Posted on 07/06/2013 7:15:44 PM PDT by MNDude
It seems almost everyone has a story of how they almost drowned, almost drove off a cliff, or narrowly dodged a bullet. What is your story of the closest you came to dying?
I’ve had my vices(Cocaine..cough cough...none since 89)...but I hated that stuff. It made me feel like crap. I once got a mainline shot after an incident on a tablesaw busted my left eye like a grape. The nurse gave it as I was standing in front of the doctor and his eye machine...holding my good eye closed...and my head starting to feel the concussion coming on. My wife was on my right holding me up. The instant the nurse dropped the plunger...my mouth filled up from the wrong way...and I had to fight all 3 to get to the hand sink to let it out. I couldn’t talk...they had no idea what the hell I was doing. I was like,”Didn’t you see my jaws blowed up like a puffer fish?” LOL
I’ve told this story here before on a guardian angel thread, so I might as well do it again.
When I was young and foolish, I had a small 2-seat convertible sports car. I was taking a route that I had driven often, and there was a roadside restaurant that had a sign out offering snapper soup.
I don’t know exactly why I picked this occasion to stop there, but I did, and I got the soup and something else. I enjoyed my meal in the same way a convict might enjoy his last meal.
When I got back into my car, for some reason, I didn’t fasten my seat belt. I had always used belts before this, and I have ever since. But something kept me from doing it this one time. The belt was tricky, and you really needed two hands to buckle it. I was driving along thinking that I needed to do the belt, but I was waiting for an opportunity to stop, but that opportunity never came.
The road I was on was twisty, with one particularly nasty off-camber blind curve. I was going too fast to make the curve, and ran into one of those old-style guard rails made from heavy wire rope and wooden posts.
Since I didn’t have the belt on, I was sort of bouncing around randomly inside the car.
Once everything stopped moving, I was uninjured, apart from a couple of bruises.
Near as I can tell, the nose of the car had gotten under the wire rope guard rail, and one of those wooden posts came up over the car. It punched through the roof, put a dent in the roll bar directly above the driver’s seat, and put a brown scuff right on the headrest where my head should have been.
If I had been buckled into my seat, that post would have hit me right in the face. I would have been killed instantly.
I found out later that someone I knew had totalled a car in exactly the same spot, and a couple of years later, someone was killed there. After that, they finally put in a modern guard rail.
What made me stop at that restaurant, and what kept me from buckling that belt?
Guardian angel or just dumb luck? You decide.
You and I are about the same age.
I was born with some kind of blood irregularity that killed before the days of transfusions. Everything went down from there.
Been talking to you for a good while on this forum, and I must say, that story doesn't surprise me somehow. Your bad-assness, and will to live comes through in much of what you post.
Righteous....
I've got one of them, too. We'll celebrate eighteen years of wedded bliss next week.
walmart. named it.
I once did something similar after staying up all night with a new girlfriend.
I was on my driver route at work the next day, and fell asleep behind the wheel on a lonely and peaceful country road. Woke up just in time to see a telephone pole coming at me at 60 mph.
I never yanked a steering wheel so hard!
You must have gotten a flashback the first time you saw the trash compactor scene in Star Wars.
What a horrifying tale.
Been plenty but my ex wife....the Brasilan one.....was by far the most life threatening event I dealt with ...endured
Like living and sleeping with a gorgeous puff adder
Worse than two open heart surgeries
Being shot
Boat sinking 135 miles offshore....treading water 8 hiurs
Semi controlled plane crash....somewhere I should not have been
Numerous auto and motorcycle wrecks
Typhoid
Hurricane Camille
Various coups in Haiti
M-19 war in Colombia
Sierra Leone late 80s
Shelling outside Corinto and Chinandega
Falling off a cliff....saved by a road runner type seedling before the abyss
Yep.....Ex was biggest threat to my mortality
I bought a hot dog from the machine at the filling station.
.....And ate it!!!
Thank you for your service, and welcome home
And then dowsed "The Führer's" body with gasoline before igniting it?
Seriously: It sounds like you might have a very interesting story to tell. Care to expand upon it?
Regards,
5th grade playing school baseball as catcher.got hit in the right temple trying to grab the ball. walked away w/4 stitches. 2nd time: got into deep water & started drowning...was rescued,everything ok. 3rd time: Iranian secret police showed up at my door for anti-islam books & literature due to house to house search. this was after the islamic revolution when Khomeini has his little smarmy muslim thugs running around They took me to Evin Prison (i was pregnant at the time, too). After a day I was released w/no charges. I could have been executed by beheading at the time.
oh yeah, i forgot all the life threatening illness.
3x’s pneumonia
2x’s dysentery
1x’s sepsis
1 really bad car accident with my oldest child- we were on a incline in a Jap Crap Car and got rear ended by a tractor trailer making a delivery to Sem-Elebem. Tractor trailer launched the car into the air and we landed crash bang- i really thought I was going to die then-went unconcious & afterwards found out I was on a body board to the local ER-that was worse than Evin Prison
Almost drowned in the Elkhorn River in Nebraska when I was a kid. But my old man jumped in and pulled me out. I remember looking at the bottom of the river and thinking it was over.
I never read the side effects, and slowly over the next 2 years slide into hell. The final straw was working in a wiring closet with my son-in-law and felt myself starting down that "dark tunnel". I had experienced blackouts before, but this one was different. When I came to, I was in the passenger seat of my wife's car, being taken to the ER. They said I had been out on my feet for over half an hour convulsing, but never collapsed.
No one could figure it out. Neurologist put me on anti-seizure meds, but I continued the downward mental spiral. I couldn't take a walk without GPS as I would get lost. It was like I had Alzheimers. I went on disability at work, and continued to sink in depression (to the point of considering suicide). I finally sat down at my computer and started researching my meds against my symptoms. That is where I found the above link. It was like reading my symptoms exactly.
I immediately stopped taking Lipitor, and changed doctors. My new doctor went through my meds and threw about half of them out. My recovery has been slow but steady. I am back to work and continuing to improve.
So here's my warning: Don't blindly follow doctors advice (particularly if the ink on their diploma is running). Research what they try to prescribe to you and question them. If you don't like their answers, get a 2nd opinion, or say NO! I have a feeling more of us are killed by Rx drug reactions and interactions than they tell us....
Bit by a big Rattler in 1966, 3 weeks in the hospital mainly from beling allergic to antivenom, temperature went into the high 100’s.
Either a mortar or an rpg hit behind me in 1971, we were being hit with both so I’m not sure.
Responded to a Domestic in 1974 and when I went into the house the husband had beat the hell out of wife. In the process of taking him down and cuffing him she stuck a kitchen knife in my left side.
Other than a short battle with cancer in 2001 thats about it.
Obama being re-elected has come closer to killing me than any of the above.
I was in bed with a gal when her husband unexpectedly came home......fortunately the bedroom was on the first floor and there wasn’t a screen on the window.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.