Ionce while hiking in the desert I fell off a sandstone monolith and landed in a bush that broke my fall. If Id missed the bush I'd have hit rocks and died, ants would have eaten my corpse.
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When I was a kid I put a yellow cherry pit up my nose while my family and I were on a bus. I remember trying to dig it out, but pushing it deeper every time I did until I started sneezing uncontrollably. By this point I was crying, but it was so far up that nobody could see it and thought I was lying. The bus driver stopped doing his route and took us to the nearest hospital. They were able to find it and 3 nurses held me down while the doctor stuck some medical pliers up my nose to pull it out. After wards the doctor said that had it been 1 centimeter deeper I would have asphyxiated to death and yelled at my parents for letting me have small object.
About 25 years ago, my car was struck by another, in the rain, with very poor visibility, on a two-lane highway, going around a curve. I came to and discovered that my car was on its roof, and I had gotten out of it while dazed. I was about 3 feet away from traffic that was passing by, facing the highway, and had almost walked out into traffic.
I was in 3 car accidents over the course of three years, all of which the car I was in was totaled.
The worst of the three was one of those secondary, peak rush-hour accidents. I was on a two lane freeway (two lanes one direction, two lanes the other with a cement divider in the middle) around rush-hour with a pretty heavy amount of traffic but moving fast. I was going between 60 and 70 and in a really good mood. Iβd just spent the whole day making music with one of my best friends with crazy vintage equipment and I was on my way to play a show that night. I was daydreaming and looked away from the road for a second, looked back and saw break lights. So I tapped my breaks, but then in a split second I realized those break lights were coming super fast. I did the exact wrong thing and slammed on my breaks. I donβt know exactly what happened, but I was hit from both the front and the back. I was driving a tiny two seater from the early 90s, not exactly the safest car. I felt around myself and I seems to be all in one piece. No pain anywhere. Iwas able to squeeze my way up out of the car, bewildered. I didnβt seem to have any injuries at all. The car looked like a crushed tin can. I went to the hospital just in case and itβs a good thing I did because as the shock wore off I discovered I had a bruised rib that was making it very hard to breathe. But that was my only injury. They gave me painkillers and sent me on my way.
I spent the next year in a fog of painkillers and existential despair and confusion. To this day I have trouble driving and I frequently question whether Iβm actually alive or living out a dream in the dying seconds of my mind.
Help me out, with impact imminent, why is breaking hard the wrong thing to do? I get that it gives the car behind you just as little reaction time which might cause a chain reaction, but the end result appears to be the same to me?
I hit by knee really hard on a tree when I went snowboarding I had to wait an hour to have my brother come carry me to his car. If I didn't have my phone with me I could have frozen to death
One time, my blood sugar was 26 mg/dl. Can confirm, felt close to death, surprisingly conscious.
Took over 400 sedative type pills in under 40 minutes, tried to o.d. homeless shelter staff found my unconscious body covered in puke the next morning. From an hour after taking pills to 18 hours later... complete black, like I wasn't here. Coming back to this reality was slow, painful, surreal. Nurses afterward said I nearly died, or did die and they brought me back.
An experience unlike any other.
To make a very long story (as it is a long, but boring story) short, my health had deteriorated due to a health condition of mine. I waited almost too long to go to the ER (which the "why" is a long rant that I'll save for another day). I'd lost about 70 pounds in the span of maybe two or three(?) months, and was just skin and bones. Ended up needing surgery to repair some major damage that had occurred, and was in the hospital for a month due to all of it.
When I was originally admitted from the ER to the hospital, the doctor had told me that if I had waited any longer I probably would've been dead as the damage would've not been reversible.
I'm certainly no stranger to my condition causing my health to decline a lot, but that was definitely the first (and thankfully only) time that it had gotten that close to killing me.
That time that a teen with an M16 with safety off, loaded and set to full auto turned around and aimed it at me (and a few others) because he needed help (Would love to shit on US gun laws but this was not in the US)
Iβve had a surprisingly similar experience, in the army, although it was a Diemaco C7. I was following behind one of my conscripts on a live fire walking/pop-up target trail, as a safety officer, and near the end of the trail, the dumbass turns around, finger on trigger, full-auto and starts chatting with the rifle pointed straight at me.
I very calmly asked him to lower his rifle to the ground, the unload it, the tore him a new one. Then I went and sat down for a bit.
I was trying to overtake a car on a narrow street with just two lanes going in opposite directions. I was way above the speed limit and another car was coming at me. Luckily, the other driver had noticed an idiot ahead and braked. I barely avoided them as I rejoined my lane in a narrow gap between two cars.
As soon as it had ended, I realized how stupid and dangerous it was. I could've died and killed innocent people. What scares me the most is that every other person on the road is the same human species as me. People make these idiotic decisions in a split second, without thinking, and you read about yet another horrific crash on the news. I was very lucky not to cause one.
Now I employ a very different approach to driving.
Tried to crash my car into a bridge stanchion, chickened out, tore the mirror off.
I have not seen myself closed enough until now. Just think that could be anytime and anywhere but nothing has really frightened me.
For everyone who thinks they were never that close it was probably while driving or crossing the street. It just takes one distracted driver and you're passing thousands of them.
Yeah
Probably when I had covid and my blood oxygen (as measured on the at home fingertip reader) went down in the 80s. Came back by the time I got seen at the ER both times though.
I fell on my neck after taking a swing too big on a hammock. I wasn't close at all, but it hurt like heck and I didn't feel good for a few days. Pain was comparable to getting hit in the balls.
As a kid I ate a rowanberry. Believe that must have been it. Otherwise almost a carcrash on highway, when someone pulled over straight to the left lane, where we we're to make space, when the vehicle entered the highway.