Your Faces of Death

How close do you think you've come to dying and/or serious injury and escaped.

I can think of three offhand.

When I was a freshman in high school I was walking with my friends to where my mom worked to go home. I was talking to my friends, looking over my shoulder when I stepped into traffic.
The car's front tire ran over the edge of my sneaker and my bookbag broke the passenger side mirror.
My friend was screaming my name as this happens. I'm just stunned. Shocked to the point I can't really move as the car keeps going. The driver tried to stop but traffic was backed up and I was OK, so they kept going.

In college, two friends of mine and a girl got roughed up by some local Gypsies at a hangout. A bunch of us head down there to see what's going on. We get down there - there's like 20 of us and about a dozen of them. They had a gun. We booked.
They started chasing us.
There are 8-10 of us piled into the back of a six-cylinder Ford Ranger. Four of these guys were easy 250 lbs. Easy.
The driver is trying to haul ass (as much ass as one can haul with a half-ton plus payload in a six-cylinder) and block the road... He decides to pull up onto a interstate on-ramp. He merged into traffic at about 20 MPH. I hear a "HHHHHHOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNKKKKKK," turn around and there is a God Damned Semi bearing down on us at 70 MPH, coming off a 7 percent grade hill. The truck was less than a 100 feet from us. We all screamed. The semi braked and the jackknifed the rear end of the truck. How the hell we escaped without injury, I'll never know. But we did. My buddy kept right on driving.

In elem. school two guys in a beat up van stopped on school grounds to ask for directions. Their van was parked between me and the school. I stood there talking to the driver and thinking something's not right, but I never moved. The directions they wanted was to a place easily defined by road signs along the highway, along which our school sat. But still there they are in our school lot asking a fifth-grade kid for directions.
They left, but I have always had the feeling I was an angel's breath from becoming a milk carton picture.

Not me but I was there ...
Hunting with some high school friends, one of our party is shooting at a squirrel as it's running across some limbs.
"Blam!" "Blam!" "Blam!" .. He missed the squirrel but as he followed it with his gun barrel and subsequent buckshot he shot off my friend's hat. Just. The. Hat.

 

You're name isn't Orville Redenbacher, it's Felix the Cat. You've got about a half-dozen lives left.

 

I went head-first over the railing of my apartment terrace. Somehow managed to wrap my arms in the railing on my way down.
Was dangling 30 above the pavement.

 

I'm sure we'll get a lot of similar stories to yours, Orville, involving car crashes and close scrapes with scoundrels. Here's two of mine.

1) Sometime in seventh or eighth grade, my friends and I would always hang out at the local pizza parlor and play the Super Mario Bros. arcade game. I stayed a little too long one time, after they had left and it got dark. Some hooligans came in and started fucking around with me. I tried to ignore them, but was terrified that if I left they'd follow me, so I stayed.
Eventually, one of them blasted me in the back of the head with what felt like a brick. I still have no idea what it was. I just stared straight ahead and kept playing the game, hoping they'd lose interest (which, I guess, they eventually did, since they left after a while; can't remember if the guys running the pizza shop finally figured out what was going and chased them out or not).
Kind of makes me shudder once in a while when I wonder what the hell they hit me with, or what actually would've happened if I'd left and tried to make it the five blocks home by myself.

2) In high school, I'd sometimes stop and buy a newspaper to read in homeroom if I got there early. One morning, I was walking back to campus from the local convenience store, stepped out between two cars stopped at the red light and ... WHAM! Got hit by a car.
Didn't see it until the last second, but still felt like I had enough time to hop a little, at least get my feet off the ground, and brace as much as I could for the impact. It helped that the car was braking for the light, too, so it was probably only going 15-20 mph instead of 25 or 30.
I just rolled off into the street, and luckily wasn't hit by another car coming the other way and didn't smack my head on anything. I was dazed for a second, but bounced up, told the lady I was OK and moseyed on back to school. I had to get back in homeroom before the bell, after all. Nothing was broken, nothing was bruised. Maybe a few scratches. I like to think I looked like a stuntman, barreling off the hood like I'd done it a million times.
It didn't really dawn on me until first period, maybe 30 minutes later, that I had just BEEN HIT BY A FUCKING CAR.
Looking back, the whole thing feels surreal. I can't imagine how scared and freaked out the woman driving the car must have felt. I barely even acknowledged her, just yelled out, "I'm OK!" and ran off.
I feel bad for her when I think about it, because I know it must have ruined her day.

 

In college, our dorm was shaped like a big "U". In one corner of the U was a bathroom.
Hanging out once before a football game, a few of us were in the third-floor bathroom and talking to some friends in their dorm room, which was the second window down on one of the arms of the U. I mentioned to one of my drunk friends that he could probably jump from the bathroom window to the dorm room window, a distance of maybe 8-10 feet -- but about 30 feet off the ground, and there was no real ledge outside the dorm room window to land on.
Before I could tell him I was kidding, the crazy son of a bitch did it.
He mostly made it clean, although one of the people in the dorm room had to help him in.

The same guy also once climbed down to the ground from a second-floor balcony in a different part of the dorm, but that was only 15 feet or so down. Needless to say, he earned the nickname "Spiderman."

 

When I was four I got sick, refused to eat or drink, and got dehydrated.

 

August 4, 2010, my commander and I launched on a mission to evacuate two US and one ANA (Afghan National Army) casualties from a really, really bad part of town.

Just prior to landing, we heard the unmistakable sound of a DShK, a Russian heavy machine gun that would make Swiss fucking cheese out of a helicopter if operated by someone who could shoot. Heard about 20 rounds in the time it took us to fly over. None hit.

When we landed, the medic jumped out an observed an RPG being launched from about 150 meters away. Just before the loudest noise I've ever heard, he said, "RPG fell short."

We were sitting ducks. Would've went right up our ass. Could've so easily been dragged through the streets of the Zhari District in a Black Hawk Down way.

 

t_b_f wins.

 

/thread

 

I have an unfair advantage in this type of competition. Sorry.

 

July 17 19TK I was 18...I was riding my bike, burning off dinner as I trained for an upcoming race. Apparently, I was clipped by a guy driving a white pick-up truck who was pulling out of a parallel parking spot. I was tossed about 20 feet through the air, landing on my head, face down, in the middle of a busy street, in front of a sidewalk cafe in Nashville. The customers came out and flagged traffic, keeping me from getting run over. One guy told everyone not to move me, because I was crumpled up and looked like I had broken my neck. So no one turned me over.

A man named Mike Lewis, driving home from work from his job as a respiratory therapist at Vandy hospital, saw the commotion in the street and got out of his car and came up to me and immediately flipped me over. As he said later, I was as blue as blue jeans. He started CPR and I pretty quickly came to (thanks to being in a fight-or-flight mode when I was hit). Estimates range from 4 to about 6 minutes that I was completely out, not breathing, full on NDE.

When I came to, I started thrashing about uncontrollably, and as a result scraped off most of the skin on my face. Also had a shattered shoulder, and severed (not completely off) tongue that I had swallowed. And a broken skull that left me with 64 stitches but no plate.

I was in the hospital for 6 weeks, most of which under a medically induced coma to reduce my brain swelling.

I healed up just fine, though. Had to do some minor therapy for speech, forgot the week or so before the accident and of course most of the time in the hospital. Lost my NROTC scholley to Mizzou. But lived to type the tale!

God bless you Mike Lewis, wherever you are!

 

Wow. That's amazing.