Closest you have come to dying

[Hobbs.]

swam a class 5 rapid during a rafting trip a couple of years ago.

[NT!]

where is that knife-wielding turks picture

[gisb0rne]

When I was younger I worked on the North Slope (of Alaska) for a company doing odd jobs like painting cleaning etc. Eventually we started to run out of work and so did retarded stuff like cleaning the roof of the huge hangar-type bay they had. There was this crane type device on a huge I-beam that spanned the bay that you could move back and forth across the bay. One day I was cleaning one of the I-beams on the upper level, on a ladder, and didn't bother putting a saftey tag on the crane device. Someone used it and almost crushed me between the I-beam of the crane and the I-beam I was cleaning. I was uninjured but it scared the crap out of me, but what was most annoying is when I brought it up at the safety panel they blew it off. Didn't want to mar their perfect safety record or something unless I actually got hurt. What a joke.

[Dementia]

Drugs.

[lmatth]

Not near death, was hit in the face with a shovel (freak accident while doing yardwork)

Handle hit me, braces cut a whole in my mouth that required 125+ stitches (hole in my face was big enough that you could put a golf ball through it) & 4 teeth knocked out.

[dinopoker]

Not as scary as some of the others (particularly the heart transplant - wow!) but when I was about 22 I got into a fight with a guy who was brandishing a knife - I had no weapon. I brushed the knife aside with my left arm (got cut but not bad) and then head-butted him right in the nose. That was all it took, he had had enough.

Few years ago my buddy and I were driving down a road in Atlanta, he was driving, I was in passenger seat. We were slowing down for a stoplight at a freeway interchange when all of a sudden a car came flying up the offramp, jumped over the island for the right turn lane, then crossed four lanes of traffic, then jumped the median and then t-boned us right in front of the drivers' door. He was going about 70mph. Amazingly, none of us were hurt badly, though my buddy banged his knee and I had a cut to the bone on my forehead.

Also, I guess when I was very young I had some kind of a fever and my temperature skyrocketed. I don't know what it was but I know that my mother ended up wrapping me in a wet sheet and covering me with towels on the advice of hospital emergency. I guess it worked, I'm still here.

[hoksy]

I used to work at a seed corn company and I was stacking bags onto a pallet on a forklift. The mast of the lift was maxed out at about 25 or 30 feet and I was standing on the pallet pulling bags off of the top of a pile. Still standing on the pallet I had managed to put about 2000 pounds of bags on the pallet when the forklift and pallet fell forward from the weight overload. I somehow managed to jump onto another pile on the way down to avoid being crushed by the 2000 pounds of corn and the 6000 pounds of forklift. BTW I got my ass chewed out for this even though the warehouse manager told my that it was safe to put at least 3000 pounds on this particular lift.

2nd story: Klompy and I were stacking bags of corn in the same warehouse when a pile of corn 30 feet high falls down right where we standing. We both mangaged to get out of the way, but had to redo 3 hours of work

[matt2500]

Man, I guess I've lived a pretty safe life. Nothing near death during my life, except an incident that I don't even remember. I was about 8 or 9 months old, at the 'crawl around the house and play with everything' stage babies go through. I crawl into the kitchen, and yank on the power cord to a coffeepot which is hanging off the counter. I pour the boiling contents of the full pot over myself. My dad runs in, and pulls my wool sweater over my head, but it bunches under my neck. I ended up with third degree burns all down my left shoulder and side, and under my neck. After being in an upper-body cast for months, the doctors remove it and learn that the burns hadn't healed correctly, so I had to spend months going into weekly physical therapy for rub downs to get the dead skin off. Scarring is almost completely disappeared now, the only remnant is a little spot on my left shoulder, and a spot under my chin where I don't have to shave.

Two that I witnessed:

--One summer, a friend's family was having a big picnic. My friend is in the kitchen making crab-stuffed mushrooms, and eats a little piece of crab. A few minutes later, she starts feeling dizzy and has trouble breathing, and figures it's a heat-induced headrush. She stumbles out onto the porch, where her mom is just walking into the house. Thank god her mom was an emergency-room nurse and immediately recognized the symptoms of anaphylactic shock, and rushed her to the ER.

--A couple of years ago, my uncle had a shindig for his 70th birthday. My dad, my aunt, my sister and I all drove about 60 miles to the party. On the way home, late at night, we're cruising down the deserted freeway, slowing up to pull of on our exit about two hundred yards ahead. I'm in the driver's seat, my dad is driving. Suddenly, there's a guy on the side of the freeway, walking right down the white line on the shoulder. My dad swerves instinctively to the left (we're in the right-hand lane), and all of a sudden, there's ANOTHER guy walking down the MIDDLE of the freeway, right on the white line between the two lanes. We missed him by maybe four inches. So it was a near-death experience for those two drunken hick numbnuts.

[morphball]

#1. When I was in about the sixth or seventh grade, I had it my head that I wanted to be a Navy SEAL. So I found big wide drainage pipe, about 18 inch diameter and about ten feet long and somehow got the monster into our swimming pool. I then decided to hold my beath and try to crawl through it underwater. All I remember is getting stuck in the middle and panicking. The next thing I remember is smacking my face into the side of pool.

No idea how I got out of that, but I did this with no one around because I knew they would try to stop me.

#2. Was into free climbing when i was in high school and got stuck 60 feet off the ground with no where to go. Hands were tired and feet were slipping. Not sure how I got of that mess either, but I remember seeing the rocks below and thinking this is it.

[maryfield48]

[ QUOTE ]
I was robbed in my parents' home at gun point.

[/ QUOTE ]