What is the closest you have ever come to dying?

I’ve had two close calls. The first was at the end of high school and my final cross country race where I decided having a shot at the school record (I was varsity basketball and not a runner). No record but a huge asthma attack that required paramedics to attend and administer the Pulp Fiction shot of adrenaline.

The second close call was a decade ago while testing a race car in France. Turned in at 110mph and the front left tire delaminated. The car went straight into the barrier and was cut in half just behind my seat. I was briefly knocked out and came to with a cool breeze blowing in from behind.

My stories, I have some.

I’ve had 2 guns pulled on me, one by a Police and one separately by a Superman wannabe, a 45 cal and a 12 ga.

The 45 cal was to my head.

The 12 ga happened at a distance. Surprisingly I was able to walk away from both.

Mmmm

There was this one time in Junior High where this kid took a gun to school. I had had trouble with him. You see, he had small man syndrome and he was probably the child of a whore and he prolly didn’t know his father.

He and this other Junior high school kid, that stabbed someone, are probably still in Prison.

I didn’t back down when I was younger. I was smart enough to ride the edge.

I'm closer today than ever before! Maybe even closer tomorrow.

When I was deployed to Iraq, we had a small wooden hut inside our OP that had a couple couches, a tv, and 3 computers where you could get on the internet. I was on one of the computers when we all heard this loud SMACK sound. It sounded like someone was carrying a stack of textbooks and dropped them on the floor or something. Everyone was looking around trying to figure out what it was. That's when I noticed some dust coming up into my field of view. I looked down and there was a stray 7.62 round that had come through the roof and lodged into the desk between my wrists.

No feeling wrote:

I was married 18 years ago. I’ve been dead inside ever since.

End thread!

Emergency appendectomy when I was nine. White blood cell count through the roof.

fatbody wrote:

When I was deployed to Iraq, we had a small wooden hut inside our OP that had a couple couches, a tv, and 3 computers where you could get on the internet. I was on one of the computers when we all heard this loud SMACK sound. It sounded like someone was carrying a stack of textbooks and dropped them on the floor or something. Everyone was looking around trying to figure out what it was. That's when I noticed some dust coming up into my field of view. I looked down and there was a stray 7.62 round that had come through the roof and lodged into the desk between my wrists.

Holy crap. A stray, then? Any guess as to how far it would have traveled?

My brother had a heart attack and a couple stents put in. Hospital tried to rush him out two days later and a couple hours before he was going to be released, he collapsed and went into cardiac arrest. They hit him 3 times with the paddles to get his heart started.

I've never been remotely that close.

Trying to stay far away wrote:

My brother had a heart attack and a couple stents put in. Hospital tried to rush him out two days later and a couple hours before he was going to be released, he collapsed and went into cardiac arrest. They hit him 3 times with the paddles to get his heart started.

I've never been remotely that close.

Don't post in the thread if the story isn't about you.

I was approximately 7 years old. I began digging a tunnel in deep snow and the partial tunnel collapsed on me. I was stomach down, head to lower back buried and only my feet were free. My panicking kicks to break free managed to reach the snow covering my head and my heel broke the snow sheet covering me otherwise I was a f*cking goner.

I was at the zoo and I fell into the Grizzly Den. I was just a young cub myself. The mama grizzly charged me and I managed to fight her off with my Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu by touching her pressure points. They threw a ladder down to me and I managed to escape. There was a news article about it that I have framed.

I always thought my most perilous experience was terrifying, but after reading some of these mine is minor league. I once had a knife held to my throat during a cab robbery. I drove a cab in San Francisco for 6 years. But that wasn't even close to my nearest encounter with death.

When I was 14 (1959) my best friend and I cut school and hitch hiked down to Devil's Slide about 20 miles south of San Francisco.

We had climbed down to the beach on a narrow trail, but decided it would be fun to scale the cliff back up to Highway 1. It was about two hundred feet. The first 150 feet were almost straight up, but on rocks that were fairly easy to climb. (For a dumb 14 year old boy)

As we were climbing we never looked down to see how high we had actually climbed. We thought the top of the rocky cliff was where the road was. We were wrong. We faced a smooth 50+ft incline. The surface was slippery gravel. We knew it was dangerous to continue climbing, but when we looked back down we were amaze at how high up we were (again...dumb 14 year old boys). It was almost a sheer drop of 150 feet. Anyone who has climbed up a cliff knows it's a lot easier to climb up than climb down.

We had no choice but to try and climb to the road. When we were about halfway to the road my friend started to slowly slide.

Fortunately he didn't panic and start flailing away at the gravel or reach for me. We were only about 3 feet apart. Instead he clawed his fingers and toes into the gravel. After a slow motion slide of 3-4 feet he dug himself in. We both thought we were going to die. Sliding off the cliff onto the large rocks below was certain death. We both started crying, something most macho 14 year old boys would never admit to doing.

The experience lasted about a half hour. A half hour of terror. But again, nothing compared to some of these other stories.

If you google Devil's Slide you can see pictures of where we climbed. We came up between the two white rocks just below the highway.

Got drafted for Vietnam. But had bone spurs. Man were those bad. Almost killed me.

Then the other day, someone told me I couldn't play golf in Florida this weekend. Apparently something bad happened there earlier this week. Anyway, I nearly choked on my cheeseburger at the prospect of not playing golf. Pence saved my life. It was a close one!

Twice:

1) buried in an avalanche on the gouter route on Mont Blanc. 3 were killed in my group. I woke up in a hospital.

2) high altitude cerebral edema on Cho Oyu. Somehow made it back to basecamp, and was helicoptered out, and flown to Kathmandu. It was a year before I felt back to myself.

had some cartel dudes after me, i was hidin in the woods. think they thought i was a snitch lol but i wasnt, i was just paranoid cuz i was using a lot of drugs at the time lol

A lot for me. Some of them:

- 50 feet fall on a vertical cliff. Helihoisting - incredible view- required. Saved one of the guy who came to rescue me from falling. Relatively minor injuries -lucky.

- Fall in a hidden crevasse in the snow. Saved by my backpack which hang up to something on the ground

- Met a grizzly and its pup somewhere in the woods in Jasper. She was at 40 feet from me. Did not move but looked at me intensely.

- Oedema on a minor Himalayan peak due to a too short altitude acclimation. Had to find my way back to base camp in a pitch black night. Then started to commit again in my tent and had to go further down. Except that the base camp was on a plateau and that was not easy after having fallen in a nearly frozen river on my way back.

The first one is the one that made me decide to stop trying my luck. I am retired from dangerous things now.

Even Boukreev and Loretan died.

Subway Surfers Addiction wrote:

Back in December I was running around a large inner city park and a massive tree trunk collapsed 5 meters in front of me, it was massive and I had to swerve and stop Indian Jones style, like I was running to the edge of a cliff. Only 500m earlier I stopped for like a second or so to get a stone out of the grooves in my shoe. That was lucky.

Please convert to feet and yards

There was the time I was driving home after a night of drinking (I was very reckless and irresponsible back in the day). I fell asleep while driving and hit some wake up strips along the side of the road which was installed a few years before that.

I don't live that lifestyle any more, but they've been times since then in which I was almost hit by a car while running.

Zev wrote:

I have died once before. I was swimming with friends and one of them snuck up on me and dunked me from behind. I remember there was light from the ceiling overhead, then there was quiet, and then everything went black & silent. The next thing I knew, I was sputtering back to life on the pool deck as the lifeguard was performing CPR on me. The lifeguard told me my pulse had stopped for about 30 seconds. My so-called friend thought it was rather funny. He later went to prison for something heinous and unrelated. Karma's a mofo.

A church friend of mine had two near death experience, both different from one another. One was similar to many NDE stories you hear, a slinging light and finding himself in paradise. The other one occurred during the time when he fell away from God and lived a drug lifestyle. He had a severe asthma attack and was "dead" twice. He had a more hellish NDE. He described himself in a place that was "very dark where your fears are magnified">