Closest you have come to dying
 

Thought this might make for an interesting thread. I think it odd how we flit through daily life with all these things that can so easily kill us, and yet most of us emerge completely unscathed. What's the closest you have come to biting the big one? Here's mine (pretty tame, but I'm sure others will have spicier contributions)

I was scuba diving, and all 8 or so of us divers were in a line, one behind another, with me at the very end, and the 2nd instructor behind me bringing up the rear. This was my first underwater certification dive, and I apparently hadn't affixed the tank properly to the tank-holding apparatus, and -- as was told to me later by the instructor behind me -- it slipped out, and was free-falling in the water deeper and deeper but he saw what was happening and caught it just before it would have consumed all the slack in the line going to my mouthpiece. Had he not noticed it and caught it, it certainly would have ripped my regulator (aka mouthpiece) out. I was only around 15 feet underwater, and might have been able to shoot to the surface unharmed, but I prob would have panicked and taken a big gulp of tasty lake water. I don't really know if taking on a ton of water is enough to kill you...or whether being resuccitated Hasselhoff-style is a straight-forward procedure...but it was enough to spook me pretty good.

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Late one night on an interstate in Arkansas, I hit some road debris and slammed on my brakes in a panic. I blew out both front tires and did at least a 540 on the road before coming to a stop facing the wrong direction. I do not want to think of what might have happened if there had been other traffic behind me.

The worst part about was that after I got to a motel for the night, I needed to have a beer in the worst possible way, and I was in a dry county. @!#$@# baptists.

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Been done before, but ...

Was passenger involved in a high-speed car accident, in which our vehicle T-boned another vehicle at an intersection. My buddy was trying to make the light, and failed miserably.

I'm not wearing a seatbelt. I'm in the center in one of those tiny foreign pickup "trucks," between my two buds.

My buddy (the driver) put his teeth through his lip on the steering wheel, and had quite the concussion. My other buddy also had a consussion, as he hit his head on the windshield. (No airbags)

Me? My buddy said he looked over, and for an instant thought I had gone through the windshield. I ended up UNDER the dash, but basically came out without a scratch.

The other driver was pretty banged up, including a broken leg.

Worst part was we could see it coming. And I can still hear the sound of the metal crunching.

P.S. Oh yeah - same night, three boys were killed in a car accident. You can imagine my mother's initial reaction when the hospital called her early in the morning to tell her that her son had been in a car accident.

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You are probably in more danger riding a bus than in that situation.

On a related note, I think the closest I ever came to dying was everytime I rode a bus in the mountains in Costa Rica.

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Probably a lot of repressed memories.

I was in gridlock at a major intersection. I hear sirens approaching from the side and then I heard a loud crash behind me. I look in the rear-view and watch the car behind me spin around about 270 degrees from a collision. Stupid kids in a stolen car. I went to a plaza nearby an hour later, and just then they getting the innocent driver on a stretcher.

That was a few years ago. Last week I was driving on the highway, it was raining. A car in the lane to my left is driving slightly faster than me and slowly passing me... he starts to drift into me, I jerk the car away from him, he overcompensates in the other direction and, as I've grown accustomed to, I watch him do a 270 in my rear-view. He wasn't hit.

Creepy stuff. I think I'll just live on the internet from now on.

There were probably some worse non-driving ones, but I can't think of them right now... oh, I ate at McDonalds once.

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When I was 14 I went under for knee surgery, and woke up 3 days later in ICU. Turns out I have malignant hyperthermia, a rare genetic disorder which causes an often fatal allergic reaction to certain anaesthetics. It was the first time this had ever happened at the hospital. Two other surgical teams were just finishing up when I went into shock, and came to help. Thank God the anesthesiologist immediately knew what was happening and saved my life with a dose of dantrolene.

Re: Closest you have come to dying
 

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When I was 14 I went under for knee surgery, and woke up 3 days later in ICU. Turns out I have malignant hyperthermia, a rare genetic disorder which causes an often fatal allergic reaction to certain anaesthetics. It was the first time this had ever happened at the hospital. Two other surgical teams were just finishing up when I went into shock, and came to help. Thank God the anesthesiologist immediately knew what was happening and saved my life with a dose of dantrolene.

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Wow.

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I was only around 15 feet underwater, and might have been able to shoot to the surface unharmed

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One breath of air is enough to get to the surface from any depth while scuba diving. If you didn't already know this then you were likely in much greater danger of dying of an embolism than drowning.

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I was only around 15 feet underwater, and might have been able to shoot to the surface unharmed

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One breath of air is enough to get to the surface from any depth while scuba diving. If you didn't already know this then you were likely in much greater danger of dying of an embolism than drowning.

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If you're 55ft under, you are NOT getting to the surface safely on one breath of air. (besides that, it was my first dive)

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I was only around 15 feet underwater, and might have been able to shoot to the surface unharmed

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One breath of air is enough to get to the surface from any depth while scuba diving. If you didn't already know this then you were likely in much greater danger of dying of an embolism than drowning.

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If you're 55ft under, you are NOT getting to the surface safely on one breath of air.

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I hope you failed your scuba test, because you are dangerously wrong.

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If you're 55ft under, you are NOT getting to the surface safely on one breath of air.

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I hope you failed your scuba test, because you are dangerously wrong.

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I think he is saying that depending on the amount of time you've been down there, just getting to the surface alive doesn't mean that much.

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a cop pointed a loaded gun at me once cause he was a retard (IMO)

probably not too dangerous though, I've been lucky

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In high school we my friends and I lived near the cornfields. Usually we'd do a dry run around the two lane roads we'd zip around. During the initial run there was no debris or wet spots on the road.

During the second run I was the lead car, pushing a turn around seventy-five, my Toyota MR2 MKIII can handle in excess of ninety. [censored] wet-spot! Some farmer took the libery to water his crops during the heat of the summer afternoon. I spin out in his cornfield; my car jerkily naviagated between a telephone pool and a big [censored] oak tree. There was about thirty-six inches of clearance on either side.

Pissing your pants is not a pleasant experience.

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a cop pointed a loaded gun at me once cause he was a retard (IMO)

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trip report?

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my wreck wasn't nearly as bad as others, but falling asleep driving up the 101 around montecito.

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On a related note, I think the closest I ever came to dying was everytime I rode a bus in the mountains in Costa Rica.

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lol, rode in one for 8 hours in march from San Jose to Puerto Jiminez, I have to say I was impressed with the dudes driving, but he was [censored] flying around those turns with dropoffs everywhere

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My brother and I got got in a rip current surfing once and didn't even notice any thing happened till about 5 minutes after. We noticed we were about a mile and half off shore instead of 300 yards or so and hauled it back in. It's creepy out in deep ocean on just a board.

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lol, rode in one for 8 hours in march from San Jose to Puerto Jiminez, I have to say I was impressed with the dudes driving, but he was [censored] flying around those turns with dropoffs everywhere

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I was more concerned with the passing that took two minutes on blind corners.

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not too thrilling

pulling out of the high school parking lot, I drove out the exit. This is illegal, but it happens every single day, if we had not done this it would have taken literally hours for the parking lot to clear (over a 1000 cars)

so this cop sees me do it and pulls me over (I later found out he was new to the area) except that he rides my ass so closely that I can't see his lights were on from the rear view mirror. He didn't have his siren on so I didn't realize he was trying to pull me over, I just thought he was trying to ride my ass (I don't know why but it's happened many times before, maybe since I was 'only' going the speed limit, or maybe since I had a nice car)

Then a few hundred yards down the road he puts the siren on, and I'm like oh rite. Except we were at a busy stop light, which was kind of comical, since he had is siren on like we are in a high speed chase but we are stopped dead at a stop light. It goes green I pull over after driving about 20 yards past the stop light, and I'm waiting for him to stroll up to my car, but instead I hear him yelling from his car "GET YOUR HANDS WHERE I CAN SEEM EM" and he's in classic using-the-door-as-a-shield stance with his gun pointed at me

I put my hands out the window, he runs up with the gun still pointed at me, pulls me out, searches me for weapons, puts me in the back of the cop car and then searches my car. 3 other cops cars pull up in the meantime. Eventually he figures out I didn't realize he was pulling me over, but still is mad at me so gives me a ticket for the violation that is committed over 500 times daily in the same spot

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WTF? A thousand cars at a highschool?

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yep, all student cars too. The teacher parking lot was on the other side

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I don't get it, so its a school with two thousand kids and everyone sixteen or over drives to school? I assume they are all worth at least 35k. I only really care because I'm out of work and this seems like a fantastic financial opportunity.

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When I was younger I was taken ill and they couldn't work out what was wrong with me. They thought I might have appendicitis, so hacked that out, then after rummaging around a bit inside discovered that I actually had holes in my intestine and was about to die from blood poisoning. The condition is called 'Meckles diverticulitis' where, from what I understand, pockets swell up in the lining of your intestine and burst.

So here I am, still living, but minus a foot of intestine and for some reason, my appendix as well.

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PARty NIght:

preparty- 2 tabs of this

http://us.st11.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.c..._1916_23305900

and 4 tabs of this: http://shop.com.edgesuite.net/ccimg....s/11925014.jpg
to relax.

Now I take a hotbath. While im relaxing, I drink about 4 shots of absinthe: http://www.originalabsinthe.com/imag...al-140x160.jpg as I got out of the tub I deffenately felt loose. ON the way to the crib, I stopped at a gas station to fill up. I regularely smoked poppy so I smoked a joint whil filling gas.

Party:

we get a poker game going. prolly 3 hours +. I had pissed about 3-4 times meaning I must have drank 10-12 beers. We smoke some weed, then I smoke another joint of poppy. Game is over. I feel drunk. Party is still going strong, but starting to fade. MY sences and cordination is fading too by now.

I start sweating like a mofo. Very wierd. Also, I begin rocking back and forth as if I am nervouse as hell. Some chiks that I'm cool with ask me "if I need any help" I ignore them. Also, some dudes are like "wtf is wrong w/ you" I also ignore. I just sit there rocking back and forth. The only thing that was going through my mind was the rapid pace of my heart beat. My heart was beating at an unhealthy rate.

I decided that the crowded atmosphere might be making my heart beat fast, so I left the party. I walked roughly 4-5 houses away from the party and layed down on a lawn to cool down. Well, I ended up passing out. This is all I remember. Apparently some ppl found me and said I was non responcive and called 911. luckily, my buddies picked my up and took me away before th cops or ambulance arrived.

I woke up the next day feeling typical post-party night, not too hung over. However, the night before, I really felt like I was go.

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I don't get it, so its a school with two thousand kids and everyone sixteen or over drives to school? I assume they are all worth at least 35k. I only really care because I'm out of work and this seems like a fantastic financial opportunity.

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There was about 800 kids in each year. We had our own numbered parking spots because 1000 wasn't enough for everyone. Carpooling seniours got preference, then carpooling juniors, then seniors, then juniors. If you were a junior and didn't go for carpooling odds are you wouldn't get a spot. Sophmores didn't get any spots

it was a rich neighborhood

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dude, a few joints by themselves isn't enough for you?

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LONG STORY. Cliff notes at the bottom.


I was 15 and was a normal active teenager. I was on my high school soccer team, but really only playing to stay in shape for when basketball started. During the soccer season, I began to notice that I was getting more tired, quickly. I figured I just needed to get in better shape, so I didn't tell anyone. This quickly escalated to where I had difficulty walking a few blocks. I also began to be unable to eat anything. As soon as it went down, I would vomit it back up. At this point I went to see the doctor.

The doctor did a thorough exam and concluded that I had stress induced asthma, and happened to also have a stomach flu at the same time. However the inhaler that I got did nothing, and my condition was infact getting worse to the point that I had trouble doing just about any physical activity. A couple of days later, still puking out anything I was eating, my parents call the doctor back and tell him the asthma is getting worse. So the doctor tells me to go to the hospital, get an X-ray and some blood tests done to see if anything comes up.

I go do that and the next day I am sitting at home watching TV (obviously too sick to go to school), and I get a call from my dad, who sounds worried telling me that he is coming to pick me up to take me to the hospital, so I should get some things together to take for the night.

I get to the hospital, where they explain to me the bad news. My heart, which is supposed to be the size of my fist, has grown to the size of a cantaloupe. This is stretching out the heart muscle, and not allowing it to work as well. So they keep me in the hospital and put me on some meds to see what happens. I keep getting worse. I haven't kept anything down for over a week, and I am at the point where simply talking to people tires me out.

I have been in the hospital for about a week, undergoing all kinds of tests and still deteriorating, when things suddenly get much worse. I remember I was lying down when my lips began to feel cold and I started seeing stars. All the monitors that I was hooked up to started beeping and doctors and nurses came running. I looked around confused, my mind slowly coming to the conlusion that I was dying, and I passed out. (Basically what happened there was that I coded. That means that my heat overloaded, causing a sudden drop in blood pressure. In other words, a person who codes is dying.)

I woke up a few days later with a wierd feeling in my stomach. I had been hooked up to a left ventricular assist device (LVAD). This is a machine that is attached to your heart and basically does the work for your left ventricle. It was a small refridgerator sized device with two hoses. Both those hoses went into the left side of my stomach, just under the ribcage to transfer the blood into the machine, and be pumped back into my heart so it would go where it needed to go. I soon found out that this was only to stabilize me and keep me alive. The only long term solution at this point was a heart transplant. The good news was that because I had been in such good shape when I had gotten sick, I had been put right at the top of the list for a transplant. However donated hearts are difficult to come by, so I settled in for a long wait.

This wait turned out to be much shorter than anyone thought it would be. 3 days after my name had been put on the list, one of my doctors scrambled into the intensive care unit where I was staying, with a huge smile on his face, telling me that they had found me a match and that I would be going to surgery in about 5 hours. It was about 10pm, and I was told to try to get some sleep before the surgery (easier said than done). There are meds for that though [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]. So I was woken up a few hours later and taken to the operating room.

The operating room was cold, and I was nervous about undergoing my second major open heart surgery in about a week, but at the same time ecstatic that I would be getting better. So I was prepped for surgery and then the anesthesiologist put the gas mask on me and I quickly lost consciousness.

I awoke about 2 days later. Waking up from that kind of anesthesia is a strange thing. At first I was only able to hear voices. I heard my mother talking about me, and I could feel her hand holding mine. I wanted so badly to wake up and tell her that everything was OK, but I couldn't move a muscle. I panicked, not sure what was going on. I tried to say something but was unable to say anything either. I kept trying though, and after a few minutes was finally able to give my mom's hand a soft squeeze. hehe, that startled her a bit. I squeezed her hand a few more times, just trying to let her know that I could hear her, before I passed out again. I woke up hours later to the delight of my family.

I recovered very well from the illness, without any major complications, and was back on the soccer team the next year.

The main reason I took the time to tell you my story is because I would like everyone to seriously consider becoming an organ donor. If it is something you wish to do it is extremely important to tell your family about your wishes, since when you die, it is ultimately up to them what happens with your body. And one body could save many lives! Without the generosity of the family of a 19 year old car crash victim from Reno (at least for pediatrics, they don't identify the donors), I would not be here to tell you this story. Thanks for reading!!


CLIFF NOTES: I get sick and get a heart transplant.

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something about falling off the house

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Tell the [censored] broken face story already.

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WINNER

incredible story. Yes, I will make sure I'm an organ donor from now on

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You are probably in more danger riding a bus than in that situation.

On a related note, I think the closest I ever came to dying was everytime I rode a bus in the mountains in Costa Rica.

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ah that reminds me, ditto for me, riding in a van from Malaysia to Thailand. I think he might have been smugling something (though I thought it would be going the other way). Dude was drivin fukin crazy

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Wow, thats amazing. How does this affect your every day life? Sorry if I'm probing, but I can't imagine shaking three days of staring at a machine that controls my life, then having someone elses heart stuffed in my chest.

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Its been almost 6 years. The most obvious way that it affects my everyday life is that I take medications everyday so that my immune system doesn't attack the heart. But in terms of my outlook on life, I guess I just always just feel that [censored] can happen anytime so I might as well enjoy life while I still can and be grateful for what I have.

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Tell the [censored] broken face story already.

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i have more than once, at least in the essentials

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My brother and I got got in a rip current surfing once and didn't even notice any thing happened till about 5 minutes after. We noticed we were about a mile and half off shore instead of 300 yards or so and hauled it back in. It's creepy out in deep ocean on just a board.

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OMG YES!!!! But I was alone, so far out, and my brother was near the surf. I kept yelling for him to come get me, being 7 and not exactly sure what to do, I needed help. Finally after a min he started to paddle out and get me. Not to mention this was big surf season. Holy crap it's hard not to get pounded by waves when you're 7.

Learned my lesson. Respect the Ocean....

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I was robbed in my apartment bedroom at knife point.

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last week i told a 60 year old former navy seal that i dont chop.

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Been There, done that

Linky too death stories

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In Zambia, I once got a BJ from an hooker without a condom... Scares me still, actually.

I've been lucky, really. Only major thing was a near hit by an ongoing ambulance that was overtaking a car, almost ramming in to me in a head-on collision.

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I got mugged in Aruba like 2 weeks ago. I'm soo glad that they did not have a knife on them, or it's likely I would not be here.