Posted on 07/06/2013 7:15:44 PM PDT by MNDude
It seems almost everyone has a story of how they almost drowned, almost drove off a cliff, or narrowly dodged a bullet. What is your story of the closest you came to dying?
Your experience reminded me that, yes, I did have a real close call. Driving over to Georgia in 1962 to see a girlfriend, I was driving at night and was awoken from my slumbers by the feeling that I was no longer horizontal. The car was going down a hill. I was able to stop it. My laundry had the rest of the story.
I was watching the powder guys load ANFO in a series of holes and heard the horn blow, signaling the charges would be set off. I notice two or three of the holes “rifled,” shooting chunks of shale high into the air.
I thought, “Maybe I should step into the pickup,” and as I did, a 30 pound chunk landed exactly where I was standing.
Your mom and dad must be much like my wife and I. If, and they never would, one of my kids gave my wife the finger, he or she would wish they were dead.
If the 'they' is parents, I can answer that. We want grandchildren.
Broke my neck in a scrum playing rugby in 1971. Spent a month as a quadriplegic, but mostly recovered. If that wasn’t bad enough, I tell the nurse “I think my breathing stops when I take these pills and sleep”. She says, “calm down now and take your pills” (painkillers and muscle relaxants). I didn’t take the pills after that, stayed awake. And here I am.
Artillery shell IED targeting my hatch in my Stryker on Route Minneapolis in Mosul, Iraq, in late 2006. My first enemy contact!
Didn’t do anything except make me eat dirt and give me a slight sunburn on my left side, but it could’ve been much worse.
In 1972 on the highway I hit head on a car with a drunk driver who suddenly came over into my lane. I was DOA in Shands, the UF hospital, because they had an ER full from a couple of other auto wrecks and triage said I was low priority. They put a DOA card on my chest and wheeled my gurney against the wall in the hall. 2 med students saw the designated corpse and one picked up a wrist and noticed no rigor mortis yet. They decided to practice their life-saving techniques. The dead guy responded. Such is what I was told by a nurse and the bone doctor when I was across the street in the VA hospital. I don’t countenance people complaining about teaching hospitals or the prospect of students working on them.
On the plus side, you got rid of the pot belly.
PS: I was on a CB 450.
I had a really bad case of pneumonia when I was 17. I was hospitalized. Water was building up in my lungs and I could barely breath. It was touch and go for a couple of days but I pulled out of it. However, for several years afterwards, I would get pneumonia every winter. I could always tell the exact moment it would return because it was signaled by sudden shortness of breath. The good news is after several years the pneumonia failed to return, ever.
>Tough to say which one put me closest to death. THere are the wrong place/wrong time kinds (round fired by a weapon on a tripod about 2k yards buzzed past my ear and flipped my hair before striking the embankment I was climbing and making a good portion of it magically disappear and then...after a few seconds...rain down on me).<
.
I can relate to that. May 68 south of Saigon my Infantry Company walked up to a battalion strength unit of NVA at a hamlet. I was a few hundred feet from some dug in heavy MG bunkers and was relieved to see a Huey gunship banking in a turn to fire on it. Then to my horror I saw a volley of 2.75 rockets fire from the gunship with one dropping short coming towards my position. I buried my face and the rocket hit a few feet behind me punching shrapnel thru my chest taking down a lung and thru my leg. We were pinned down by heavy fire for 8 hours with no chance of extraction and with only 1 lung working was the longest 8 hrs of my life. They were finally able to get some armor in behind us and get the wounded a mile back for dustoff. I was 18 at the time.
Three years ago both my kidneys failed t happened literally in a matter of hours. I called my dad at 9 pm an d told him I felt really sick but I would call a doctor in the am
He woke up at 1am with a premonition i was dying. I just recall being in such pain I couldn’t move, I couldn’t get to the phone, and by the time I did I was wimpering like a wounded animal. Dad got an ambulance. The cops had to come to bust the door open and I was starting to,die. When thru brought me to the hospital they said both kidneys had stopped functioning and the urine was poisoning the blood. If my dad hasn’t dreamed about me I would have been dead about an hour or two later,
Wjen I was 15, I was riding my bike down a 2 lane highway. The weekend before, my uncle had given me a helmet. 1977...not an easy time to convince, but he told me it would save my life someday. He was a lawyer, so I listened. I was hit by a car driven by a worker for the (yeah, I know) Michigan Highway Safety Department. Dead for three minutes.
I once knew a beautiful and extremely talented girl who was blind, and the reason she was blind is that she was born prematurely and they gave her oxygen and that oxygen somehow damaged her eyes, blinding her.
She was one year older than me, and I was born in 1955.
I don’t know when you were born, but if it was in or before that time frame - and you can see - you are very lucky.
Thanks for that story.
Yes, Our Lord is at work all around us. There is no doubt of it.
I was a school kid who was brought home by school bus. Actually, the bus didnt drop me off at my home, but instead a whole long block and a half from my house.
Back in those days, the school buses werent equipped with those little pop out stop signs like they are today. Nor did they have flashing red lights when it dropped off or picked up us kids. But it still was the law for cars to stop behind school buses when the buses stopped to drop off or pick up passengers.
One day the bus let me off the usual northwest corner. In order to get home, I had to cross over the two way to go south. I went around to the front of the bus. The bus blocked my view of oncoming traffic, so I tried to peek around the bus, but saw and heard nothing. I went to cross when all of the sudden, a sports car came out of nowhere and zipped by at a high rate of speed right within an inch of me, illegally passing the stopped bus. I was shook up. Had I not been so cautious to cross the street, I would have been dead.
I remember clearly one afternoon I decided to see what would happen if I pulled out a plug part way and touched both prongs simultaneously. That was a useful lesson.
At one point I built a power supply so I could play around with some old CRT’s that had come into my possession. It was good for about 1500 volts, no idea how much current, but I suspect it had lethal potential. I was pretty careful with it, though.
Eventually ended up with a cheap Heathkit oscilloscope.
Heard a remote-controlled airplane and looked up, directly above me, at the precise moment that the tail detached from the large plane. (5-foot wing span)
It was flying straight down, directly at me, too fast for reaction - not even an adrenalin rush.
It crashed onto the sidewalk three feet in front of me.
Someone either wants me here or is overdue for target practice.
;-)
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