JCC What's the Closest You've Ever Come to Death?

That you know of. I mean, I figure everybody nearly dies all the time without even realizing it. But I've been thinking about this.

This was back when I was in college. I was at a trailer park near where I live, trying to contact some people that had visited my church. They ended up not being home, but I was on their porch knocking on the door when I heard this really loud pop from behind me and then I heard something whiz into the bushes right next to the porch.

Come to find out, some crazy woman on the next street was trying to scare a couple of guys off of her property and she had fired a pistol over their heads. And that was the bullet that had gone through those bushes. Bushes I was like three steps from.

So, yeah, I almost got shot and if I had gotten shot it would have been just totally random wrong-place, wrong-time type thing. I remember that a lot. It oddly didn't scare me at all at the time. I was more angry really, once I found out what the actual deal was. But I think about it a lot now. Who knows what might have happened. I might have been killed or paralyzed or anything. And perhaps this was a formative moment in my transition from gun-rights to gun-control. What an idiot. Coulda killed me.

 

I mean, a family friend's ten year old daughter was killed on the fourth of July a few years ago when some drunk guys fired their guns off across a pond. So that's a very real and very scary possibility in my mind. I imagine that would be rattling for sure, Rogue.


The closest I have ever come to dying was probably while glacier hiking in Alaska when I was eleven. There are these huge fissures in glaciers called moulins, and if you fall in them you're getting dragged under an icy river for about a mile. Yeah, I almost fell in twice. Then our guide started keeping us back a little further. Probably scarier for my family than for me, since I was a kid.

 

The third Hobbit film, or I guess when Burma or Timor had their uprisings in 2006 and 07.

 

Walking home late at night after studying, street thug brandishes a knife and approaches me. I escaped by nothing but pure luck - would have been killed or mugged if not for that.

 

Jesus. Hiking glaciers at eleven. Yeah, I could see that being problematic.

I think that was actually the closest you've come to killing someone else.

 

I was driving from Chicago to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Past St. Louis, there was this surprise ice storm out of nowhere. The road went from perfect to completely coated with ice from one minute to the next, and no one knew it was coming. There was a guy pulling a U-Haul trailer in front of me, and he put on his brakes and I saw him start to skid. Some cars were going off the road into the median of the interstate. Some cars were sliding off the road to the right. But I was coming up too fast behind the U Haul and had no choice but to try to swerve into the right hand lane to avoid slamming into the trailer. The road was so slippery I did a 180 and was actually traveling backwards at about 45 miles per hour. At that point I had no control over the car, but luckily the momentum took me off the interstate to the right hand shoulder, where I landed backward and skidded to a stop between two other cars that had slid off. There wasn't a scratch on the car, and I was perfectly fine, but there was that moment of timelessness when the car was spinning and it felt like I had an absolute eternity to assess the situation and decide that my odds of dying in a nasty collision and pile up were reasonably good but that I wasn't really afraid of anything but killing someone else with my car. One person near me went off into the median ditch and rolled over and was injured. Me and some of the other drivers who had gone off the road on the right crossed over and waited with them until an ambulance came. But the benefit of being in the middle of a really wild situation and coming out untouched is that I haven't really been afraid of anything much since.

 

i was born with a collapsed lung and was kept on a respirator for the first two weeks of my life. that's by far the closest i've come to dying, but since i do not remember it i will recount to you the story of the next closest time.

when i was twenty, about to turn 21, i went to honolulu to visit my friend nathan and celebrate my 21st birthday. it was a glorious vacation. i escaped the snow and darkness of early december and spent an entire month in flip flops, playing in the water and getting drunk and stoned. while i was there we did a bunch of the touristy stuff, and we went to a bunch of shows including steel pulse and the foo fighters, and we drove and hiked to various famous and beautiful spots to go swimming. one of these spots was called china walls.




now i should mention that i am not a strong swimmer. my friend nathan is an alpha male and invincible an every way. great swimmer, great surfer, great at any athletic endeavor he has ever attempted. we show up at this spot. there's no surf so we're the only ones there. you have to jump in from from those wet rocks and the water is like 30 feet deep. so we jump in. we're swimming around, it's great. the swells come past and lift you up as you're just floating there looking up at the sky. just another day on this dream vacation. but then it is time to get out of the water. nathan explains to me that in order to get out you have to let the swell lift you up until you are just at the lip of the rocks and then pull yourself up out of the water. he then proceeds to do this, no problem. but it's not super easy. it's my turn and i'm waiting for a swell that will lift me up high enough. the surf is really flat on the south shore in the winter so most of them don't. finally i choose one. it does lift me up high enough and i grab onto the rocks, but they're wet and slippery and my hands slip and i fall back into the water. at this point i'm a little shaken. "take your time", nathan says, and i back off from the rocks, tread water, and try to regain my composure. okay, breathing easier i attempt it again. but the second attempt goes the exact same way. and this time, already exhausted and a weak swimmer to begin with, i just full-on panic. and in that moment the thought was, "oh ****, gonna drown, gonna die". i mean i really did feel that, even though nathan would have most likely never let me die. and that was it, in the midst of my panic the next swell came. i just flailed my hand out and nathan grabbed it and pulled me to the safety of the rocks.

tl;dr: i almost drowned once.

i was also in a really horrible car accident when i was 18 that could have easily been fatal, but the china walls incident was definitely when i felt my own mortality the most.

 

Probably when I was in second grade and I decided to ride my bike down our very steep and long driveway after my brother taunted me about not doing it. I had planned on stopping in the grass at the bottom on the left (the house was on the right) , but my dad parked his ATV with the trailer there, I got scared and tried to stop with my feet instead of the breaks and I slammed face first into the back of my dad's van.

My parents were told I probably would have died had I not had a helmet on and the only reason I didn't break every bone in my face was because I had on a motorcycle helmet with a strong visor, which shattered on impact. Amazingly I got away with a face covered in bad bruises and minor cuts from where my glasses/visor/taillight broke. (They took the X-Rays twice because they couldn't believe I hadn't broken most of my face.)

 

When I was one year old, I had an extremely bad fever that ruined my hearing. If not for a very good babysitter and the hospital visit, I would probably be dead.

When my family was on vacation in Fiji, my two brothers asked me if I wanted to go on a walk. I thought about it for a little bit, but then told them no, I'd stay behind and read at the hotel. When they got back, they told me about their near-death experience with a bus. They were walking alongside the road (one of those kinds without a sidewalk, just pavement and then dirt and rocks). They were several feet away from the edge of the pavement. Then the bus came along and was mere inches from wiping out one of my brothers. What if I had chosen to go along on the walk? Would all three of us have walked side by side? Who would have been on the end nearest to the road? What would have happened?

edit:

tom, have you become a better swimmer since then?

 

When I was a kid, we would visit the beach and I would play in the ocean although I couldn't really swim. I would try not to go out where the water would get over my head, but sometimes you would step in a sinkhole and get into trouble. I experienced several of these although there was three different occasions that I got in real trouble and people had to go out into the ocean and help me out. Once was a marine and my father, once it was my older sister, and once it was a lifeguard. I also almost stepped out in front of a car and got hit once.

Moral of the story is even if you watch your kids, they are still kids and do stupid risky stuff.

 

Hit by a car while on my bike when I was seventeen. I was only bruised, aside from a small cut on my head, but it could have been a lot worse. It was a head-on collision with a car that was leaving a convenience store driveway (and accelerating in the process, I would say). I was also hustling to make the light, a mistake I endeavored never to make again. I was sent flying into the air, which was very fortunate for me, since I could have also gone underneath the car.

The driver got out to make sure I was alive, and then quickly drove off. A passing high school classmate picked me up on the side of the road and took me to my mom's work. A fellow high school student of mine had been seriously injured in a similar accident not too long before that same year.

 

I've mentioned them before in similar threads I think.

1. I was born a month premature with all the associated problems. My memory of that time is a bit hazy. That's probably the closest I've come to dying.

2. I got scarlet fever when I was about 8. It shouldn't have been a big deal, but the emergency room doctor misdiagnosed it as just the flu (I WAS BOILING AND I HAD A RASH YOU MORON). I had gotten chicken pox the year before and I remember people always whining about how terrible that was. Scarlet fever was much, much worse for me. Chicken pox was nothing. I'm not sure how close I actually came to death, but if my pediatrician hadn't corrected the diagnosis the day after the ER visit I probably would've had an even rougher time of it. Hey, it was around Halloween too. Happy anniversary to me. Crappy life events seem to like Halloween.

 

I had a flatmate OD in the house.. twice. (she survived & moved out before we could give her the boot)
Pretty scary when you see them, they are not moving, eyes open staring into nothing

 

I had a knife held to my throat while "I'll ****ing kill you" was being screamed.

Another time I was choked outside a bar by a drunk person.

Got in a car accident once and hit a tree head on.

Had an ex boyfriend who one night was trashed and decided to drive on the opposite side of a very winding road (completely on it) into head on traffic, on and off for a 20 min. drive.



I've had a lot of illnesses and whatnot but I guess those are the most times in life in order that I felt the most at risk of death.

Yes I had to deal with an ex doing this. It's the worst.

 

How did you get out of it?

 

nope! i'm pretty land locked. the only options here are a freezing river and the city pool. basically the only time i swim is on vacation.

 

In that case...



But only if you've got some serious cash to burn.

 

My ex was down the hall and used the classic "fight me like a man, why do you have to use a knife", which surprisingly worked and got his attention off me. He then disarmed him and we split, called the cops. The cops didn't do anything because LA. There were many knife holes in my door since though, he stabbed the crap out of it after we locked ourselves in my apt.

I can only explain the situation with that the guy was probably on a lot of drugs. There's no other reason why someone would do any of that drama.

 

Similar to how I escaped my knife wielding maniac - good timing.

 

Nearly drowning in neighbours pool

 

i too have been held at knife point by a maniac! outside of the greyhound bus station in chicago. he just wanted my money tho, so i gave it to him. all i had on me was $52.00.

 

Just to give Dani another white privilege thing to bug me about:

My closest time dying was probably almost choking to death on steak whilst on a safari in the middle of the Masai Mara in Africa when I was nine years old. I wish I were making that age up as a part of the inside joke thing, but it's absolutely true.

Turned blue, buggy eyes, whole thing.

Second closest: only a couple of years later, trying to practice jaywalking like a real New Yorker on my walk to school in the morning and misjudging a truck.

 

When I was a kid in Pakistan living with my grandparents, we went to a restaurant I liked one night. That night, a former employee who had apparently been cheated by his employer (the owner of that restaurant) decided to destroy his former employer's restaurant. We were with family friends. We finished our food, left, and stood outside in the parking area, where my grandparents and their friends were discussing something. The restaurant then exploded. I don't remember how big the explosion was (it felt big from my 6 year old perspective), but I do remember it being loud. Very loud. I don't recall any of us going flying from the shockwave because we were...decently far. Scared the **** out of me for weeks, though.

Had we been in the restaurant at the time.....ugh.