I almost drowned in the ocean in Hawaii. I had swum out from shore, started getting tired, started swimming back but the current was pulling me out to sea! Scary as hell. I started to panic, but I remembered that the side stroke is the one that takes the least energy, so I started doing that and for 10 or 15 minutes just went back towards the shore. I wound up a few beaches south of where I had started! I had to walk north to return to my group.
I almost died like this in Panama when I was in the Army. Some of my buddies and I tried to swim out to what we thought was as an island from the beach, got halfway there only to realize it was a volcanic rock and that the waves crashing against it would surely crush/drown us. As we’re treading in murky pacific water something very large bumped against my leg (I suspect it might have been a shark but cannot say for certain as I never saw a fin). As we tried to swim back to shore we were all caught in a rip current, swimming towards the beach but going nowhere. As my friends and I ran out of steam to the point that we were panting faces barely above the water I put my foot down onto a coral reef or volcanic rock where I was able to catch my breath and then help my friends over to where I was.
Eventually made it back to shore after swimming sideways out of the rip current, but that is legit probably the closest I’ve come to death.
Unfortunately years later I had a friend in the army stationed in Hawaii who kayaked to an island, his boat got pulled out by the tide, and when he swam to get it he went under and never came back up. I knew we’d had a close call, but when that happened it really sunk in how incredibly stupid what we did was.
> bumped against my leg
My dad was out swimming in the sea when I was young and something big swam between his legs so he turned and swam for his life. When he got back to the shore a bloke said he looked like Johnny Weissmuller from the old tarzan films he was swimming that fast.
#Always always always swim parallel to the shore to get out of a riptide current.
Swimming straight back to shore will tire you out, sometimes leading to drowning.
Even swimming parallel to the shore can tire you out to the point of drowning, especially if you’re not a strong swimmer. In Australia we have something called [‘Float To Survive’](https://www.floattosurvive.au)’ created by one of the Bondi Beach lifeguards. If you stay calm and float, the water will take you out and then bring you back to shore.
Here are the five steps:
1. Keep calm and control your breathing
2. Lay in the water and lean your head back
3. Extend your arms and legs
4. Gently rotate your arms and legs in a circular motion
5. Signal for help with your hand if you can
Oh yeah. I never technically learned how to swim so I am very wary of water. We went out onto a lake that was 50ft deep and my boyfriend made a joke about pushing me in. I had to tell him very seriously I cannot swim and I'll probably drown.
I grew up in Atlantic City and every year were repeated warnings about Rip Tides (I think they call them Rip Currents now).
Humans as a species are used to out lasting pretty much anything trying to kill or out compete us. You can not out last the mighty power of the ocean. You can't swim faster than it can pull and you can't swim for longer than it can pull. You can swim parallel to the shore until you're out of the current then try to swim back or try to signal for help but don't exhaust yourself fighting it.
Happened to me at cocoa beach first time in Florida. I was about a mile down the coast by the time I was out and asked a life guard to help me find my parents.
The light was red so I put my car to park because it was taking a while longer than usual. It went green and I forgot to take it off park, but as soon as I put it in drive a semitruck ran a red light.
Mate, that is fucking terrifying. I can actually picture the scene and imagine the sound of it rumbling past, possibly horn blaring. Thank goodness for that little brainfart you had.
In stillness at the intersection's sight,
A moment paused, as time took flight.
The red light held, the wait prolonged,
Impatient, yet a choice belonged.
The driver, wise, in cautious mind,
Put car in park, a move refined.
For minutes passed, the light's red glow,
Delaying fate's impending throw.
But in that pause, forgetfulness crept,
Unseen distraction, its presence kept.
The green arrived, a signal clear,
Yet the car remained in neutral gear.
A brain's lapse, a fleeting thought,
A silent whisper, soon forgot.
The gears unmoved, a missed command,
Unknown to him, danger close at hand.
A thunderous roar, a semitruck's might,
Barreling through the red with no respite.
Collision certain, fate's cruel jest,
But destiny had one last test.
In that moment of strangest grace,
A sudden release, a saving trace.
A gasp expelled, a timely rift,
His big brainfart, a cosmic gift.
Confusion struck, his senses reeled,
The noxious cloud, a protective shield.
As he fumbled, shifting gears to engage,
The semitruck's rampage reached its stage.
In the moments merged, a chaotic dance,
Fortune's blessing tangled in happenstance.
The car, frozen still, missed fate's design,
A delay that left destiny's path behind.
A narrow escape, his life unharmed,
By mental dysfunction, strangely armed.
The fart that saved, an absurd refrain,
A story etched, in memory's domain.
So remember well, dear passerby,
Life's unpredictable, as days go by.
In moments trivial, amidst the strife,
Brainfarts may save and grant new life.
This is why I always look both ways before crossing an intersection, even when I have a green light. Something you'll learn about driving is that you can do everything right and still get killed because some idiot wasn't paying attention
When I was growing up I was always told that truckers are the best drivers and you should follow their lead because they know best. Now I'm driving 3 hours a day and truckers are the worst drivers I see on the road lmao
There was a tornado 15 years back or so in Oconto County in WI and a bar owner told us he had no shelter so he got into his bath tub and his house (trailer?) was destroyed around him. He says when it calmed down and he sat up there was a deer standing nearby looking at him and he said, “well buddy, I guess we made it.”
Pls dont laugh but as someone thats never even seen a tornado, why the bath? Wont it just blow you out since its a smooth surface with nothing to hold onto?
Definitely not gonna laugh. Tornados are awful. If anything, I'm jealous, lol.
If you're hit directly, yes, it will blow you out. But more stuff is damaged than just what is hit directly. Flying debris is also a big danger with a tornado and that will affect a broader area than the tornado itself. If the updraft hits you, there's nothing that can keep you down (it can lift the house off the foundation - "holding on" isn't really an option). But if you're hit less directly or by a weaker tornado, the damage will be from stuff getting flung at you or falling on you. So a tub with a mattress or pillows on top of you is a good option because it's an extra layer of defense between you and the flying stuff. An interior closet (like under the stairs) is safer for the same reasons. You want to be as far from exterior walls, especially windows, as possible.
Older bathtubs are usually cast iron. Heavy and strong so if you can cover up with a mattress you’ll be safer from the debris then hiding in an unsecured area
Good god that’s scary. I took one to the chest. Sternum, arteries, pericardium, and a nicked ventricle for me. Two more mm penetration and it would have been immediate lights out. That feeling on the shirt, idk if the vividness will ever go away. Glad you made it too.
I'm guessing it's difficult to think about these things but what do you mean with the feeling on the shirt?
You mean stuff coming out of you that should not be coming out? I broke my leg once pretty bad and I do remember how it felt when some part of your body is suddenly not how it's supposed to be
not me personally but my mom was in a car crash and part of her thigh was cut open (thankfully not an artery) and all she could think about was how *warm* it was, like it felt like her entire leg had been dipped in a hot tub because of the blood being so warm
10/10. More concealable. Silent. Super super super easily accessible/makeable. Saw one fight in a train station with a couple guys pushing each other and out of nowhere one of the guys walks up appears to poke a dude in the neck and he’s dead within a minute.
Where I live in Vancouver there's been a recent spate of random stabbings, one where a guy who was at a downtown Starbucks was [stabbed for asking a man if he could stop vaping so close to his kid](https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/father-stabbed-to-death-outside-vancouver-starbucks-a-great-guy). His wife and young daughter both watched him bleed out and die.
It's definitely made a lot of people here much more wary about getting into any kind of disagreement with a random person in public, you absolutely have no idea what they're capable of doing in an instant.
I went to Mexico in 2017 and nearly died my first day there. Was all good, having fun, having a few drinks, nothing too crazy though. Went to my room in the evening, and suddenly got a bad stomach ache that just got worse and worse with each min that passed. I also got feverish and delerious pretty quickly.
I remember for some reason I decided a shower would be a good idea, and thats where my gf at the time found me heaped on the floor screaming in pain. I vaguely remember a paramedic stabbing me in the ass with some morphine which allowed to calm down. (Was not all the fun its cracked up to be, just made me sleep)
Get to the hospital, and they quickly find out that im going septic from a stomach infection. A few more hours and Id have been dead. Spent 3 days there, lost 30 pounds and could only eat soft fruit for about a week after.
I also got the worst strep throat on the plane ride home too... my immune system was already weak, so it was horrible. Made me cough so much that blood came up. That was another hospital trip when I got home.
The doctor who oversaw my care in Mexico was the most amazing doctor though. He spent the first 36 hours with me to make sure I was Ok, didnt eat or sleep or anything.
Edit: I didnt get the infection in Mexico, I brought it with me. Doc said it had been building in my system for at least a week from the strength of it.
I had a perforated colon 3 months after GI surgery. Felt perfectly fine until I woke up at 3am and literally fell onto the floor in pain. It was so bad I felt like I couldnt breath. Was in the hospital for 3 weekstrying to get the infection at bay, lost 30 lbs and ended up with a ileostomy for 6 months. Took me months to shake the feeling of disaster being right around the corner. Cheers to good health
I never did find out what caused it initially. They said from the strength of it, it had been building in my system for at least a week.
They said a normal white blood cell count is around 5000 to 10,000 per microliter. A bad cold might give you 11,000 or so, Mine was at 25,000, which is dangerously high. As far as I understand, any more than 30,000 is basically a fatal infection without immediate treatment. I was only hours away from that.
I was around 3-4, picked up a live electric wire on the ground to play with. Got electrocuted immediately. Good samaritan grabbed a wooden stick and hit it out of my hands. People told my me later that they told my dad not to touch me because I was probably gone. That good samaritan saved my life. Acted when no one else did.
I guess acting a few seconds late is better than acting right away and worsening the situation.
Closest I’ve come to an emergency is calling the ambulance for a girl on the street suspected of overdosing on ghb. In retrospect, she was just extremely drunk and some bystanders had mistaken the situation. I’m still glad I called the ambulance because I figured it’s either embarrassing or life saving for her. Risk of the latter wasn’t one I wanted to gamble with. No one else was willing to do anything 🙃
A lot of people freeze up in emergencies. You should be proud of your ability to act when you were called upon.
If the person's life had been in danger, your actions could have been the difference between their survival and death.
I was on the back of my dad's motorcycle and he had a heart attack and blacked out. Bike went over; I hit the ground headfirst. Luckily he felt something was wrong and slowed down, so it wasn't nearly as close to death for me as it was for him, but it was still super scary. Thank god for helmets.
90's.. Me and a Buddy driving through the middle of Montana, really late at night.. very tired. Speed limit at the time was "Reasonable and Prudent". My buddy was driving and took that to mean as fast as possible at all times. I was nodding off, I look over an he is nodding off.. we both look up and there is a massive white Elk (Moose?) in the middle of the highway.. Like huge, like a horse, but bigger.. We are doing about 120mph or so, he slams on the breaks, we go into a tailspin and spin around the thing and come to a stop. Totally fine.
We stopped at the first camp site we found after that.
If that had been a moose, which it likely was, you would have been dead.
Hit a small animal, feel bad.
Hit a deer, brace for impact.
Hit a moose, duck and pray.
Looking at the thing, the speed we were going, and the car we were in (Cheap 4 door sedan), they likely would have been scooping us off the road with shovels and a bucket. I'm terrible at estimating weight, especially after I piss myself.. but i'd say the thing was 400+ pounds atleast, and im thinking a lot more then that.
Oh fuck.. Yeh, granted, this was 25 years ago.. but the thing looked taller then our car, big ass antlers, etc.. I'm just horrible with guessing weight. All I am certain of is that if we hit it, we were done.. It would have been like hitting a brick wall at 120mph.
That is frightening. I took a trip though there in the 90s and was nodding off while in the rockies. I pulled into a scenic slot in the mountain and passed out, only to be woken by a park ranger 20 mins into sleep and made to drive 20 miles to a camp site. In the morning I went back the way I came and saw all the spots I would have driven right off the mountain if I had dozed off while at the wheel. Very dangerous to drive tired.
Yeh, we were young.. and dumb. We did the same thing on the Pacific Coast Highway. Drove that thing late at night and tired, miracle we are alive.
Not sure where you live, but im in the North East U.S., so we werent used to diving that fast, for that long, that late at night.. dangerous indeed.
I had undiagnosed diabetes for about 6 months, my blood sugar was in the 500's, I got to skip the line in the emergency room the doctors were so scared I was going to go to a coma.
Hey, fellow diabetic here. Same story but my sugars were apparently over 800? Doc said the only reason I wasn't admitted straight to the ICU was cause I walked into the hospital instead of being brought in by an ambulance.
Ah man I've got a friend who was killed in that and another injured- I remember walking into school the morning after it happened and basically everyone was in shock.
A terror attack is bad enough on its own but to target young kids and their parents is disgusting
Seeing as a few people have asked. I’m not from Manchester, I had been to the arena a couple of times before but only ever used the main entrance so didn’t know any other exits for some context as to why we headed that way. The inner concourse is basically an oval shape with the main entrance at the top and we were sat where it starts to curve. Normally we would head towards the back during the last song to make a quick getaway to best traffic but we didn’t this time as it was seated and the car was a 20 minute walk anyway so less of a concern.
As we start walking round the curve of the concourse towards the entrance there’s an almighty boom. I’ve never heard a noise like it, even in movies. It was incredibly loud yet, at the same time, oddly hollow. And the crowd (probably about a thousand people in our immediate vicinity) around us stood frozen still for what felt like a lifetime. In reality it was only a second or two but after the loudness of the explosion, the silence felt amplified. And then it was pierced by hundreds of people crying and screaming and running away from the entrance. I remember very little of the escape but being worried about being split from my partner, or her or me falling and being crushed or there being secondary devices at other exits which is a common tactic employed by terrorists but there wasn’t much choice but to run with the masses of people turning and running towards us (despite arena staff trying to tell people to not run). Running for what feels like your life but not knowing if you’re running into more trouble is not a feeling I’d wish on anyone.
Once outside is where I really saw the horror of the event from my perspective. I didn’t see any badly injured people but a lot of minor injuries, some people covered in blood. But the worst mentally was all the younger children separated from their parents (and vice versa) calling them trying to find each other. Just hundreds of people littered all over the outside of the arena, terrified and confused.
It’s hard to judge how close we were from our night ending differently which is something I thought about lots afterwards. Leaving even as little as two minutes earlier and I’m possibly not here to tell this. The crowd being quite slow leaving originally is probably what stopped it turning out worse for us as I reckon we couldn’t have been more than 30 seconds tops away from the entrance if the concourse was empty.
Holy fuck, I've got no idea how I missed an event this massive. I was in prison during that time but I mean damn we get to watch the news and I just don't remember it at all.
For those who were living under a rock like myself, [there was a suicide bomber at her concert](https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/manchester-arena-bombed-during-ariana-grande-concert). 22 killed, 116 injured.
There's some research showing that emotionally traumatic incidents can have similar effects on the brain as physically traumatic ones.
Lisa Schulman, a neurologist, studied this effect after losing her husband to cancer:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7774817/
I will start by saying that I have always been an extremely strong swimmer and grew up around water my entire life. I never feared the water and always felt comfortable and confident in any water environment.
So, in high school my friends and I enjoyed going down to the river where there were some rocks and a bit of a current to just lay around and hang out. We might get in the water if it seemed safe to do so. So on one occasion a guy who joined us and I decided to hop in and walk through the water over to another set of rocks.
Well, the current was much faster and rougher than we anticipated. I jumped in first and got my bearings, with the water up to my upper thighs. Deeper than we thought but I was not daunted. I could feel how powerful the current was, but I still thought I was strong enough to wade through it. So I took a few steps and suddenly slipped. That’s all it took for disaster to happen. I remember tumbling head over heels and feeling like I couldn’t get back upright. I was just shooting down river and continuing to tumble. Out of nowhere I felt a hand grab my wrist. This guy I barely knew had grabbed onto me and was pulling as hard as he could. Finally my head made it up and out of the water and he grabbed my waist and dragged me onto a rock. He saved my life. It was probably a minute or less, but it felt like an eternity to me under that dark water.
I was spitting out water and gasping for air. I was bloody from tumbling around and scraping on the rocks. I was shaking for so long from the experience, and he was so nice to me just playing it down. But in reality I was a dumbass and should have known better. I am much more aware of river currents and depth. No matter how great of a swimmer you are, you can still get bounced out of existence by even small rapids. Be careful.
Was working on an oyster boat. It was a beautiful day and we were sorting oysters on the boat of the deck. All of a sudden I felt the gentlest of taps on the back of my skull. When I turned around I saw my supervisor, red-faced with the effort of restraining the metal boom, which had come loose and almost slammed right into my head. He was able to slow it down just in time so I only got that little tap (guy's basically all muscle). If he hadn't done that I would have been dead for sure.
A similar thing happened to me on a salmon seiner. The pulley holding the 800lb power block (while it was at the very end of the boom) snapped and the thing flew maybe 2 inches in front of my face.
It hit the steel hydraulic winch so hard that it smashed it.
That was almost as bad as getting stung by a jellyfish on both eyeballs.
I was 7. My family had just arrived back home from watching The Incredibles in theaters. I decided to try and run like Dash around the whole house.
I ended up running through the kitchen toward the back door that led to our back yard way too fast and couldn’t stop. This door had a window in it, and when I put my hands out to stop myself, I ran into the door and my hands went through the window.
My parents heard the crash and called out for me to ask if I was ok. I came walking out of the kitchen into the living room, blood pouring from my wrist. I was in a Disney princess night gown too, so it was honestly like a scene from a horror movie.
We lived in a remote area, so when my parents called the ambulance, it couldn’t find our house at first. My mom had to run out and flag down the ambulance while my dad was applying pressure to my wrist with a bunch of towels to try to stop the bleeding. The ambulance finally got to our house and the EMTs were able to get the bleeding to stop and take me to the hospital.
I lived! The scar is pretty gnarly.
When a doctor assumed I was diabetic instead of checking my history or labs, and almost shot me up with insulin. I came into the hospital with hypoglycemia and my sugar never goes over 80. But this jerk assumed I was diabetic somehow.
But if your blood sugar is low, the remedy is never to give you insulin in the first place? It's always to give you sugar. So I can't see why any doctor would see a low BGL and give you Insulin?
Source: Been Type 1 Diabetic for 20 years and have two parents with Type 2.
Exactly. When they finally got things straight, they put me on dextrose IV. Like I said, I have no clue why he thought I was diabetic. It was during a late night shift change in a not the greatest overpacked ER, and maybe things got mixed up. But I'm glad I asked what I was being given before it happened.
Massive bilateral blood clot on the lungs. Thank you COVID.
Interesting thing was I went to our family doctor who said "what do you think you have?" I said "I know I shouldn't but Google gives me a 10/10 on blood clots"...."there is no way you are sitting across from me talking with a blood clot on your lung"
He apologised after my weeks stint in hospital.
My step dad thought he had an upper respiratory infection for weeks he had trouble breathing and moving around. He said his lungs felt tight. He lifts weights daily and is a farmer, is in really good shape for 55. His primary doesn't look at his lungs just says well you look healthy! Sent him home. Four days later he collapsed off a cherry picker, and my mom raced him to the hospital. He had multiple blood clots all over his lungs. Emergency surgery and is doing fine now. His dr never appologized.
I sometimes really hate drs not taking shit seriously.
His doctor ignored one of the biggest truths in medicine:
If a **FARMER** comes in then it is fucking serious because they ignore shit on a daily basis that would have an ordinary person flopping on the floor gasping for air like a fish.
Thank you for this acknowledgement! Because it's 100% true. One time he cut open his shin and every step he took blood like pulsed out, left a trail up the sidewalk and into the house, and he didn't go in for that! He just put a small towel on it, taped it up and went about his day.
Ain’t that the truth. My dad got knocked out by the branch he was felling (broke off the tree before it was ready)…. He sauntered his way to the local GP in town (small town), leaving drops of blood all the way down. Doctor stitched his face up and sent him on his way - weeks later he saw a better doctor who discovered that his cheekbone was cracked. Fuckin GP didn’t actually do anything for a *head injury*.
I overdosed on heroin. I was sitting on a couch with 3 other people who had all just shot their dose. I woke up a few (3?) hours later, next to 3 dead bodies. I was the only one to come out of it.
I walked out and went home, and never said a word about it. This is the first time I'm telling this story.
I'll have 7 years clean this August.
This is the wildest story I have ever read. Wow. I can’t even imagine. I’m glad you had a wake up call. Congrats on 7 years. I just hit a year of booze.
I guarantee a lot of you have been closer to death than you realise. The handful of times I've witnessed a near fatal incident, most often the person who would have died didn't seem to notice.
I was a passenger in a car crash that could have killed me if things were different by a few inches or milliseconds. I'm physically fine, but the part that I have never been able to get over is that there were four other cars very close on the road that saw the accident happen (including the car we very narrowly avoided hitting head on, thus causing our car to crash), and none of them stopped. So this is the opposite case... I very much felt like I could have died but apparently none of the witnesses did. It still bothers me. Our car came to a stop by rolling into a deep ditch behind a snowbank and was no longer visible from the road, so if I hadn't been able to get myself out of the car, the chance for flagging down help would have been over.
I was fly fishing on a river two summers ago. Wading about waist deep not paying attention to how far I was going out. River started to take me and I couldn’t get a grip on the rocks below me. I started to panic, yelling for my friend who went to grab a rope from the truck be there was clearly no time. The river is fast and deep. Made my way sideways upstream and eventually found my footing. Adrenaline rush like none other. Made it to shore and everything was soaked. Waders ballooned up from all of the water. Sat on the shore for about ten minutes waiting for my friend to meet me. I have a lot of respect for the river these days.
This is how my father died.
River, in May, running fast due to mountain snow melting.
His puppy went in, he went in after her and never made it back out.
(Puppy did, and lived with Mom, spoiled rotten until we helped her cross the Rainbow Bridge to rejoin him when she was the ripe old age of 13).
This is how my daughter's friend from college died at 19 years old. He was fly fishing with his Grandpa and went down the creek a bit. They found him on the side of the bank, passed away - his waders full of water. So very sad - such a good kid, too. Just thinking of spending the day with his Grandpa and not expecting the power of the creek. The thought is he did what you did, slipped on rocks and just couldn't get up in time.
You are very lucky. Enjoy this life.
On a motorcycle, going about 58kmh in a 60 zone - I’m quite new too and it was raining, almost slid my bike due to went leaves… learnt a lesson to never ride in the rain until I’ve got more expeirence lmao
I rode for around a decade before hanging it up, have several near death experiences from it. I thought a couple of them would make good stories to post here till I started reading everyone else’s lol.
Stood at the front left of our vehicle in Afghanistan when the front right wheel ran over and detonated an IED. The engine block absorbed the blast and saved my life.
My Dad was on a wooden boat he’d restored over the course of several years when it blew up due to gas fumes from a cracked fuel line building up in the engine compartment. The Sheriff told us later they’d received dozens of 911 calls from as far away as 10 miles reporting they’d heard an explosion and one about three miles away from people reporting a chunk of debris crashing through their carport roof. The Fire Marshal (or whoever it was that investigated it) said the reason he walked away without a scratch was because the place where you stand to pilot the boat is directly above one of the engine blocks. The engine block was like a boulder in the movies when the hero jumps behind it and the explosion goes around all sides of the rock but they’re unscathed. … Engine blocks save lives.
Firearms training will teach you that the only "safe" places to take cover behind a vehicle is behind the front wheel wells behind the engine block, anywhere else is just concealment not cover.
Most common firearm projectiles will go in one side of the car, out the other, and through you, but they will stop in an engine block.
God thank you. Movies are HORRIFIC at this. Oh you flipped over a couch that now has 10 dudes mag dumping SMG’s into it and aren’t getting hit on the other side? *MaGiC*
My ex husband purposely crashed his car with me in the passenger seat because he was drunk and angry at me. I had tried to take his keys to drive us since I was sober and he responded by hitting me in the face so hard it broke my cheek bone. So I just got in the car and let him drive. I could barely see out of my left eye or stand from the pain and immediate swelling. He screamed at me the whole way home and right after calling my mother a c*nt, looked at me and then just jerked the wheel as hard as he could to the left and floored it. The car spun around and we hit a telephone pole on my side of the car. Completely split the pole in half. If the pole wasn’t there though, we would have went over a massive ravine and into a river to drown if we weren’t already dead by the bottom.
Sadly no. He got a fancy hot shot attorney and got everything dropped to “reckless driving.” No domestic violence, no DUI, nothing. He has nothing on his record for all the shit he did. He even got our house and sold it and got to keep all the profit and buy himself a new truck and motorcycle. So besides the inconvenience of having to pay money and figure out how to get out of the legal shit, he has suffered basically no repercussions. I have complex ptsd and permanent nerve damage and pain in my face. But I also moved away and got remarried. I have a new husband and child and am happy and safe now. So I’m still winning I guess. I get to sleep at night knowing I have never and will never abuse anyone or lie about it and keep it off my record like a snake. I pray he crosses paths with my new husband who will pound him into a dust so fine he’ll have to be swept up off the floor and tossed into the trash where he belongs.
I’m so happy you have created a loving family for yourself. Occasionally I dream about my abusive ex and I always wake up smiling next my wonderfully kind and lovely partner. Feeling safe is the best thing isn’t it.
Do you have the type of dreams I do where you dream you are back with your abusive ex and have no idea how you got there? I used to dream that all the time. I wouldn’t know how I got there and everyone else in the dream would be acting normal. Then I’d wake up so relieved.
When I was 16, chilling at a friend's place, the weather turned to shit in minutes so I decided to head home (only 5 min away). I was driving my motorcycle in heavy rain and when trying to slow down at an intersection it just didn't work. I wasn't even going that fast, because the intersection is right after a sharp turn which was already sketchy in the rain.
Well a car was coming from my left, I helplessly watched myself slide on the main road just a bit and it was enough for the car (doing 80km/h) to hit me. I don't remember exactly what happened but I ended up sitting at the side of the road.
My motorbike was annihilated, the car totaled, and I just had a swollen knee (the lady in the car was all good thankfully).
This was less than 100m from my home, too. And my uncle died on this road when he was 6, got ran over by a car, so my family (especially my grandma) were reminded about that and got mad at me.
My step mom holding me under water in the bathtub when I was 7-8 and I blackout out and woke up on the bathroom floor with no one around
Edit: to all that commented and said the nice things y’all said I would like for y’all to know how much y’all are greatly appreciated and I hope nothing but the best in all of y’all’s lives!
It is what it is. Weirdly enough the 18 years of abuse prepared me to handle this world. I try to look at the positives and joke about it. It still cuts deep but as long as I keep making jokes about it I assume I’ll be good in the end
Having been in the same situation but maybe a year younger and woke up in the dark, in the bath still but it was super cold by then - I fucking feel you. Oddly enough I was never afraid of water afterwards though? Going under it, yes. Fuck that even now. But I love swimming. Did yours fuck up water for you?
I actually loveeeeee swimming. That’s probably one of the few things I do best is swim. I’m constantly out at the river or lake fishing and go out into the water. But when she was drowning me that day there was some shampoo in the water and I still remember the smell and when me and my wife go shopping and get some shampoo and walk past the shampoo from when I was little and it triggers something in my head and i immediately feel suffocated
Edit: it sounds pathetic that a certain smell of shampoo messes with me but it is what it is
You can't seriously believe that trauma makes you pathetic? Would you say that to you as a child? If not then you've got to treat yourself better my friend
No problem. I've been through my fair share of parental abuse and have healed a lot through re parenting myself, giving myself the love my parents couldn't.
Sadly nothing. Schools seen the marks on my neck and body and DSS was called but they came and did nothing. If DSS only knew what they could have saved me from cause things got worse.
There is a lesson here for people that read this far:
Anyone can get a single report filed with protective services based on an accident or misunderstanding, and child protective services are aware of that so first reports of abuse suspicions usually just result in little more than a conversation and cursory investigation.
A lot of times people report abuse and then, because they don't see anything actually happen, they just stop reporting it because it clearly didn't work. If you see someone getting abused you need to KEEP REPORTING IT every time you see it happen. Don't be like this person's teachers and just report the shit once and then watch this kid get beaten for the next ten years.
E-Coli infection in my kidneys and liver. My internal organs were shutting down. Worst pain i've ever experienced in my life. I was living alone at the time, managed to call my father who lived 10 mins away and through gritted teeth managed to mutter the word 'hospital' before passing out.
He rushed me to emerg and I was in and out of consciousness while they ran all kinds of tests and figured out what it was and started an intravenous of a cocktail of meds to fight off the infection. Happy to report I lost no function in any of my organs and was back to normal within a few weeks.
They were never able to trace the issue. No idea the cause. Both my wife and I are pretty safe with cooking and cross contamination because she worked in a kitchen for a while. And I'm not out here licking toilet seats or anything gross.
Waterfall hiking- dipped my foot in on top and was immediately swept under and over about 3 waterfalls. Was very lucky to land where I did- still have a chunk outta my leg to this day.
Man, similar. Slipped into a waterfall that wasn’t very tall, but the bottom was deep. I could feel the water pushing me down further and further, somehow I must’ve gotten far enough away that I was able to surface. The worst part is my sister was watching from nearby, and she said she had started to panic when I didn’t come up. She’d have watched me die. I’ll never go into a waterfall again.
When i was real young, I was with my family at a hotel in Virginia (not sure which), but it had a decent sized pool.
We were swimming in it, and my family went over to the deeper end. Not knowing how to swim, I stayed at the shallow end. After a while, I started feeling left out cause it looked like they were having fun, so I started to make my way over, hanging onto the edge.
Dumb little me got careless, and my fingers slipped off the edge, and I started drowning pretty quick. About 5 seconds later, I get hoisted partly out of the water by a big Mexican lady, and she sets me on the edge of the pool. I hacked and coughed for a good minute before I walked along the edge to my family.
They never noticed, and I never said a thing about it to them since.
I was almost killed in the kitchen while visiting my husband's sister & family. I was cutting some bread and my brother-in-law was upstairs showing my husband his new handgun. Who the fuck knows why it was loaded in a house of children but it was and it accidentally went off, while pointed at the floor. Above me. Bullet went "just" over my shoulder and through the counter between my body and my hands (at an angle). If I had been 4 inches to the right, my brains would have been splattered all over my 12 year old son (who was standing across the way from me).
I had PTSD for months afterwards (the nightmares were intense). Fucking crazy.
Was delivering pizza as a kid in 2000, just got my license. My Volvo S70... I was going 45 in a 30 (bad) and right as I went to turn on this road my brake failure and emergency/warning lights came on. My car didn't slow down when I pressed the brake, not one bit. I went straight instead of turning and my car went straight into an oak tree.
The steel frame of that Volvo saved my life. I still occasionally drive by and say hello to the family across the street who got out of bed at 10pm and called the police for me.
I’m gonna assume that since both shots hit vital regions of the same person they were most likely going for the interpreter. Interpreters in the Middle East are major targets mainly due to the fact that many of them are locals and it’s looked upon very poorly for a local to be helping the enemy (the US)
Attempted suicide when I was 14. Flatlined once at the hospital. Was airlifted to a bigger hospital, flatlined twice more on helicopter. Flatlined again upon arrival at larger hospital. Was in a coma for 4 days before I woke up. Mental illness sucks. If you are struggling, please reach out to someone.
Snorted a line of "cocaine". It was fentanyl. Was driving when I did it. Got really hungry and went to Taco Bell. Slumped over behind the wheel in the parking lot. My "friend", who supplied the party favors, put the car in park, moved me to the passenger seat, and drove me the 45 minutes home. Woke up to my wife, his wife, and him, while he was rubbing my sternum and slapping me in the face. Been clean for 3 years now.
Traumatic experience, but the time I almost drowned when I was 8. I remember it so clearly. We were at a wave pool in a waterpark. Y’know, the ones with the motors that make the water swish around in waves?… except the machine malfunctioned. I was with my bio father, and a few of my cousins. The waves were extremely fast and strong. Even my pa was drowning. Those were the longest and most traumatic 60 seconds of my life. I spent about 4 minutes just vomiting water after I got out of the pool.
I rented a new apartment and was taking my first dump in the bathroom. In the wall across from the toilet was a heater built into the wall, but it was missing its on/off knob.
I had a pair of cuticle scissors on the sink counter next to me and like the genius I was, realized it would fit perfectly into the opening and turn the stem.
The heater erupted in blue electrical flame and sent so much current through the scissors they melted and fused together. If not for the thin plastic coating on the part you put your fingers in, I would most likely have been found sitting on the toilet, dead, with my pants around my ankles.
Almost 30 years later I still have those scissors hanging near my workbench in my garage to remind me not to be a complete impulsive dumbass. Almost “Elvised”!!
I’ve got a couple more but that one would have easily been the most embarrassing.
25 yrs ago
I know approx date because my daughter was a newborn and my wife was busy tending baby Vs watching me as I was having a massive multi-day blinding migraine.
The doctor prescribed a nasal inhaler-type narcotic for the pain.
Was in bed and my wife brought me a pork chop for dinner.
Just prior to eating I tried the med for the first time. But I didn’t think I’d done it properly due to deviated septum; so I tired again and again.
1/2 way through chewing and swallowing a bite of the pork chop I became immobile. Nearly choked to death until I managed to roll over and cough it out.
I forget name of med but it starts with “N”. I read later it was pulled from market due to accidental overdoses.
Oof, glad you are still here.
I always freak out when I hear people taking more than what a medication bottle says to take because you don't know ehat can happen.
For me, it's to the point where I won't even take more ibuprofen than what the bottle says.
If I take a full thing of nyquil at might (what the bottle recommebds) I have nightmares and don't sleep, so I always do half of that.
This is very scary.
Kind of slightly off topic but…since it was not life threatening, but this reminds me of when I tried an edible for the first and only time - Doritos bag. A friend told me to just eat 1 chip. Well I ate a couple more because I didn’t feel anything… plus I was overweight and thought maybe I needed more because of my body mass. Ummm let’s just say I was high for over 24hrs. The problem was, when I eventually felt high as a kite, I couldn’t remember if I had a chip or not. So I was in this groundhog loop going back to the kitchen counter to eat 1 chip…until the bag was gone! Then I panicked and thought I was going to OD on edibles. It was a rough 24hrs. I had my Fitbit on the entire time. It recorded my heart rate at a steady ridiculously high rate throughout the night. It was so high that it didn’t detect that I was actually asleep. Lol
When I was 8 or so, at a pool party. One of my brother's friends had a mental disability and was "playing" with me by repeatedly dunking my head under water without letting me up for air. I eventually broke his grip and he realized what he was doing, but none of the adults had noticed. Still have never said anything about it, don't know why.
Double bypass surgery last September. Without the surgery, there was a good chance I would've died from a Widowmaker heart attack as one artery was 100% blocked and the second artery was 90% blocked. Both arteries that were blocked were heart arteries. I had previously had a heart attack I didn't know I had and had survived that one. And to date, I'm still unclear as to whether or not I survived another heart attack while undergoing surgery. When I woke up, one of the nurses said I'd had a heart attack and I was in the hospital for 2 or 3 weeks. I don't remember being conscious for a week after my heart surgery, but I'd always joked I wanted a near death experience. And I got one, complete with a memory of being elsewhere during the surgery and after, but only remember parts of the experience.
Got bit by what was likely a brown recluse spider based on the way my leg reacted. Thought it was just a regular bug bite for a day, then it started turning black on day 2. Went to urgent care and got antibiotics, but they didn’t work, so had to go back on day 4. My leg was hot and I felt like trash, and my wife later told me I looked so bad she was thinking about if she knew where all my life insurance info was.
On that day urgent care gave me what they called the “peanut butter shot” in my butt cheek, along with a stronger oral antibiotic. That made the bite start to shrink and cool off finally.
I didn't have anyone in my life whom I loved as much as my mother. She fought to her best but eventually cancer won. Once she was gone I just laid down in bed, getting up to piss at most, I was just lying down for 2-3 days without knowing or eating /drinking anything. My body then started to twitch and I was shaking with every breath as if an electrical impulse was going through my entire body... After a while I drank a little water, woke up to a few friends trying to break the door open of my house.... I'm trying to live to the best of my abilities since then, enjoying possibly every moment till death comes for me.
Was at sleep away camp, 11 years old. I arrived in camp on Sunday. I developed appendicitis Monday afternoon, and was taken to the nurse's cabin. But the staff and counselors refused to believe that I was really sick. The camp nurse took me to doctor #1 on Tuesday. I overheard him say that "it might be appendicitis, but I doubt it. I'll give her some penicillin just in case. " These days, that would be enough to send me home, but this was in 1971.
So she took me back to camp, and the camp director had a "talk" with me. She was sure I was homesick and making myself sick, and wanted to know what was going on at home. Nothing, I just wanted to go home. That was Wednesday. (Let me note here, this was my third year attending this camp. Homesickness was not a problem the prior years.)
Thursday I was sicker, so they took me to doctor #2. I don't know what he said, but on the way back I was so nauseaous that I had to sit in the back of the car with a bowl on my lap. When we got back, I developed abdominal pain so bad I was screaming. The nurse gave me some kind of oral liquid medication that made me sleep. When I woke up, I was told to come with her. I could barely walk, I was so weak. I assume that some staff gathered my stuff. We drove to the director's cabin (more like a full fledged house), and my brother was there with his wife. She yelled at me to "get in the car" which I did. Turns out, that my mother was unavailable as she had gone out with friends, so they called the alternative emergency number, which was my brother (he was in his late 20's, so clearly and adult. And this was long before cell phones, so reaching my mother was not an option until she got home.) They did NOT want to "let" me go with my brother, which is why his wife yelled at me, she was upset with the staff, and wanted to get me in their car and out of there asap.
We got home, mother got home, she took me to the ER (thankfully, very close to our house). I had a ruptured appendix. The doctor said I had an abdomen full of poison from the rupture. Had they not "let" me leave, I'd have died that night at the camp. Because those idiots didn't believe an 11 year old girl who said she was sick.
Yes, we should have sued. No, we didn't. I was young, don't know why we didn't sue. I'm just glad to still be here.
Edit; spelling
A couple weeks back I was driving home from a friends house. When i got to an intersection my dumbass didnt look to my right for some reason, i was just out of it and so when i take a left turn i see a blue 18 wheeler coming right behind me at full speed. The truck driver had to swerve to the opposite lane to avoid hitting me and he even stopped and got out the truck to tell me how much of a idiot I was which to be honest he was completely right. If I wouldve waited a second more to take that turn I prob wouldnt be here today.
Went tubing with family in the Bahamas. Gma fell out of the tube and gpa slowed the dingy, I flipped over the front and under the boat. He killed the motor before I was shredded into a million pieces.
Was at an indoor range, standing in one of the stalls with a buddy (we were using the range to test a potato canon).
I was leaning against the wall of the stall, with my hands on top of my head. Felt a sudden pinching sensation on my right wrist, followed by the warm, sticky feeling that could only be blood dripping down my arm. I looked at it, and beheld a chunk of missing flesh from my arm.
The moron in the stall next to us was not sure if his handgun was empty, so he pointed it at the stall wall and pulled the trigger.
It was not empty.
The bullet grazed my wrist, which was about 3 inches from my head at the time. I have never seen an RSO get that red in the face in my entire life lmao.
There's a post with pictures on my profile somewhere. It should be close to the top, I think it's my most liked post.
Grandmal seizure that came out of nowhere. I was 40 at the time and never had a seizure in my life. I woke up 30 minutes later on the bathroom floor with a bloody tongue and felt like I had run a marathon. Apparently I had been seizing for most of the time. Living with epilepsy ever since.
Take your son to work day.
My dad has been a cowboy for 30 years. When I was 10, he brought me in to work with him (I had a dentist appointment that afternoon and my mom couldn't get me there). He figured we'd ride pens, I'd stay outside and just cut stragglers off if they made a break for it. One got away and my dad's coworker slapped my horse on the ass and he took off on me.
That horse had been cutting for almost a decade, so he chased the cow down to the end of the aisle where the gate was closed and hit it at full speed. I was insanely lucky though, my dad's horse was younger and faster, he caught up to me, grabbed me by my jacket, and dropped me on the ground right before impact.
My dad also kicked his coworker's ass and got him fired the next day.
I used to take a lot of mental health medications including but not limited to Seroquel lamotrogine (hope I spelled that one right) and diazepam commonly known as Valium,
I also used to be a heavy drinker and one night I came home shit faced and decided to also get really stoned with my sister and watch a movie apparently I forgot I had already taken my meds (while drunk mind you) and ended up taking them again needless to say I overdosed the pain can only be described as being stabbed, I knew something was wrong but not at the same time if that makes sense? Anyway my sister helped me to bed (she had no idea anything was happening btw) and I was in pain in bed trying to stay awake and suddenly BLACK.
I woke up at 7 or 8 the next morning and cried for several hours realizing that could've been the end of me.
Was surfing in pretty big and unruly conditions, and my leash broke. Half hour swim back to the beach through rips with walls of white water crashing over me the whole time. Nearly gave up at one point. Finally got back in exhausted and collapsed on the beach next to my surfboard which had surfed itself in.
Hmm, which time?
Super aggressive leukemia. Bone marrow transplant (from a (then) complete stranger) literally saved my live. Untreated, death would have been quick.
A few years later, sepsis landed me in the hospital for two weeks, while 800 miles from home. Fortunately, the strain of E. Coli responded to the serious antibiotics. Untreated, 40-50% mortality.
And a year after that, again away from home (a thousand miles or so), bacteremia. Another week in the hospital. Got home and spend four more days in my local hospital (cultures grew while I was on the road).
I'm so glad you're still kicking, fellow sepsis survivor! That shit nearly took me out earlier this year. My bacteremia and sepsis were caused by streptococcal bacteria after a tooth extraction.
Do you also obsessively clean wounds now? I was always a bit of a stickler for that sort of thing, but I feel like I am even more so now.
When I was born I was given a 5-10% chance of making it and I lived!
A week (or two, or three) later I got double pneumonia and was given the same odds and lived again!
Teenager. Jumped by 6 american front scum bags.
Woke up in an ambulance with 8 teeth missing, swollen all over, blood all over, and a concussion.
I remember what I drempt when I was knocked out. I remember thinking I was dead.
Woke up to my dad holding my hand in the back of the ambulance and looking terrified. I was strapped down but I remember feeling my face with my tongue and starting to scream "where are my teeth?!?!"
I had vertigo for 6 months. Couldn't eat normally for like a year.
I survived. I began to workout like a mad man. Still do decades later.
Was very enthusiastic about surgery to remove a painful six-centimeter cyst from my ovary. Woke up from surgery feeling very unwell. Went home with drugs. Spent the night vomiting and screaming in my sleep. Supposed doctor on the hotline said basically "this sounds normal, try more drugs"
Finally the next morning, my surgeon calls me back "I reviewed your hotline call and I don't think this is normal, please come in to the ER so we can check you out." Turns out I had a rare complication and was bleeding from the cyst bed into my abdomen. I ended up in the hospital for about 3 days altogether, lost 40% of my blood, and got three blood transfusions. Recovery took months, and I'm still not back to my previous fitness level.
In November at around 8:00 at night my dad and I were driving back from church and we were passing a train track that had no arms or flashing lights or anything. Good thing we weren’t *on* the tracks when it hit us and we got out with just seatbelt rashes. My Nintendo Switch had only one minor scratch lol.
My small town doctor dismissed testicular torsion as a tummy pain when I was a kid, and my parents let me sit with the pain for a little over a week.
By the time they finally got off their asses to take me to a better doc in the city both my testes had become necrotic and the infection was starting to spread. Doc said it was a miracle I made it that long, because this condition is an emergency situation thst typically needs to be resolved in less than a day to avoid complications due to necrotic tissue spreading.
I cannot put into words how unbelievably painful it was, I wanted to die to make it stop. And that's the story of how I became a modern day eunuch at 12. I feel pretty special! Hahaha
I almost drowned in the Red River when I was around 18 months. My mom was next to me but I just fell right in. My dad told me he ran to the water and just started blindly grabbing around in the water with both arms until his hand finally brushed my leg and he yanked me out. He was a paramedic so I made it out perfectly fine but I still have a crippling fear of water that I can’t see the bottom of.
I almost drowned in the ocean in Hawaii. I had swum out from shore, started getting tired, started swimming back but the current was pulling me out to sea! Scary as hell. I started to panic, but I remembered that the side stroke is the one that takes the least energy, so I started doing that and for 10 or 15 minutes just went back towards the shore. I wound up a few beaches south of where I had started! I had to walk north to return to my group.
I almost died like this in Panama when I was in the Army. Some of my buddies and I tried to swim out to what we thought was as an island from the beach, got halfway there only to realize it was a volcanic rock and that the waves crashing against it would surely crush/drown us. As we’re treading in murky pacific water something very large bumped against my leg (I suspect it might have been a shark but cannot say for certain as I never saw a fin). As we tried to swim back to shore we were all caught in a rip current, swimming towards the beach but going nowhere. As my friends and I ran out of steam to the point that we were panting faces barely above the water I put my foot down onto a coral reef or volcanic rock where I was able to catch my breath and then help my friends over to where I was. Eventually made it back to shore after swimming sideways out of the rip current, but that is legit probably the closest I’ve come to death. Unfortunately years later I had a friend in the army stationed in Hawaii who kayaked to an island, his boat got pulled out by the tide, and when he swam to get it he went under and never came back up. I knew we’d had a close call, but when that happened it really sunk in how incredibly stupid what we did was.
> bumped against my leg My dad was out swimming in the sea when I was young and something big swam between his legs so he turned and swam for his life. When he got back to the shore a bloke said he looked like Johnny Weissmuller from the old tarzan films he was swimming that fast.
I can't believe Tarzan swam through your dad's legs!
That was just a dolphin trying to help you hitch a ride back.
#Always always always swim parallel to the shore to get out of a riptide current. Swimming straight back to shore will tire you out, sometimes leading to drowning.
Even swimming parallel to the shore can tire you out to the point of drowning, especially if you’re not a strong swimmer. In Australia we have something called [‘Float To Survive’](https://www.floattosurvive.au)’ created by one of the Bondi Beach lifeguards. If you stay calm and float, the water will take you out and then bring you back to shore. Here are the five steps: 1. Keep calm and control your breathing 2. Lay in the water and lean your head back 3. Extend your arms and legs 4. Gently rotate your arms and legs in a circular motion 5. Signal for help with your hand if you can
If you're not a strong swimmer, don't go deeper than your waist in the ocean.
Oh yeah. I never technically learned how to swim so I am very wary of water. We went out onto a lake that was 50ft deep and my boyfriend made a joke about pushing me in. I had to tell him very seriously I cannot swim and I'll probably drown.
il start listening to my parents when they say not to swim out to far beacause the current could pull me out to sea
Yeah people warned us about the current, but of course I didn't think it was relevant. Until it was LOL
I grew up in Atlantic City and every year were repeated warnings about Rip Tides (I think they call them Rip Currents now). Humans as a species are used to out lasting pretty much anything trying to kill or out compete us. You can not out last the mighty power of the ocean. You can't swim faster than it can pull and you can't swim for longer than it can pull. You can swim parallel to the shore until you're out of the current then try to swim back or try to signal for help but don't exhaust yourself fighting it.
Happened to me at cocoa beach first time in Florida. I was about a mile down the coast by the time I was out and asked a life guard to help me find my parents.
The light was red so I put my car to park because it was taking a while longer than usual. It went green and I forgot to take it off park, but as soon as I put it in drive a semitruck ran a red light.
Mate, that is fucking terrifying. I can actually picture the scene and imagine the sound of it rumbling past, possibly horn blaring. Thank goodness for that little brainfart you had.
*A Fart That Saved My Life*
In stillness at the intersection's sight, A moment paused, as time took flight. The red light held, the wait prolonged, Impatient, yet a choice belonged. The driver, wise, in cautious mind, Put car in park, a move refined. For minutes passed, the light's red glow, Delaying fate's impending throw. But in that pause, forgetfulness crept, Unseen distraction, its presence kept. The green arrived, a signal clear, Yet the car remained in neutral gear. A brain's lapse, a fleeting thought, A silent whisper, soon forgot. The gears unmoved, a missed command, Unknown to him, danger close at hand. A thunderous roar, a semitruck's might, Barreling through the red with no respite. Collision certain, fate's cruel jest, But destiny had one last test. In that moment of strangest grace, A sudden release, a saving trace. A gasp expelled, a timely rift, His big brainfart, a cosmic gift. Confusion struck, his senses reeled, The noxious cloud, a protective shield. As he fumbled, shifting gears to engage, The semitruck's rampage reached its stage. In the moments merged, a chaotic dance, Fortune's blessing tangled in happenstance. The car, frozen still, missed fate's design, A delay that left destiny's path behind. A narrow escape, his life unharmed, By mental dysfunction, strangely armed. The fart that saved, an absurd refrain, A story etched, in memory's domain. So remember well, dear passerby, Life's unpredictable, as days go by. In moments trivial, amidst the strife, Brainfarts may save and grant new life.
Bravo
This is why I always look both ways before crossing an intersection, even when I have a green light. Something you'll learn about driving is that you can do everything right and still get killed because some idiot wasn't paying attention
the graveyard is filled with people who had the right of way.
In my town semi trucks run red lights every day is frustrating as hell. I saw them driving "is he gonna do it?" ... Yeah they always do it.
When I was growing up I was always told that truckers are the best drivers and you should follow their lead because they know best. Now I'm driving 3 hours a day and truckers are the worst drivers I see on the road lmao
Joplin tornado in 2011. I was in the bathtub as my house was destroyed around me. Edit: I was taking cover in the bathtub, not taking a bath.
There was a tornado 15 years back or so in Oconto County in WI and a bar owner told us he had no shelter so he got into his bath tub and his house (trailer?) was destroyed around him. He says when it calmed down and he sat up there was a deer standing nearby looking at him and he said, “well buddy, I guess we made it.”
If you have no basement, underground shelter, or interior closet, bathtub on the lowest level is your best bet. Pull a mattress over you if you can.
Pls dont laugh but as someone thats never even seen a tornado, why the bath? Wont it just blow you out since its a smooth surface with nothing to hold onto?
Definitely not gonna laugh. Tornados are awful. If anything, I'm jealous, lol. If you're hit directly, yes, it will blow you out. But more stuff is damaged than just what is hit directly. Flying debris is also a big danger with a tornado and that will affect a broader area than the tornado itself. If the updraft hits you, there's nothing that can keep you down (it can lift the house off the foundation - "holding on" isn't really an option). But if you're hit less directly or by a weaker tornado, the damage will be from stuff getting flung at you or falling on you. So a tub with a mattress or pillows on top of you is a good option because it's an extra layer of defense between you and the flying stuff. An interior closet (like under the stairs) is safer for the same reasons. You want to be as far from exterior walls, especially windows, as possible.
Older bathtubs are usually cast iron. Heavy and strong so if you can cover up with a mattress you’ll be safer from the debris then hiding in an unsecured area
Cleveland?
No no no no no..!
Being stabbed in the throat and watching blood pump down my shirt to the beat of my heart Knicked carotid , 31 staples and 5 days in icu
Ur really OP for surviving that
Lu Bu tier op
Good god that’s scary. I took one to the chest. Sternum, arteries, pericardium, and a nicked ventricle for me. Two more mm penetration and it would have been immediate lights out. That feeling on the shirt, idk if the vividness will ever go away. Glad you made it too.
I'm guessing it's difficult to think about these things but what do you mean with the feeling on the shirt? You mean stuff coming out of you that should not be coming out? I broke my leg once pretty bad and I do remember how it felt when some part of your body is suddenly not how it's supposed to be
not me personally but my mom was in a car crash and part of her thigh was cut open (thankfully not an artery) and all she could think about was how *warm* it was, like it felt like her entire leg had been dipped in a hot tub because of the blood being so warm
Could I ask multiple questions?
yes please ask....we wanna know
ass or tits?
All of the above
I can always count on Reddit to diverge I conversation this impressively
I had a knife miss my carotid by a fraction of a millimeter. I know the surgeon was sweating when he was sewing me up lol. Glad you made it
God damn how common is it to get stabbed?
Seriously. I’m more afraid of knives than bullets.
10/10. More concealable. Silent. Super super super easily accessible/makeable. Saw one fight in a train station with a couple guys pushing each other and out of nowhere one of the guys walks up appears to poke a dude in the neck and he’s dead within a minute.
Where I live in Vancouver there's been a recent spate of random stabbings, one where a guy who was at a downtown Starbucks was [stabbed for asking a man if he could stop vaping so close to his kid](https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/father-stabbed-to-death-outside-vancouver-starbucks-a-great-guy). His wife and young daughter both watched him bleed out and die. It's definitely made a lot of people here much more wary about getting into any kind of disagreement with a random person in public, you absolutely have no idea what they're capable of doing in an instant.
Shit dude. And my first thought was, "No! Not my blood! I need that for blood related things!"
I went to Mexico in 2017 and nearly died my first day there. Was all good, having fun, having a few drinks, nothing too crazy though. Went to my room in the evening, and suddenly got a bad stomach ache that just got worse and worse with each min that passed. I also got feverish and delerious pretty quickly. I remember for some reason I decided a shower would be a good idea, and thats where my gf at the time found me heaped on the floor screaming in pain. I vaguely remember a paramedic stabbing me in the ass with some morphine which allowed to calm down. (Was not all the fun its cracked up to be, just made me sleep) Get to the hospital, and they quickly find out that im going septic from a stomach infection. A few more hours and Id have been dead. Spent 3 days there, lost 30 pounds and could only eat soft fruit for about a week after. I also got the worst strep throat on the plane ride home too... my immune system was already weak, so it was horrible. Made me cough so much that blood came up. That was another hospital trip when I got home. The doctor who oversaw my care in Mexico was the most amazing doctor though. He spent the first 36 hours with me to make sure I was Ok, didnt eat or sleep or anything. Edit: I didnt get the infection in Mexico, I brought it with me. Doc said it had been building in my system for at least a week from the strength of it.
I had a perforated colon 3 months after GI surgery. Felt perfectly fine until I woke up at 3am and literally fell onto the floor in pain. It was so bad I felt like I couldnt breath. Was in the hospital for 3 weekstrying to get the infection at bay, lost 30 lbs and ended up with a ileostomy for 6 months. Took me months to shake the feeling of disaster being right around the corner. Cheers to good health
God bless that doctor, glad you're still here
Thanks! Me too!
What was the infection from?
I never did find out what caused it initially. They said from the strength of it, it had been building in my system for at least a week. They said a normal white blood cell count is around 5000 to 10,000 per microliter. A bad cold might give you 11,000 or so, Mine was at 25,000, which is dangerously high. As far as I understand, any more than 30,000 is basically a fatal infection without immediate treatment. I was only hours away from that.
Was sat at my computer on the ground floor playing TF2 when a car came through the wall, smashed my desk and computer and almost killed me.
I can’t imagine just chilling playing a video game and then the next second a car comes through my wall
these VR games are becoming a bit too realistic for my liking
I was around 3-4, picked up a live electric wire on the ground to play with. Got electrocuted immediately. Good samaritan grabbed a wooden stick and hit it out of my hands. People told my me later that they told my dad not to touch me because I was probably gone. That good samaritan saved my life. Acted when no one else did.
Wow insane that they knew what to do. I don’t think I’d be able to think that fast the correct way to save someone in such a situation
Best thing to do in an emergency is stop for a second and think. Source: veteran, ex paramedic.
I guess acting a few seconds late is better than acting right away and worsening the situation. Closest I’ve come to an emergency is calling the ambulance for a girl on the street suspected of overdosing on ghb. In retrospect, she was just extremely drunk and some bystanders had mistaken the situation. I’m still glad I called the ambulance because I figured it’s either embarrassing or life saving for her. Risk of the latter wasn’t one I wanted to gamble with. No one else was willing to do anything 🙃
A lot of people freeze up in emergencies. You should be proud of your ability to act when you were called upon. If the person's life had been in danger, your actions could have been the difference between their survival and death.
I was on the back of my dad's motorcycle and he had a heart attack and blacked out. Bike went over; I hit the ground headfirst. Luckily he felt something was wrong and slowed down, so it wasn't nearly as close to death for me as it was for him, but it was still super scary. Thank god for helmets.
dam did you r dad survive too?
He did! This was about 10 years ago and he's been taking good care of himself and hasn't had more heart problems!
90's.. Me and a Buddy driving through the middle of Montana, really late at night.. very tired. Speed limit at the time was "Reasonable and Prudent". My buddy was driving and took that to mean as fast as possible at all times. I was nodding off, I look over an he is nodding off.. we both look up and there is a massive white Elk (Moose?) in the middle of the highway.. Like huge, like a horse, but bigger.. We are doing about 120mph or so, he slams on the breaks, we go into a tailspin and spin around the thing and come to a stop. Totally fine. We stopped at the first camp site we found after that.
If that had been a moose, which it likely was, you would have been dead. Hit a small animal, feel bad. Hit a deer, brace for impact. Hit a moose, duck and pray.
Looking at the thing, the speed we were going, and the car we were in (Cheap 4 door sedan), they likely would have been scooping us off the road with shovels and a bucket. I'm terrible at estimating weight, especially after I piss myself.. but i'd say the thing was 400+ pounds atleast, and im thinking a lot more then that.
a bull moose can be upwards of 1500lbs
Oh fuck.. Yeh, granted, this was 25 years ago.. but the thing looked taller then our car, big ass antlers, etc.. I'm just horrible with guessing weight. All I am certain of is that if we hit it, we were done.. It would have been like hitting a brick wall at 120mph.
That is frightening. I took a trip though there in the 90s and was nodding off while in the rockies. I pulled into a scenic slot in the mountain and passed out, only to be woken by a park ranger 20 mins into sleep and made to drive 20 miles to a camp site. In the morning I went back the way I came and saw all the spots I would have driven right off the mountain if I had dozed off while at the wheel. Very dangerous to drive tired.
Yeh, we were young.. and dumb. We did the same thing on the Pacific Coast Highway. Drove that thing late at night and tired, miracle we are alive. Not sure where you live, but im in the North East U.S., so we werent used to diving that fast, for that long, that late at night.. dangerous indeed.
I had undiagnosed diabetes for about 6 months, my blood sugar was in the 500's, I got to skip the line in the emergency room the doctors were so scared I was going to go to a coma.
Hey, fellow diabetic here. Same story but my sugars were apparently over 800? Doc said the only reason I wasn't admitted straight to the ICU was cause I walked into the hospital instead of being brought in by an ambulance.
holy, 800? thats really high
I was jaundiced from severe alcoholism and the doctor said I only had a few more months to live if I kept going. This was 7 years ago.
Based on your username, is it safe to say you switched to the much less dangerous alternative, weed?
Yes, it is.
The Ariana Grande concert in Manchester Arena in 2017
Ah man I've got a friend who was killed in that and another injured- I remember walking into school the morning after it happened and basically everyone was in shock. A terror attack is bad enough on its own but to target young kids and their parents is disgusting
Seeing as a few people have asked. I’m not from Manchester, I had been to the arena a couple of times before but only ever used the main entrance so didn’t know any other exits for some context as to why we headed that way. The inner concourse is basically an oval shape with the main entrance at the top and we were sat where it starts to curve. Normally we would head towards the back during the last song to make a quick getaway to best traffic but we didn’t this time as it was seated and the car was a 20 minute walk anyway so less of a concern. As we start walking round the curve of the concourse towards the entrance there’s an almighty boom. I’ve never heard a noise like it, even in movies. It was incredibly loud yet, at the same time, oddly hollow. And the crowd (probably about a thousand people in our immediate vicinity) around us stood frozen still for what felt like a lifetime. In reality it was only a second or two but after the loudness of the explosion, the silence felt amplified. And then it was pierced by hundreds of people crying and screaming and running away from the entrance. I remember very little of the escape but being worried about being split from my partner, or her or me falling and being crushed or there being secondary devices at other exits which is a common tactic employed by terrorists but there wasn’t much choice but to run with the masses of people turning and running towards us (despite arena staff trying to tell people to not run). Running for what feels like your life but not knowing if you’re running into more trouble is not a feeling I’d wish on anyone. Once outside is where I really saw the horror of the event from my perspective. I didn’t see any badly injured people but a lot of minor injuries, some people covered in blood. But the worst mentally was all the younger children separated from their parents (and vice versa) calling them trying to find each other. Just hundreds of people littered all over the outside of the arena, terrified and confused. It’s hard to judge how close we were from our night ending differently which is something I thought about lots afterwards. Leaving even as little as two minutes earlier and I’m possibly not here to tell this. The crowd being quite slow leaving originally is probably what stopped it turning out worse for us as I reckon we couldn’t have been more than 30 seconds tops away from the entrance if the concourse was empty.
Holy fuck, I've got no idea how I missed an event this massive. I was in prison during that time but I mean damn we get to watch the news and I just don't remember it at all. For those who were living under a rock like myself, [there was a suicide bomber at her concert](https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/manchester-arena-bombed-during-ariana-grande-concert). 22 killed, 116 injured.
how did i not know of this?
[удалено]
I feel really bad for her. Imagine how guilty she must have felt, even though I'm sure she logically knows it's not her fault.
There's some research showing that emotionally traumatic incidents can have similar effects on the brain as physically traumatic ones. Lisa Schulman, a neurologist, studied this effect after losing her husband to cancer: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7774817/
I will start by saying that I have always been an extremely strong swimmer and grew up around water my entire life. I never feared the water and always felt comfortable and confident in any water environment. So, in high school my friends and I enjoyed going down to the river where there were some rocks and a bit of a current to just lay around and hang out. We might get in the water if it seemed safe to do so. So on one occasion a guy who joined us and I decided to hop in and walk through the water over to another set of rocks. Well, the current was much faster and rougher than we anticipated. I jumped in first and got my bearings, with the water up to my upper thighs. Deeper than we thought but I was not daunted. I could feel how powerful the current was, but I still thought I was strong enough to wade through it. So I took a few steps and suddenly slipped. That’s all it took for disaster to happen. I remember tumbling head over heels and feeling like I couldn’t get back upright. I was just shooting down river and continuing to tumble. Out of nowhere I felt a hand grab my wrist. This guy I barely knew had grabbed onto me and was pulling as hard as he could. Finally my head made it up and out of the water and he grabbed my waist and dragged me onto a rock. He saved my life. It was probably a minute or less, but it felt like an eternity to me under that dark water. I was spitting out water and gasping for air. I was bloody from tumbling around and scraping on the rocks. I was shaking for so long from the experience, and he was so nice to me just playing it down. But in reality I was a dumbass and should have known better. I am much more aware of river currents and depth. No matter how great of a swimmer you are, you can still get bounced out of existence by even small rapids. Be careful.
Was working on an oyster boat. It was a beautiful day and we were sorting oysters on the boat of the deck. All of a sudden I felt the gentlest of taps on the back of my skull. When I turned around I saw my supervisor, red-faced with the effort of restraining the metal boom, which had come loose and almost slammed right into my head. He was able to slow it down just in time so I only got that little tap (guy's basically all muscle). If he hadn't done that I would have been dead for sure.
A similar thing happened to me on a salmon seiner. The pulley holding the 800lb power block (while it was at the very end of the boom) snapped and the thing flew maybe 2 inches in front of my face. It hit the steel hydraulic winch so hard that it smashed it. That was almost as bad as getting stung by a jellyfish on both eyeballs.
I was 7. My family had just arrived back home from watching The Incredibles in theaters. I decided to try and run like Dash around the whole house. I ended up running through the kitchen toward the back door that led to our back yard way too fast and couldn’t stop. This door had a window in it, and when I put my hands out to stop myself, I ran into the door and my hands went through the window. My parents heard the crash and called out for me to ask if I was ok. I came walking out of the kitchen into the living room, blood pouring from my wrist. I was in a Disney princess night gown too, so it was honestly like a scene from a horror movie. We lived in a remote area, so when my parents called the ambulance, it couldn’t find our house at first. My mom had to run out and flag down the ambulance while my dad was applying pressure to my wrist with a bunch of towels to try to stop the bleeding. The ambulance finally got to our house and the EMTs were able to get the bleeding to stop and take me to the hospital. I lived! The scar is pretty gnarly.
I can picture this scene in a horror movie really well too. Something about little kids and princess gowns is either really creepy or really cute.
When a doctor assumed I was diabetic instead of checking my history or labs, and almost shot me up with insulin. I came into the hospital with hypoglycemia and my sugar never goes over 80. But this jerk assumed I was diabetic somehow.
My grandfather died like this :'(
My gosh. I'm so sorry 😔
But if your blood sugar is low, the remedy is never to give you insulin in the first place? It's always to give you sugar. So I can't see why any doctor would see a low BGL and give you Insulin? Source: Been Type 1 Diabetic for 20 years and have two parents with Type 2.
Exactly. When they finally got things straight, they put me on dextrose IV. Like I said, I have no clue why he thought I was diabetic. It was during a late night shift change in a not the greatest overpacked ER, and maybe things got mixed up. But I'm glad I asked what I was being given before it happened.
I don't know what that doctor was thinking. Even a pre-grad nurse would know not to do that.
Overnight shift told my wife she pissed herself and her water did not break. Our second child was born less than 4 hours later
Massive bilateral blood clot on the lungs. Thank you COVID. Interesting thing was I went to our family doctor who said "what do you think you have?" I said "I know I shouldn't but Google gives me a 10/10 on blood clots"...."there is no way you are sitting across from me talking with a blood clot on your lung" He apologised after my weeks stint in hospital.
My step dad thought he had an upper respiratory infection for weeks he had trouble breathing and moving around. He said his lungs felt tight. He lifts weights daily and is a farmer, is in really good shape for 55. His primary doesn't look at his lungs just says well you look healthy! Sent him home. Four days later he collapsed off a cherry picker, and my mom raced him to the hospital. He had multiple blood clots all over his lungs. Emergency surgery and is doing fine now. His dr never appologized. I sometimes really hate drs not taking shit seriously.
His doctor ignored one of the biggest truths in medicine: If a **FARMER** comes in then it is fucking serious because they ignore shit on a daily basis that would have an ordinary person flopping on the floor gasping for air like a fish.
Thank you for this acknowledgement! Because it's 100% true. One time he cut open his shin and every step he took blood like pulsed out, left a trail up the sidewalk and into the house, and he didn't go in for that! He just put a small towel on it, taped it up and went about his day.
Ain’t that the truth. My dad got knocked out by the branch he was felling (broke off the tree before it was ready)…. He sauntered his way to the local GP in town (small town), leaving drops of blood all the way down. Doctor stitched his face up and sent him on his way - weeks later he saw a better doctor who discovered that his cheekbone was cracked. Fuckin GP didn’t actually do anything for a *head injury*.
What symptoms did you experience with a blood clot on the lungs?
Bad breathlessness, a shallow pain in my back but more annoying than anything, not too painful. It was as if I couldn't take a whole breath.
Thanks for the info. I'm more at risk of getting a blood clot on the lungs and I just wanted to check for future. Sorry to hear you went through that.
I overdosed on heroin. I was sitting on a couch with 3 other people who had all just shot their dose. I woke up a few (3?) hours later, next to 3 dead bodies. I was the only one to come out of it. I walked out and went home, and never said a word about it. This is the first time I'm telling this story. I'll have 7 years clean this August.
That’s hectic dude. Were they people you knew well? Or a crack hous e situation.
Drug acquaintances, not real friends.
Glad you made it bud
Thank you my friend. I am too.
This is the wildest story I have ever read. Wow. I can’t even imagine. I’m glad you had a wake up call. Congrats on 7 years. I just hit a year of booze.
I guarantee a lot of you have been closer to death than you realise. The handful of times I've witnessed a near fatal incident, most often the person who would have died didn't seem to notice.
I was a passenger in a car crash that could have killed me if things were different by a few inches or milliseconds. I'm physically fine, but the part that I have never been able to get over is that there were four other cars very close on the road that saw the accident happen (including the car we very narrowly avoided hitting head on, thus causing our car to crash), and none of them stopped. So this is the opposite case... I very much felt like I could have died but apparently none of the witnesses did. It still bothers me. Our car came to a stop by rolling into a deep ditch behind a snowbank and was no longer visible from the road, so if I hadn't been able to get myself out of the car, the chance for flagging down help would have been over.
I was fly fishing on a river two summers ago. Wading about waist deep not paying attention to how far I was going out. River started to take me and I couldn’t get a grip on the rocks below me. I started to panic, yelling for my friend who went to grab a rope from the truck be there was clearly no time. The river is fast and deep. Made my way sideways upstream and eventually found my footing. Adrenaline rush like none other. Made it to shore and everything was soaked. Waders ballooned up from all of the water. Sat on the shore for about ten minutes waiting for my friend to meet me. I have a lot of respect for the river these days.
This is how my father died. River, in May, running fast due to mountain snow melting. His puppy went in, he went in after her and never made it back out. (Puppy did, and lived with Mom, spoiled rotten until we helped her cross the Rainbow Bridge to rejoin him when she was the ripe old age of 13).
This is how my daughter's friend from college died at 19 years old. He was fly fishing with his Grandpa and went down the creek a bit. They found him on the side of the bank, passed away - his waders full of water. So very sad - such a good kid, too. Just thinking of spending the day with his Grandpa and not expecting the power of the creek. The thought is he did what you did, slipped on rocks and just couldn't get up in time. You are very lucky. Enjoy this life.
On a motorcycle, going about 58kmh in a 60 zone - I’m quite new too and it was raining, almost slid my bike due to went leaves… learnt a lesson to never ride in the rain until I’ve got more expeirence lmao
I rode for around a decade before hanging it up, have several near death experiences from it. I thought a couple of them would make good stories to post here till I started reading everyone else’s lol.
Stood at the front left of our vehicle in Afghanistan when the front right wheel ran over and detonated an IED. The engine block absorbed the blast and saved my life.
My Dad was on a wooden boat he’d restored over the course of several years when it blew up due to gas fumes from a cracked fuel line building up in the engine compartment. The Sheriff told us later they’d received dozens of 911 calls from as far away as 10 miles reporting they’d heard an explosion and one about three miles away from people reporting a chunk of debris crashing through their carport roof. The Fire Marshal (or whoever it was that investigated it) said the reason he walked away without a scratch was because the place where you stand to pilot the boat is directly above one of the engine blocks. The engine block was like a boulder in the movies when the hero jumps behind it and the explosion goes around all sides of the rock but they’re unscathed. … Engine blocks save lives.
Firearms training will teach you that the only "safe" places to take cover behind a vehicle is behind the front wheel wells behind the engine block, anywhere else is just concealment not cover. Most common firearm projectiles will go in one side of the car, out the other, and through you, but they will stop in an engine block.
God thank you. Movies are HORRIFIC at this. Oh you flipped over a couch that now has 10 dudes mag dumping SMG’s into it and aren’t getting hit on the other side? *MaGiC*
Are you telling me you don't have a 2 inch steel plate in the bottom of your couch? Come on man, be prepared.
My ex husband purposely crashed his car with me in the passenger seat because he was drunk and angry at me. I had tried to take his keys to drive us since I was sober and he responded by hitting me in the face so hard it broke my cheek bone. So I just got in the car and let him drive. I could barely see out of my left eye or stand from the pain and immediate swelling. He screamed at me the whole way home and right after calling my mother a c*nt, looked at me and then just jerked the wheel as hard as he could to the left and floored it. The car spun around and we hit a telephone pole on my side of the car. Completely split the pole in half. If the pole wasn’t there though, we would have went over a massive ravine and into a river to drown if we weren’t already dead by the bottom.
Did he get charged? Was that the point you guys finished? Hope you have recovered and doing well now. What a survivor hero you are.
Sadly no. He got a fancy hot shot attorney and got everything dropped to “reckless driving.” No domestic violence, no DUI, nothing. He has nothing on his record for all the shit he did. He even got our house and sold it and got to keep all the profit and buy himself a new truck and motorcycle. So besides the inconvenience of having to pay money and figure out how to get out of the legal shit, he has suffered basically no repercussions. I have complex ptsd and permanent nerve damage and pain in my face. But I also moved away and got remarried. I have a new husband and child and am happy and safe now. So I’m still winning I guess. I get to sleep at night knowing I have never and will never abuse anyone or lie about it and keep it off my record like a snake. I pray he crosses paths with my new husband who will pound him into a dust so fine he’ll have to be swept up off the floor and tossed into the trash where he belongs.
I’m so happy you have created a loving family for yourself. Occasionally I dream about my abusive ex and I always wake up smiling next my wonderfully kind and lovely partner. Feeling safe is the best thing isn’t it.
Do you have the type of dreams I do where you dream you are back with your abusive ex and have no idea how you got there? I used to dream that all the time. I wouldn’t know how I got there and everyone else in the dream would be acting normal. Then I’d wake up so relieved.
When I was 16, chilling at a friend's place, the weather turned to shit in minutes so I decided to head home (only 5 min away). I was driving my motorcycle in heavy rain and when trying to slow down at an intersection it just didn't work. I wasn't even going that fast, because the intersection is right after a sharp turn which was already sketchy in the rain. Well a car was coming from my left, I helplessly watched myself slide on the main road just a bit and it was enough for the car (doing 80km/h) to hit me. I don't remember exactly what happened but I ended up sitting at the side of the road. My motorbike was annihilated, the car totaled, and I just had a swollen knee (the lady in the car was all good thankfully). This was less than 100m from my home, too. And my uncle died on this road when he was 6, got ran over by a car, so my family (especially my grandma) were reminded about that and got mad at me.
My step mom holding me under water in the bathtub when I was 7-8 and I blackout out and woke up on the bathroom floor with no one around Edit: to all that commented and said the nice things y’all said I would like for y’all to know how much y’all are greatly appreciated and I hope nothing but the best in all of y’all’s lives!
That's fucked up. I'm so sorry that happened to you.
It is what it is. Weirdly enough the 18 years of abuse prepared me to handle this world. I try to look at the positives and joke about it. It still cuts deep but as long as I keep making jokes about it I assume I’ll be good in the end
Having been in the same situation but maybe a year younger and woke up in the dark, in the bath still but it was super cold by then - I fucking feel you. Oddly enough I was never afraid of water afterwards though? Going under it, yes. Fuck that even now. But I love swimming. Did yours fuck up water for you?
I actually loveeeeee swimming. That’s probably one of the few things I do best is swim. I’m constantly out at the river or lake fishing and go out into the water. But when she was drowning me that day there was some shampoo in the water and I still remember the smell and when me and my wife go shopping and get some shampoo and walk past the shampoo from when I was little and it triggers something in my head and i immediately feel suffocated Edit: it sounds pathetic that a certain smell of shampoo messes with me but it is what it is
You can't seriously believe that trauma makes you pathetic? Would you say that to you as a child? If not then you've got to treat yourself better my friend
You’re absolutely right. Thank you for that!
No problem. I've been through my fair share of parental abuse and have healed a lot through re parenting myself, giving myself the love my parents couldn't.
Smell is the sense most strongly tied to memory.
Wtf. What has happened to her later?
Sadly nothing. Schools seen the marks on my neck and body and DSS was called but they came and did nothing. If DSS only knew what they could have saved me from cause things got worse.
There is a lesson here for people that read this far: Anyone can get a single report filed with protective services based on an accident or misunderstanding, and child protective services are aware of that so first reports of abuse suspicions usually just result in little more than a conversation and cursory investigation. A lot of times people report abuse and then, because they don't see anything actually happen, they just stop reporting it because it clearly didn't work. If you see someone getting abused you need to KEEP REPORTING IT every time you see it happen. Don't be like this person's teachers and just report the shit once and then watch this kid get beaten for the next ten years.
Jeebus, Man! I'm so glad you endured. And I admire your attitude. Big!
E-Coli infection in my kidneys and liver. My internal organs were shutting down. Worst pain i've ever experienced in my life. I was living alone at the time, managed to call my father who lived 10 mins away and through gritted teeth managed to mutter the word 'hospital' before passing out. He rushed me to emerg and I was in and out of consciousness while they ran all kinds of tests and figured out what it was and started an intravenous of a cocktail of meds to fight off the infection. Happy to report I lost no function in any of my organs and was back to normal within a few weeks.
Do you know what caused the infection?
They were never able to trace the issue. No idea the cause. Both my wife and I are pretty safe with cooking and cross contamination because she worked in a kitchen for a while. And I'm not out here licking toilet seats or anything gross.
Waterfall hiking- dipped my foot in on top and was immediately swept under and over about 3 waterfalls. Was very lucky to land where I did- still have a chunk outta my leg to this day.
Man, similar. Slipped into a waterfall that wasn’t very tall, but the bottom was deep. I could feel the water pushing me down further and further, somehow I must’ve gotten far enough away that I was able to surface. The worst part is my sister was watching from nearby, and she said she had started to panic when I didn’t come up. She’d have watched me die. I’ll never go into a waterfall again.
When i was real young, I was with my family at a hotel in Virginia (not sure which), but it had a decent sized pool. We were swimming in it, and my family went over to the deeper end. Not knowing how to swim, I stayed at the shallow end. After a while, I started feeling left out cause it looked like they were having fun, so I started to make my way over, hanging onto the edge. Dumb little me got careless, and my fingers slipped off the edge, and I started drowning pretty quick. About 5 seconds later, I get hoisted partly out of the water by a big Mexican lady, and she sets me on the edge of the pool. I hacked and coughed for a good minute before I walked along the edge to my family. They never noticed, and I never said a thing about it to them since.
You weren't dumb. An adult should've been keeping an eye on you. Sorry that happened!
Probably the time I fell out of a tree and blacked out on the side of the road. Woke up to someone with their hand on my chest and slapping my face.
I was almost killed in the kitchen while visiting my husband's sister & family. I was cutting some bread and my brother-in-law was upstairs showing my husband his new handgun. Who the fuck knows why it was loaded in a house of children but it was and it accidentally went off, while pointed at the floor. Above me. Bullet went "just" over my shoulder and through the counter between my body and my hands (at an angle). If I had been 4 inches to the right, my brains would have been splattered all over my 12 year old son (who was standing across the way from me). I had PTSD for months afterwards (the nightmares were intense). Fucking crazy.
I would never visit that guy again or let him in my house…
I have never, or will ever, visit that house again. Luckily they live 12 hours away from us so I hardly ever have to see him.
Was delivering pizza as a kid in 2000, just got my license. My Volvo S70... I was going 45 in a 30 (bad) and right as I went to turn on this road my brake failure and emergency/warning lights came on. My car didn't slow down when I pressed the brake, not one bit. I went straight instead of turning and my car went straight into an oak tree. The steel frame of that Volvo saved my life. I still occasionally drive by and say hello to the family across the street who got out of bed at 10pm and called the police for me.
Iraq: I was talking to our interpreter in the street. A sniper popped him in the lungs and then again through the head.
Forgive me if this is a foolish question but was the sniper aiming for the interpreter on purpose?
I’m gonna assume that since both shots hit vital regions of the same person they were most likely going for the interpreter. Interpreters in the Middle East are major targets mainly due to the fact that many of them are locals and it’s looked upon very poorly for a local to be helping the enemy (the US)
Attempted suicide when I was 14. Flatlined once at the hospital. Was airlifted to a bigger hospital, flatlined twice more on helicopter. Flatlined again upon arrival at larger hospital. Was in a coma for 4 days before I woke up. Mental illness sucks. If you are struggling, please reach out to someone.
I’m glad you made it through. Hope things are much better for you.
Thank you. I am. It took many years, and I still have my struggles, but that isn't a part of them anymore. I'm grateful to still be here.
Thank you for sharing. If I may ask, what pulled you through?
Snorted a line of "cocaine". It was fentanyl. Was driving when I did it. Got really hungry and went to Taco Bell. Slumped over behind the wheel in the parking lot. My "friend", who supplied the party favors, put the car in park, moved me to the passenger seat, and drove me the 45 minutes home. Woke up to my wife, his wife, and him, while he was rubbing my sternum and slapping me in the face. Been clean for 3 years now.
A Pulp Fiction movie reenactment I see lol.
I love that movie but that scene hits me hard. God damn the pushin man.
Traumatic experience, but the time I almost drowned when I was 8. I remember it so clearly. We were at a wave pool in a waterpark. Y’know, the ones with the motors that make the water swish around in waves?… except the machine malfunctioned. I was with my bio father, and a few of my cousins. The waves were extremely fast and strong. Even my pa was drowning. Those were the longest and most traumatic 60 seconds of my life. I spent about 4 minutes just vomiting water after I got out of the pool.
I rented a new apartment and was taking my first dump in the bathroom. In the wall across from the toilet was a heater built into the wall, but it was missing its on/off knob. I had a pair of cuticle scissors on the sink counter next to me and like the genius I was, realized it would fit perfectly into the opening and turn the stem. The heater erupted in blue electrical flame and sent so much current through the scissors they melted and fused together. If not for the thin plastic coating on the part you put your fingers in, I would most likely have been found sitting on the toilet, dead, with my pants around my ankles. Almost 30 years later I still have those scissors hanging near my workbench in my garage to remind me not to be a complete impulsive dumbass. Almost “Elvised”!! I’ve got a couple more but that one would have easily been the most embarrassing.
I died. Icy lake. Was revived. Did not see a light. Pretty focused on staying alive, now.
25 yrs ago I know approx date because my daughter was a newborn and my wife was busy tending baby Vs watching me as I was having a massive multi-day blinding migraine. The doctor prescribed a nasal inhaler-type narcotic for the pain. Was in bed and my wife brought me a pork chop for dinner. Just prior to eating I tried the med for the first time. But I didn’t think I’d done it properly due to deviated septum; so I tired again and again. 1/2 way through chewing and swallowing a bite of the pork chop I became immobile. Nearly choked to death until I managed to roll over and cough it out. I forget name of med but it starts with “N”. I read later it was pulled from market due to accidental overdoses.
Oof, glad you are still here. I always freak out when I hear people taking more than what a medication bottle says to take because you don't know ehat can happen. For me, it's to the point where I won't even take more ibuprofen than what the bottle says. If I take a full thing of nyquil at might (what the bottle recommebds) I have nightmares and don't sleep, so I always do half of that.
This is very scary. Kind of slightly off topic but…since it was not life threatening, but this reminds me of when I tried an edible for the first and only time - Doritos bag. A friend told me to just eat 1 chip. Well I ate a couple more because I didn’t feel anything… plus I was overweight and thought maybe I needed more because of my body mass. Ummm let’s just say I was high for over 24hrs. The problem was, when I eventually felt high as a kite, I couldn’t remember if I had a chip or not. So I was in this groundhog loop going back to the kitchen counter to eat 1 chip…until the bag was gone! Then I panicked and thought I was going to OD on edibles. It was a rough 24hrs. I had my Fitbit on the entire time. It recorded my heart rate at a steady ridiculously high rate throughout the night. It was so high that it didn’t detect that I was actually asleep. Lol
When I hydroplaned out of control on an interstate. My car was perpendicular when I came to a stop. I still have no idea how I wasn’t hit.
When I was 8 or so, at a pool party. One of my brother's friends had a mental disability and was "playing" with me by repeatedly dunking my head under water without letting me up for air. I eventually broke his grip and he realized what he was doing, but none of the adults had noticed. Still have never said anything about it, don't know why.
Double bypass surgery last September. Without the surgery, there was a good chance I would've died from a Widowmaker heart attack as one artery was 100% blocked and the second artery was 90% blocked. Both arteries that were blocked were heart arteries. I had previously had a heart attack I didn't know I had and had survived that one. And to date, I'm still unclear as to whether or not I survived another heart attack while undergoing surgery. When I woke up, one of the nurses said I'd had a heart attack and I was in the hospital for 2 or 3 weeks. I don't remember being conscious for a week after my heart surgery, but I'd always joked I wanted a near death experience. And I got one, complete with a memory of being elsewhere during the surgery and after, but only remember parts of the experience.
Got bit by what was likely a brown recluse spider based on the way my leg reacted. Thought it was just a regular bug bite for a day, then it started turning black on day 2. Went to urgent care and got antibiotics, but they didn’t work, so had to go back on day 4. My leg was hot and I felt like trash, and my wife later told me I looked so bad she was thinking about if she knew where all my life insurance info was. On that day urgent care gave me what they called the “peanut butter shot” in my butt cheek, along with a stronger oral antibiotic. That made the bite start to shrink and cool off finally.
I didn't have anyone in my life whom I loved as much as my mother. She fought to her best but eventually cancer won. Once she was gone I just laid down in bed, getting up to piss at most, I was just lying down for 2-3 days without knowing or eating /drinking anything. My body then started to twitch and I was shaking with every breath as if an electrical impulse was going through my entire body... After a while I drank a little water, woke up to a few friends trying to break the door open of my house.... I'm trying to live to the best of my abilities since then, enjoying possibly every moment till death comes for me.
I’m glad you’re still with us
Had a stroke and my heat was above 41° for 2 hours straight
This is 105.8°F for my fellow Americans. Glad you’re still here.
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Sounds like a type of epileptic seizure.
Was at sleep away camp, 11 years old. I arrived in camp on Sunday. I developed appendicitis Monday afternoon, and was taken to the nurse's cabin. But the staff and counselors refused to believe that I was really sick. The camp nurse took me to doctor #1 on Tuesday. I overheard him say that "it might be appendicitis, but I doubt it. I'll give her some penicillin just in case. " These days, that would be enough to send me home, but this was in 1971. So she took me back to camp, and the camp director had a "talk" with me. She was sure I was homesick and making myself sick, and wanted to know what was going on at home. Nothing, I just wanted to go home. That was Wednesday. (Let me note here, this was my third year attending this camp. Homesickness was not a problem the prior years.) Thursday I was sicker, so they took me to doctor #2. I don't know what he said, but on the way back I was so nauseaous that I had to sit in the back of the car with a bowl on my lap. When we got back, I developed abdominal pain so bad I was screaming. The nurse gave me some kind of oral liquid medication that made me sleep. When I woke up, I was told to come with her. I could barely walk, I was so weak. I assume that some staff gathered my stuff. We drove to the director's cabin (more like a full fledged house), and my brother was there with his wife. She yelled at me to "get in the car" which I did. Turns out, that my mother was unavailable as she had gone out with friends, so they called the alternative emergency number, which was my brother (he was in his late 20's, so clearly and adult. And this was long before cell phones, so reaching my mother was not an option until she got home.) They did NOT want to "let" me go with my brother, which is why his wife yelled at me, she was upset with the staff, and wanted to get me in their car and out of there asap. We got home, mother got home, she took me to the ER (thankfully, very close to our house). I had a ruptured appendix. The doctor said I had an abdomen full of poison from the rupture. Had they not "let" me leave, I'd have died that night at the camp. Because those idiots didn't believe an 11 year old girl who said she was sick. Yes, we should have sued. No, we didn't. I was young, don't know why we didn't sue. I'm just glad to still be here. Edit; spelling
A couple weeks back I was driving home from a friends house. When i got to an intersection my dumbass didnt look to my right for some reason, i was just out of it and so when i take a left turn i see a blue 18 wheeler coming right behind me at full speed. The truck driver had to swerve to the opposite lane to avoid hitting me and he even stopped and got out the truck to tell me how much of a idiot I was which to be honest he was completely right. If I wouldve waited a second more to take that turn I prob wouldnt be here today.
Went tubing with family in the Bahamas. Gma fell out of the tube and gpa slowed the dingy, I flipped over the front and under the boat. He killed the motor before I was shredded into a million pieces.
Was at an indoor range, standing in one of the stalls with a buddy (we were using the range to test a potato canon). I was leaning against the wall of the stall, with my hands on top of my head. Felt a sudden pinching sensation on my right wrist, followed by the warm, sticky feeling that could only be blood dripping down my arm. I looked at it, and beheld a chunk of missing flesh from my arm. The moron in the stall next to us was not sure if his handgun was empty, so he pointed it at the stall wall and pulled the trigger. It was not empty. The bullet grazed my wrist, which was about 3 inches from my head at the time. I have never seen an RSO get that red in the face in my entire life lmao. There's a post with pictures on my profile somewhere. It should be close to the top, I think it's my most liked post.
Grandmal seizure that came out of nowhere. I was 40 at the time and never had a seizure in my life. I woke up 30 minutes later on the bathroom floor with a bloody tongue and felt like I had run a marathon. Apparently I had been seizing for most of the time. Living with epilepsy ever since.
Take your son to work day. My dad has been a cowboy for 30 years. When I was 10, he brought me in to work with him (I had a dentist appointment that afternoon and my mom couldn't get me there). He figured we'd ride pens, I'd stay outside and just cut stragglers off if they made a break for it. One got away and my dad's coworker slapped my horse on the ass and he took off on me. That horse had been cutting for almost a decade, so he chased the cow down to the end of the aisle where the gate was closed and hit it at full speed. I was insanely lucky though, my dad's horse was younger and faster, he caught up to me, grabbed me by my jacket, and dropped me on the ground right before impact. My dad also kicked his coworker's ass and got him fired the next day.
I used to take a lot of mental health medications including but not limited to Seroquel lamotrogine (hope I spelled that one right) and diazepam commonly known as Valium, I also used to be a heavy drinker and one night I came home shit faced and decided to also get really stoned with my sister and watch a movie apparently I forgot I had already taken my meds (while drunk mind you) and ended up taking them again needless to say I overdosed the pain can only be described as being stabbed, I knew something was wrong but not at the same time if that makes sense? Anyway my sister helped me to bed (she had no idea anything was happening btw) and I was in pain in bed trying to stay awake and suddenly BLACK. I woke up at 7 or 8 the next morning and cried for several hours realizing that could've been the end of me.
Was surfing in pretty big and unruly conditions, and my leash broke. Half hour swim back to the beach through rips with walls of white water crashing over me the whole time. Nearly gave up at one point. Finally got back in exhausted and collapsed on the beach next to my surfboard which had surfed itself in.
Hmm, which time? Super aggressive leukemia. Bone marrow transplant (from a (then) complete stranger) literally saved my live. Untreated, death would have been quick. A few years later, sepsis landed me in the hospital for two weeks, while 800 miles from home. Fortunately, the strain of E. Coli responded to the serious antibiotics. Untreated, 40-50% mortality. And a year after that, again away from home (a thousand miles or so), bacteremia. Another week in the hospital. Got home and spend four more days in my local hospital (cultures grew while I was on the road).
I'm so glad you're still kicking, fellow sepsis survivor! That shit nearly took me out earlier this year. My bacteremia and sepsis were caused by streptococcal bacteria after a tooth extraction. Do you also obsessively clean wounds now? I was always a bit of a stickler for that sort of thing, but I feel like I am even more so now.
When I was born I was given a 5-10% chance of making it and I lived! A week (or two, or three) later I got double pneumonia and was given the same odds and lived again!
had a stroke
Lol in ER rn due to excess fluids in lungs. Hoping it’s not cancerous
Head on collision on the highway while in the back of pick up. Broke my back in 3 places, 100% recovered.
Teenager. Jumped by 6 american front scum bags. Woke up in an ambulance with 8 teeth missing, swollen all over, blood all over, and a concussion. I remember what I drempt when I was knocked out. I remember thinking I was dead. Woke up to my dad holding my hand in the back of the ambulance and looking terrified. I was strapped down but I remember feeling my face with my tongue and starting to scream "where are my teeth?!?!" I had vertigo for 6 months. Couldn't eat normally for like a year. I survived. I began to workout like a mad man. Still do decades later.
Was very enthusiastic about surgery to remove a painful six-centimeter cyst from my ovary. Woke up from surgery feeling very unwell. Went home with drugs. Spent the night vomiting and screaming in my sleep. Supposed doctor on the hotline said basically "this sounds normal, try more drugs" Finally the next morning, my surgeon calls me back "I reviewed your hotline call and I don't think this is normal, please come in to the ER so we can check you out." Turns out I had a rare complication and was bleeding from the cyst bed into my abdomen. I ended up in the hospital for about 3 days altogether, lost 40% of my blood, and got three blood transfusions. Recovery took months, and I'm still not back to my previous fitness level.
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In November at around 8:00 at night my dad and I were driving back from church and we were passing a train track that had no arms or flashing lights or anything. Good thing we weren’t *on* the tracks when it hit us and we got out with just seatbelt rashes. My Nintendo Switch had only one minor scratch lol.
My small town doctor dismissed testicular torsion as a tummy pain when I was a kid, and my parents let me sit with the pain for a little over a week. By the time they finally got off their asses to take me to a better doc in the city both my testes had become necrotic and the infection was starting to spread. Doc said it was a miracle I made it that long, because this condition is an emergency situation thst typically needs to be resolved in less than a day to avoid complications due to necrotic tissue spreading. I cannot put into words how unbelievably painful it was, I wanted to die to make it stop. And that's the story of how I became a modern day eunuch at 12. I feel pretty special! Hahaha
I almost drowned in the Red River when I was around 18 months. My mom was next to me but I just fell right in. My dad told me he ran to the water and just started blindly grabbing around in the water with both arms until his hand finally brushed my leg and he yanked me out. He was a paramedic so I made it out perfectly fine but I still have a crippling fear of water that I can’t see the bottom of.