About 25 years ago when I was still in college I thought it would be cool to get a motorcycle. I rode it around for about a year with no problems until one day I was riding down this mountain road near where I lived and a deer ran out in front of my bike and I swerved to avoid it, I flew off my bike and into a ditch on the side of the road and was knocked out, my bike fell off the other side of the road and down a sheer cliff face. It was not obvious anyone has ever been there or that there was an accident. I laid there for almost a two days until people started looking for me after missing work. When I came to my legs were messed up, I had broken an ankle, elbow and wrist and couldn’t move. I sat there for hours convinced I was going to die. I was pretty upset about it but after a while the anxiety washed away and I just went completely numb. My next memory was waking up in a hospital.
Thank god I was wearing a helmet.
How about you?
Does it count if I don’t really remember it? I was 8. It was a week before summer break. I was waiting for my mother to come home from work (sitting on the front steps to our house). A friend of mine called me across the street. I went. I didn’t make it to the other side. Hit and run driver crashed right into me, dragged me half a block and left me for dead. Neighbors said he didn’t even look back. They never caught him. I don’t remember waking up in the ambulance. I had a head wound and a broken leg (compound fracture, pierced the skin). I remember them having to set the bone and then take me to another hospital (a children’s hospital). I remember being drugged. And waking up to my mom sleeping in the chair next to me. I have no memory of anything from the time I was crossing the street to the time I was in the ICU at the first hospital. They wouldn’t let me move my head. I don’t remember being scared or in pain or anything until they had to set the bone to straighten out my leg to splint it.
Even the aftermath (10 weeks in a body cast that went from my breast bone down to cover everything but the toes of my broken leg) is kind of a hazy mess. Except that I then fell down the stairs and broke my arm too. Added insult to injury.
Kids are weirdly resilient. It sounds like you should have deep scars across your body, but I know for a fact that they all probably faded in a year or two. Damn kids with their super powers.
I still have the scar from the head wound but you can only see it in winter time when I’m paler, and it’s sort of receded some into my hair line. Even then. It’s very faint. I don’t have any scars on the leg (that I can see anyway) Or my back. It’s the kind of thing that didn’t seem scary or worry me at the time, but looking back I know I could have died. I think I don’t remember a lot of things because I was on painkillers for a good majority of the time.
Of course the other thing is that I have to go off the accounts of people who were there at the time and they were mostly kids (and one person’s mom) who couldn’t give the cops a good description of the guy or the car or anything.
High stress job led to alcohol, smoking, high risk lifestyle almost ended me at 27 with a bleeding ulcer. In bed for a day or so before my then girlfriend found me and called the hospital. ER, blood transfusion, 2wk stay, 2wk recoup at home with daily iron injection, prescription meds for a month to keep the acid low.
Special diet for a month (no processed food, no caffeine, no nicotine, no pepper, no hard foods-spft, mushy, etc.
Got my shit together, woke up. No more smoking, alcohol (eventually) in moderation, healthier coping mechanisms- at one point when the stress ramped up in the job (still in the same career field) I was training/running triathlons. Married that then girlfriend, 25+ years on, 2 grown ass kids.
27 club is no joke…just happy I wasn’t a celebrity.
Glad you turned it around. Alcohol is no joke
Yeah also found out during a follow up exam that cigarettes cause an increase in stomach acid.
Bumped my head with another kid in 6th grade at recess. When we went back in for reading time I realised I couldn’t read and had a headache, so I told my teacher and went up to the front office. I remember sitting down waiting for my mum to pick me up, then next thing I know I’m laying down in a hospital bed. Apparently I got a really bad concussion and went crazy and I don’t remember a thing, I’m glad I don’t lol.
There was an icy patch on the playground one day and people were taking turns sliding on it. One kid fellover and I went down after him and my stomach fell on his upturned shoe. All the wind rushed out of me and everything went black for a few seconds until I woke up on the ground
Wow, that is really scary. It is kind of funny/sad how delicate our heads are and they just kind of hang there on top of everything exposed
I know right, it wasn’t even that hard of a hit. Apparently it was just in a sensitive spot
Lights turn green, I step on the road, I have no words for this other than spidey sense tingles, I step back, car shoots past me.
I believe god was with me that day because I did not see or hear the car approaching it was that fast.
That is so scary. Whenever I visit the US I feel like this is going to happen to me when I have to cross a street, glad you got the spidey sense!
Overdose (Xanax and Alcohol)
I was meeting a friend from out of the state and got a bit big for my britches trying to show off how cool I was and made some poor judgment.
Somehow ended back in my apartment with a bunch of medics checking me out, I don’t even remember getting home from the bar.
First and only time ever using Xanax
Yeah, I had a similar but less severe experience with my first and last time trying xanax. I started to flip out a bit but definitely not remembering what was going on. I ended up picking a fight with a friend of mine who punched me in the face to get me to stop wiling then dragged me into my home and put me in my bed. I never thanked anyone for punching me in the face before or since lol
This must be how kids feel when they fall asleep in the car and wake up the next morning in bed. “Huh? Did I die and teleport here?”
Oh man, I had a few of those. For privacy reasons I won’t disclose any of it but I’ve spent some chunk of my life in hospitals. What I can tell is that none was a life changing experience. I did made some adjustments to avoid such issues in the future but the whole “I almost died, it made me a different person” wasn’t my thing.
I used to work at a new car dealership, I didn’t have a whole lot of experience. I get a new truck in that the customer wants running boards installed on. I get it up on the lift and start working on it. I get one side loosely on and bend down to do something then the back of the truck falls off the lift and the sides land on the lift arms. For some dumb reason my instinct was to try to catch the truck. Fortunately I wasn’t crushed. The problem was that the lift arms did not lock into position, the lift pads were round rubber pads which were pretty smooth and the truck frame had just been undercoated. The lift arms just decided to both slip inwards. They said it wasn’t even the first time something like that had happened with that specific lift.
The damage was pretty bad because that running board that was loosely installed bent up the rocker panel. Both bed sides were damaged.
A couple of years ago my (now ex, for urelated reasons) partner got ahold of some molly. I was pretty new to drugs, but trusted her to keep me safe. We tested a small portion of it, and it came back clean. That night we took it with us to some club and did some lines in the bathroom.
Unfortunately, I was unaware that the chemicals in those test kits have expiration dates, and no one had ever explained the chocolate chip cookie effect to me. Either we just missed the chunk that had fentanyl in it, or those expired tests just weren’t accurate, but either way I ended up overdosing.
I’m told my heart stopped for about ten minutes. Fortunately for me, the boyfriend of one of the performers had narcan with him. I had collapsed in front of the bar, and woke up laying in the parking lot with a bunch of strangers crowding around me. My partner ended up bundling me into the car and driving me home. I’m pretty sure I ended up with some brain damage. Years later though, I feel like I’m pretty much recovered, fortunately.
Got SIBO from a liver or gallbladder issue. Went through 1 to 4 bottles a month of antibiotics. 2 for 2 weeks then next 2 weeks 2 different ones. Done that 15 times. Was given 4 to 8 weeks max to live losing 2 to 4 pounds a week at 105 pounds. Still not sure how I beat it. I’m still struggling but doing a bit better. Hospitals are shit, most Dr.s are shit. Health is wealth!
Heart stopped beating. I could feel the lack of oxygen despite breathing like mad. Thought “Fuck, tomorrow my mom is going to find me dead in my bed” (I still was a student living close enough to university to commute). Luckily, one of the built-in safety mechanisms kicked in and my heart restarted. Spent some weeks in hospital after that so they could find me a better medication than the one I was using.
Intense, glad you’re still around!
Yes, me too. Not a good experience, I’ll rate it 1/10, not recommendable.
And yes, quite some of your life passes before your eyes in those seconds. It is indeed very intense.
Heart stopped beating? That’s a thing? Jesus
Presumably OP had some kind of condition, given that they were already on (non-working) meds.
I mean I’ve heard of heart attacks but never just neurologically stopping beating. I’m not a doctor or anything though
Heart attacks are also not no more beating, if you didn’t know that. It’s when the heart muscles don’t get enough blood and the essentially start to suffocate.
If it stops beating for any of a large number of reasons, that’s cardiac arrest, which used to be the definition of death.
man dies, freaks out, and comes back to life
Cardiac arrest is heart stop beating (e.g. damar Hamlin? The Bills dude the other year). This is when you see a flatline.
Heart attack or myocardial infarction means the arteries that keep your heart oxygenated get blocked, cardiac tissue after the blockage of that then starts dying. The heart is still beating (or trying to beat).
That is a thing if the medication you get does not really work out for you. I remember waking up one night a week before that where I started the blood pressure recorder, and it measured a heartbeat of 26 BPM. And that was when I was actually out of the valley and had enough energy to press the button.
If you don’t mind me asking, what are you diagnosed with?
High blood pressure. I initially got beta-blockers, which my heart didn’t like that much.
Drowning when swimming on the river
Scary, was it the undercurrent?
Yes it was near a watergate, didn’t know that it was not fully closed. It was weirdly peaceful and when i woke up I’m already on land
Wow, that’s a crazy experience. Somebody jumped in and saved you?
My uncle save me, the good thing is i always go with my siblings and cousin + my uncle. So someone always on standby. Got nagged by my grandma and banned from swimming there but we go there next day anyway.
Kid me was pretty stupid. My mom, sister, and I went on a trip to Hawaii with my mom’s coworker. At that time, I was really bad at swimming. One of the beach trips we went to snorkel. I was left unsupervised for a while and ended up following a sea turtle way too far out. I ended up getting water in the breathing tube, and I panicked. I think I was flailing around for about two minutes going up and down the surface of the water until my mom’s coworker noticed and dragged me back to shore. Was pretty sure I would’ve just drowned if no one noticed.
Found out I’m allergic to a medicine after being administered via IV in one shot, luckily for me I was already at the hospital and the nurses figured out what was happening.
A few, 7yo appendicitis which ruptured in surgery. 15yo Fell from 3 story high scaffolding and landed on my back. 11yo an adult repeatedly slammed my head onto a wooden floor: maybe not a near death but I had thought that that was the end. 18yo big hill at night friends figgered we would ghost it, brakes off keys out of the ignition, find break don’t work and scrabbling to put keys in ignition… I was drunk so I don’t remember much else but we all survived car had a dent on the bumper.
I have two from when I was a kid. Once I was waiting at a traffic light with my mom. The light turns green and I jump out onto a street without looking. Not even half a second later a car whizzes by just centimeters in front of me. It went by so fast I have no doubt it would have killed me had it hit. That was probably 20 years ago and I still always look both ways even when the light is green.
Another one was at the beach. I couldn’t swim (still can’t) so I was walking parallel to the shore in water up to my shoulders. At one point there was a drainage pipe or something and the current from it seems to have eroded the bottom, so as I’m walking the ground suddenly goes out from under me and I feel like I’m getting pulled deeper in the sea. Luckily my mom was nearby and pulled me out pretty quickly. I don’t like going deeper than waist height into the sea since then.
I also had a more recent scary moment, which wasn’t really near death, but could have easily been very bad if there was an oncoming car. Get good tyres and don’t fuck around in the rain, kids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXTThHtUqLk
