OT: Close Calls - Things that should have killed you, but didn't
Driving into work today a few cars smashed into each other right in front of me. I had to do a pretty crazy maneuver at about 75 mph to avoid a head on collision and my car was sprayed with broken glass and plastic. This is the second time this month that I very narrowly avoided a serious accident and it has me thinking about my other close calls.
The closest I ever came to actually dying was when I had an allergic reaction to something I didn't know I was allergic to. It happened really fast and being 17 and invincible I was hesitant to seek assistance. Until I looked in a mirror and saw that my now lobster red face had swollen to twice it's normal size.
I drove myself to the nearest ER and my windpipe was almost closed by the time I got there. I'll never forget the look on the receptionist's face. It was like she was looking at a corpse.
What about you? Have you beaten cancer? Dodged a bullet fired by a jealous husband?
When I was very young my brother and I were playing with a garden hoe. At some point he picked it up and dropped it straight down on my head. Luckily the blade fell perfectly flat and landed directly on the seam of my baseball cap. Doctor told my mom if it was dropped with the sharp point down or if i wasn't wearing the hat I would've died.
Nah. He was only two or three when it happend.
Okay, so your story involving things dropping on heads reminded me:
It didn't happen to me, but during our middle school days, I was over at my childhood's friend's house and we were walking down the hallway to go outside. The freaking attic door/ladder fell down right on top of my friend's head as he walked behind me. Split his head open and he had to get a bunch of stitches. I remember his parents saying the doctor told them he was very lucky it wasn't worse.
That was years ago and I still remember it vividly. I remember the sudden scare of the noise, the cold feeling of seeing my friend just laying there, and the realization that a split second of difference meant that it could have fallen on me.
That's some Final Destination shit. Thank your windshield manufacturer.
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
Surprised no one from another car ever killed you for doing that.
I had a job once cleaning industrial air-handling / HVAC systems. The company I worked for was very small and not very sophisticated.
As a sideline, they once took on a job cleaning the insides of grain silos at a frozen foods plant. It wasn't work we normally did, but it was easy money and a lot cleaner than what we normally took on. And the place smelled yummy.
The only way in or out of the silos was through a man-hole opening on the top of the silo, 100 feet from the inside bottom part that had to be cleaned. So we rigged up a hand-cranked winch with a chain and a rubber strip for a seat that we could use to lower a person down to the bottom and back.
I was the guy that got picked to go down to the bottom inside the silo and do the cleaning.
I got on the seat and my co-worker cranked the winch by hand until I reached the bottom. It took like 10 minutes. Once I was down there, he disappeared.
As I was cleaning down there, I began to feel dizzy and couldn't breathe. It kept getting worse to the point where I began to choke. I kept yelling for my co-worker, but nobody answered.
I was stuck inside a silo, 100 feet from the opening at the top with no way up, unable to breathe. I was in a panic.
Just in time, the guy finally came back and heard my cries for help. I got on the seat and he hoisted me the hell out of there as fast as possible.
I was taken outside of the plant on the grass, where I puked for a hour straight.
We later learned from the maintenance supervisor that the combination of moisture and my manipulating old encrusted grain created poison gas that would have killed me if I kept breathing it.
That was the last time we took on a job like that.
Bonus Protip from another job at a car battery factory: When you begin to taste black licorice in your mouth, you've breathed too much lead dust.
That's confined space 101. Those guys nearly killed you.
I hated confined spaces. The dullest regs ever. But they're written for a reason. Good gravy.
Similar job type story. I was 17 and working for a construction company doing roofing, etc. They got a job digging down to expose the wall of a leaky basement and re-tar the outside. The lady didn't want them tearing up the yard, though, so they got the bright idea to limit the digging to a 3' garden against the house. So we dug all along the side of the house 9 feet deep and 3' wide. I was the youngest one working for the company, so they had me down in hte hole digging and loading dirt into 5 gallon pails they would pull up with a rope and empty. After getting older and learning about excavation deaths in MiOSHA training, I realized how easilly that could have resulted in me literally digging my own grave.
I've had a few brushes, no telling how close I really was.
I remember when I was 19 tubing down the Muskegon River, at some point I got out of the tube and the water was deeper and flowing dtronger than I thought it would be. I had shoes on in case of glass in the river and I was not a super strong swimmer, I thought I was going to go under but somehow I made it to shore and got out.
Several times I had close brushes with drunk drivers coming within inches of my vehicle.
At my former job I was a manufacturing supervisor in a die casting department. One time I was next to a machine and the accumulator blew up several feet from where I was standing, the accumulator is a very high pressure container with hydraulic fluid and nitrogen. That one scared me.
Our die casting machines used aluminum and several times we would have a water or hydraulic hose break and start pouring into the molten aluminum tank. If water gets under the surface of alumiunum it has the potential to explode with the power of dynamite, luckily each time we just had a mini volcano.
Lastly, as a child I had epilepsy. Not a life threatening disease by any means but with seizures in the right place and time it certainly could have been life threatening. I just a had a cousin a few weeks ago that passed away a week after he had a seizure while fishing and fell in the water. Only by the grace of God, that could have been me.
I made a joke further down about my lawnmower, although it was sort of serious. My most serious incident was a year after I graduated from Michigan. I had just bought my first car with my own money and I was out with friends for Memorial Day weekend. I live on the coast, and that's a huge party here. Got drunk, drove home and fell asleep at the wheel. Totalled my car into a parked car. Thank god I didn't hit another car with someone in it or a pedestrian. I just got scratches. But ever since, my budget for cabs and making sure my friends don't drink and drive has been huge. I definitely learned my lesson when I had to ask my mom to drive and see my car at the impound lot and watched her cry.
to my experience. A year out of college, driving drunk after going out with friends on Halloween, lost focus (didn't quite fall asleep) and slammed into a parked car. It was a disabled car near the turn lane that I drifting towards, but I must have been doing 40 mph. Walked away with scratches and some airbag burn, but got a DUI and paid the $2k (which was all the money I had at the time) in court costs/fines. I wish I could say that this was my last experience with drinking and driving, but sadly it was not. Never got another DUI, but didn't learn my lesson until years later. Now it's uber/cabs/DD every time.
Double post
It took me a long time to admit it to most of my friends. I was really embarrassed. Everybody makes mistakes. It's how you make changes afterwards.
Everyone in my circle knew pretty quickly, and no one seemed too shocked by it. The birth of my daughter was eventually what made me change my ways. Now that I've got two kids and am the sole provider for my family, I realize there's a lot more than just my dumb ass to think about these days. Not to mention the other lives I put at risk behind the wheel after drinking. Man, just thinking about those years when I used to do this shit is unsettling...
I wrecked a GSX-R 1000 going 159 mph, slowed it down to about 80 through a field when I hit a culvert and was sent airborne. Woke up without my helmet, which my head should have been attached to. Amazingly, I didn't have a scratch on me (no riding gear). I did break my collarbone, cracked my ribs, bruised my kidney, punctured a lung and tore my ACL and meniscus.
Lucky you didn't have a scratch though
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
gixxer squid buddies <3 I tried to overtake a car on a blind corner and fought hard not to lowside the bike as it slipped on the double yellow while also trying turn in enough to not hit oncoming traffic while also trying to slow down because it turns out that blind corner was a decreasing radius corner.
not sure how i didn't become road pate
gixxer squid buddies <3 I tried to overtake a car on a blind corner and fought hard not to lowside the bike as it slipped on the double yellow while also trying turn in enough to not hit oncoming traffic while also trying to slow down because it turns out that blind corner was a decreasing radius corner.
not sure how i didn't become road pate
Jesus you guys... excuse me while I go home, build a bubble fort and stay in there for the next 50 years.
Tell me about it! I have 7 kids under the age of 11, 5 of which are boys... there is an infinite number of stupid things they are going to do. Life is precious.
Do you have the ability to get women pregnant by looking at them?
Flashback: January 29, 2001. It was a chilly drizzly night, one of those "in between" days in a Michigan winter where the temperature rises to just above freezing during the day and tapers off in the evening. Frozen slippery rain.
I had a house in Farmington Hills and was working in Ann Arbor downtown. The drive to and from work was 35 miles and I usually arrived home after dark around 7 PM.
This particular evening I arrived home to find that all of my exterior lights and the one light that I usually left on inside the house were extinguished. The house was completely dark. To my additional surprise, the garage door opener did not work. I parked my truck and walked up to the front door to see a note taped there "You had a fire. Come over and see me... George"
George was the 80+ year old next door neighbor. He was one of the original owners of the houses in this neighborhood having built his back in 1949. George was a very nice man who lived with his wife and we talked from time to time.
Just then I head George's voice over my shoulder. He explained to me that a few hours earlier, his wife was sitting in their living room when she heard a loud "crack" coming from my house. She looked out the window to see my electrical box had caught fire. George and her went out to see the damage but the flame was out by the the time they got there. The power was out in the house as well.
I got on the phone to Detroit Edison and a half hour later, a guy in an Edison truck arrived at the house. He surveyed the damage with myself, George and Walter the neighbor across the street. Walter was another original owner from the neighborhood. He and George had lived across the street from one another for over 50 years.
The Edison tech explained that the cable leading from the junction box outside the house had frayed over the years and that evening when the moisture from the freezing rain got in to the cable, it caused a massive short which lead to the fire and power outage. He said that since the cable was below the junction box, that he could not repair it as it was not Edisons responsiblity.
However, the Edison guy was very nice and he told me exactly how to fix the problem...what cable to buy etc. It was a relatively simple repair. I decided to put it off until the morning, however George and Walter offered to help fix it that night...so that I would have heat, lighting and food for myself and my pets. Since the rain had let up, and the repair seemed easy enough, I decided to go to Home Depot and buy the supplies.
An hour later, I arrived home with the repair supplies to find George and Walter happily waiting for me with a hot cup of coffee.
We finished that and started in on the repair. The job was to remove the old, worn cable from the bottom connector on the junction box (had to remove the globe with the meters on it to get to the terminal) and then lead the new cable through the hole in the garage to join up with the power box inside the garage.
As we started to work on it...I carefully unscrewed the cable from the junction. As we began to put the new cable on in its place I stupidly let my arm/hand go upwards towards the top of the box.
This was a huge mistake. I began to feel an incredible surge of electricity, pain and numbness through my hand. In that instant another hand came over my back and knocked my arm away. It was Walter from across the street...all 80+ years of him quickly knocking my hand away before I could electricute myself accidentally.
My arm was completely numb from the voltage. My fingers and hand were very painful. It was the single most stupid thing that I have ever done in my life. Not being careful with that screwdriver almost killed me. Walter saved my life.
I thanked Walter but being so embarrassed at how stupid I had been, I did not let on as to how my arm felt. This was after the Edison guy had warned us not to touch above the bottom terminal because the top one was live. I was that close to getting massive voltage though my body and in less than 1 second from death, Walter saved my life.
So Thank you Walter...wherever you are.
a know-nothing homeowner how to change out the old wires and never thought to disconnect his own so there would be no hot lines in there? What. Theee. Fuck?! If that dumbass happens to be in here reading this and wants to tell his own story of how the time his dumbassery almost got an innocent person killed and should have gotten his ass sued off and fired, now's the time.
Where in Nevada? There are tons of places to get into trouble there and I'm curious if we've done stupid things in the same area.
Thanksgiving 2010 in Taji. Trying to enjoy my Thanksgiving meal in the motor pool when Haji thought it would be a good idea to shoot some russian made S-5's at us. It was fun watching the 58's take off and immediately return fire from the original position.
Hit a barbed wire fence late at night on a snomobile at speed. Flipped me off the back of the sled, the barbs tore the throat out of the raised collar of my coat and the neck gaiter I was wearing underneath it, and dug a trench in my helmet. I hit the ground with my hands at my neck thinking I was done...gonna bleed out on the snow. Barely got a scratch. I still don't know how when I think of that neck gaiter and my coat.
Part Deuce
Got into a head-on collision on my way to take the SAT. I don't remember any of it from well before the accident. The car I was driving looked like Optimus Prime did a tap dance on the front of it. I was told I wasn't wearing a seat belt, and that my chest hitting the steering wheel had completely collapsed the whole steering column... had a half circle shaped bruise on my chest and that's it. Other driver wasn't hurt at all.
Encore
Numerous stories of absolutely assinine things I used to do in a car when I was a bulletproof fool. A child really, being so stupid. It embarasses and shames me while at the same time gives me goose bumps. I think about it now and pray to God that I didn't genetically transmit any of that kamikaze bullshit to my sons.
I was swinging and steel mallet that my dad made, got dizzy, and fell on the upright handle. It jammed into my neck and missed the jugular by less than half an inch.
Asked why the mallet had a pointed end, dad said it was scrap material that he had laying around, and why the fuck was I playing with it? :)
Lot's of creative, sophisticated ways to die folks.
Not just your typical Buckeye "Here, hold my beer and watch this!" stuff.
The Michigan difference.
I feel like we almost got killed 15-20 times driving along the country roads
Except for me it would have been the cliffside roads around New Zealand. Or try to drive through the roads in Ecuador(luckily I wasn't the driver).
Sent from MGoBlog HD for iPhone & iPad
Fear & Loathing.
Had burst 1 day before departing on 20 hour flight to Malaysia meeting.
Was ill for a few days leading up to trip. Finally said eff it and went to emergency room day before trip.
Had I not done that, Dr. said I'd probably be irrevocably screwed or dead.
I suffered two abdominal abcesses post-operative as a result of my typical male stubborness about pain, etc.
But honestly I didn't even know my appendix burst. No fever. Nothing.
Surgeon said it was one of the most serious cases he had seen.
"Sometimes you eat the bear, othertimes the bear eats you."