laws'. There was a great "whump" sound and flames shot up. So I probably wouldn't have died but I might have burned my face off if I hadn't been leaning slightly back.
Numerous near-misses on the road but nothing like the dramatic scenes posted above.
Be careful out there, everybody.
In high school I took a decent lacrosse shot straight to the neck. For those that don't know, a hard shot (much faster than what my friend was capable of, luckily for me) has killed a few people by stopping their heart. Ended up being alright but couldn't breathe for about a minute.
I went into labor 2.5 weeks early with baby #1. Since it was our first go around I didn't realize I was in labor (mostly because it was early) and I barely had time for an epidural. For a first baby he came blazing fast but he was perfect and we were euphoric.
Almost immediately I started to feel extremely weak and began to shake. I heard the tone of the doctor's voice change from jubilant and congratulatory to worried and then frantic. Calls were made and people began flooding in the room. I think at one point there were upwards of 20 people working around my bed. I had started to bleed out and they couldn't get it stopped. I could see my husband, looking scared, standing in the corner of the delivery room with our baby boy in his arms.
It was a very surreal moment as I almost seemed to view things from a place outside myself. It was at that point that I was fairly sure that I wasn't going to make it and I just really wanted to see my baby and hold my husband's hand. After what seemed like an eternity, but was probably only about 5 minutes, they tried one last ditch effort procedure to get the bleeding to stop before they rushed me to surgery. Thankfully it worked. I ended up losing over 50% of my blood and had to have several transfusions. I was told by several doctors and nurses that usually women in my situation don't make it. Also, thankfully I had opted to drive 40 minutes to Grand Rapids to deliver instead of delivering at the tiny hospital in my small hometown.
They never did figure out what caused the hemorrhage so needless to say I was a little nervous when I was nearing my due date with Baby #2. That labor and delivery went so unbelievably smoothly that we're headed into the homestretch of my pregnancy with Baby #3 due in early August.
I plan to spend most of my labor pouring over HTTV as currently my MGoHusband is reading it.
Birth should have killed me. Umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck. I came out with a head as purple as an egg plant.
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Went white water rafting in the Green River in BC late fall/early summer. I guess the river still was being fed by a lot of snow run-off so we had to put on these full thickness wet suits. The water was really cold and was literally green from all the glacial sediment. The trip was going well and then we hit this calm section of the river. The guide said, "hey you guys want to go for a little float?" To me, I thought this was a bad idea but everyone else in the rafting group wanted to do it so I went along with it. It was OK, but a little cold. Finally the guide told us to get back into the raft. Being the gentleman that I am and wanting to impress the now MgoWife with my gallantry, I let everyone else climb back into the raft before me.
By the time the last person before me got in, the guide was frantically gesturing for me get back into the raft. I looked around and saw some whitewater that was downriver from me that was coming up really fast. Unfortunately I had drifted downstream faster than the raft and the other people and I started to literally swim as fast as I could.. upstream towards the raft. At that time in my life, I was swimming a lot and considered myself a pretty strong swimmer but no matter what I did, I kept drifting closer and closer to the rapids and I was getting really tired. The combination of swimming that hard and the cold water was just sucking the energy from me.
Finally, the raft got close enough to me. The guide and I locked our gazes for a second but it seemed forever. I must have been terrified. He throws a rope, I grab it and he starts to reel me in. The rapids are getting really close but I'm just so tired that I cannot pull myself into the raft. Finally, he and my MgoWife and the other people in the raft are able to pull my exhausted probably hypothermic self into the raft and we hit the rapids.
Later, at the take-out site I'm still pretty tired while everyone else is enjoying lunch. The guide comes up to me and asks if I'm OK. I say "yeah" and he replies that maybe that it wasn't such a good idea for everyone to a little float down the river.
I went to a man-made lake with my sisters and one of their friends back in the day. I have been told that in order to build the highway nearby, they dug out large amounts of dirt from an area to build overpasses, level the ground, etc.. This left a huge hole in the ground, which they then filled with water. It wasn't meant to be a recreational area at first, but it was later converted into one.
Well, the experience of the lake was lame. It was basically 2 feet deep, which is good for little kids, but not fun for a teenager. So stupid me, I decide to go further out to find deeper waters. The water started to get around my waist, but still I wanted more. I finally got close to a buoy. As a dumb teenager, I forgot one important thing: I did not know how to swim!!!!!
I remember thinking I was probably going too far and that it was time to turn around, when all of the sudden, I felt the sand falling away from my under my feet, and a strong cold current pulling me up and pulling me out into the drop off. HOLY SHIT BALLS did I freak out as I felt my body getting submerged. By instinct, I "swam" like hell to get back to safety.
Immediately afterwards, my heart was pounding so loud, I could hear it in my ears. I looked to the lifeguard, but he didn't even notice I was just in trouble. In fact--as far as i could tell--nobody noticed. I got out of the water after that and just sat in the sun stunned at my stupidity. I reluctantly told my sisters about it, and they were shaken because they could see me from a distance, but had no idea I was in trouble.
Not long after I went there, somebody drowned doing the same thing I did, and it closed for a few years. It opened up again, but I never went back. I took lessons to learn to swim not long after my first brush with death.
Prison.
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almost sucked the life out of me! It would have killed anyone else.
For the few times I could have easily died, I was too drunk or ignorant to realize the danger at the time. One was canoeing with a friend. Our goal was to canoe the Flint river from Flushing to Lake Huron. We weren't sure how long it would take--we thought about 3 days. This was June of 1980--the only reason I remember is because we took a cooler with food left over from my little sister's high school open house. We started out late in the afternoon and camped out on a small island just north of either mt. Morris or Vienna Rd. It had rained heavily, so the river was flowing well and deep enough for no problems. The next morning we headed out. We came to a fork in the river, and had to guess which way to go. Eventually we came to the Shiawassee wetlands or whatever it's called, and here we were really pretty clueless. We knew which general direction we needed to go, but where we were was more like swamps and small lakes than a river, so we just tried our best to follow the flow of water. We were in this for hours. We saw all manner of birds, including bald eagles, and I swear vultures...having watched plenty of Westerns, the vultures kind of freaked us out, and we imagined drifting, lost for days on end. We eventually made it to what was obviously the Saginaw river, and stopped at a park in Saginaw by late afternoon / early evening. We bought more beer, and headed down the river. By this point it was dark and we were near the foundry, where the river is more like a channel, and a big grain, ore, or something ship was coming up river. We debated whether to get to shore or try to weather the wake. At the last minute, we decided to pull to shore. Had we not, the wake would have most certainly sunk us, and fully clothed and drunk, I'm not sure we would have made it
We kept going until we were about a mile past I-75 and camped out for the night. The next morning, we headed out. We discovered the wind was so strong that no matter how hard we paddled, the best we could do was stay stationary. At this point, my buddy's shoulder was giving out, so we decided to go up-river. I sat in the back and just steered and we headed up river at a really fast clip, no paddling required. I remember going under one of the bridges with an operator to open for ships coming through. I could see his face clear as day, and just the shock (and I presumed awe) for him to see two idiots out in water that choppy in a canoe. We made it back to the park we had started at before, called for our ride from a pay phone, and made our way back home. That day with the wind was probably the most dangerous, if we were to get crosswise or hit one waves wrong, we could have easily overturned. At least we were mostly sober at this point.