There were a few incidents where people told me, "You almost..." or "You could have...."
But after reading these stories, a couple in particular, I am sure that I have never even been close.

given the # of my ER visit..yes, I have been VERY lucky..
at 16 ,I was involved in a gas tank explosion = 3 months ICU, +6 months burn ward.
few MVA's, 15yr's of Med-evac. missions..everything from engine failure, to tailrotor going somewhere.
how was your day?. fine babe..
(few hrs earlier, lightning had struck our UH-60 in the Alps...Seahawk will appreciate this pucker freefall)

Rika

I used to jog/run a lot. One afternoon in 1989, I went out for my run. My usual run was 5-6 miles however, a storm was approaching and I decided to make it a 1 mile dash. I had been working toward a 4 minute mile and had a route all planned. About halfway into the run I realized the storm was coming in faster than I originally thought. Lightning was striking in the distance and I remember thinking "hmm, I should get my ass back and quick". Made the the halfway turn and was doing very well. I felt very fast. Actually, I was getting a little worried. A few strikes hit very close and the sound was incredible. The next one got me. I woke up with a guy standing over me but couldn't hear anything and everything was in slow motion. Felt like a huge weight was on me and it was hard to breathe. Also felt numb all over. It was a cop. Later, I heard he found me in the street and thought I was dead. I think he pulled up right after it happened. ER docs said it must have been an indirect hit. No burns or anything but they said tests showed I was hit with a large amount of electricity. My buddies called me "Flash" for quite a while.

I almost drowned with my wife when we were newlyweds. We went to the beach, actually we went to a deserted beach where we were alone, sort of a suit optional type of place.

It was a weekday so the beach was desolate, we never saw another person all day.

We went swimming and got caught in a rip current, my wife is not as strong a swimmer as I am and we could not get out of it, it was very wide. I was dropping to the bottom and pusher her forward towards the beach on a diagonal, no matter where we moved we could not get out of it. So I kept going under and pushing her and walking on the bottom. I drank a lot of water and was pretty sure this was how I was going to die, I accepted it and just wanted to get her safe even if I drowned.

After what seemed like an eternity and I was still alive, I was getting better and better footings on the bottom and we worked our way to the point where we could touch. We collapsed on the beach after that.

See the bumper sticking out of the water?


http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1214491896.jpg

I've never been seriously injured or in the hospital, but a few incidents come to mind.

When I was around 12 I had a severe flu with a very high fever for days. I was hallucinating and became dehydrated. Dad was too cheap to consider taking us to the doctor for something like that. If he'd had his way I would have been going to school through the whole thing.

Around that same time I was at a summer camp where lightning struck near the bath house where I was taking a shower. I happened to be adjusting the water temp when it struck... I got knocked down and had a numb arm for a couple of days.

At around 16 I was having a long distance dirt bike jumping contest with a friend. It was late in the day and we needed to get home. We agreed the greatest distance on the last run would win. My timing was off at take off and the bike landed on the front wheel, almost going over. My friend couldn't believe I didn't lose it. It scared me so much I sold the bike after that.

I'll say. When I was 20 I was in the back of a pick-up truck when it went off the road and rolled. (I and two friends had hitched a ride from Bridgport to a trailhead in Yosemite to go backpacking.) It was 11 at night and I remember the horizon of the Sierras doing a flip. The truck, a Ford F150, rolled over my back, shoving me into the sage and sand.

I broke my scapula right down the middle, and ruptured my liver and spleen. When my friends, unhurt, asked where I hurt, I said, "My left arm doesn't hurt." Everywhere else hurt, but the fun had just started. We were out in the middle of nowhere, but I eventually made it back to Bridgeport in someone's car, then to Reno in an ambulance. I got to a hospital 8 hours after the accident and was sent straight to surgery. The whole time I forced myself to stay awake. I knew if I fell asleep I would never wake up. The pain that was beyond extreme helped.

Later, the Doctor said he'd never seen such injuries on a living person, and the fact that there were 8 hours of internal bleeding before I got treated, he couldn't believe it. That was a long night.

I ate a 'Hot Pocket' once... :D


KT

The day I was born, that was nasty!

When I was in 7th grade I managed to flip my 2-seater go cart on the cul-de-sac in front of my house. The crash broke the carb in half (5hp Briggs motor) and the gas tank, which is situated just below the carb when the engine is upright, started to pour copious amounts of gas onto the ground and also onto the hot muffler of the still running engine. I was pinned by the cart (no roll bar) and the ground underneath me was becoming a puddle of gas. I managed to pull myself out (cart probably only weighed 150 lbs or so) and got about 15 feet from the cart before it erupted in flames.

During my last summer as a mountaineering guide, I was in Switzerland on a mountain called Dente Blanche and due to the ineptitude of my client (which was in turn my own ineptitude... it's up to the guide to be in control of the situation) I ended up in what's known as a pendulum fall, where the highest point of protection is not vertical to your fall but instead out to the side, making you swing on the end of the rope. I received a "flail chest" from that one, an injury where you break your ribs badly enough that part of your chest wall detaches entirely.

This is going to seem trivial compared with some of the episoded I've just read :eek:

'end of 1st season of road racing (TZ250), got T-boned at a hairpin by an idiot, broke radius+ulna cleanly. Too swollen to operate over weekend (happened Sat lunchtime), so had to wait 'till Mon.
Perfectly OK in every other way before operation to plate both bones, but post operation I woke up in intensive care with my family around me. I was breathing 4 times per minute while under anaesthetic!
'surgeon said that it was probably due to a knock on the head when I was sideswiped. :rolleyes:

Motorcycle crash in high school...separated both shoulders and had a concussion, big dent in my bell full face helmet.

T-boned on my bicycle in college, broke my lower tib and fib...was also concussed again. I was hit by a small Honda and was launched upward. Had he been driving a truck...

Ran off High 49 in the Sierras..I was driving drunk and speeding. We were all boatmen for a rafting company and were en route to run the Stanislaus River the next day. We sailed off an embankment with a 300ft drop-off. The only thing that saved us was a three strand bob wire fence that caught and entangled my old 2002 and stopped us in about 150 feet, just prior to the long, 300ft drop. My two buddies and me were unhurt. The car suffered almost no damage other than some suspension stuff I fixed the next week.

Bunch of flying close calls, some Desert Storm stuff but nothing compared to Kurt and the current folks in the middle east.

Was it an Alabama Hot Pocket?

plenty of "holy sheet" moments.


wrote myself off so many times a religious Tibet follower called my "experience" attitude Buddhism.

At 18 4 friends and I drove to Matzatlan and other areas surfing. Coming back I was driving a 55 Pontiac wagon and rolled it at 60+. No seat belts, we were all asleep. I was the only one hurt and spent time in jail in Culiacan because I was the driver.


VietNam, north of Danang, rockets and mortars


Racing motorcycles 1/2 mile at Ascot in LA, got center punched and knocked out, the ambulance drivers thought I was dead and weren't moving too fast. My wife at the time and friends started yelling at them to get moving. I was out for four hours and when I woke up the worst thing I could think of was I had bit through my tongue. Think when you say "mother f er" where your tongue is in mother. It took months to get over that knockout.

Drugs.

I went to Hoag Hospital one Sunday morning because I was having some problems. Chest, short breath, sweating, left arm numb, jaw hurt. Must be a bad cold. I told my wife I was going to get checked out and go to a junkyard after.
ER checked me in and asked if I had ever seen a heart doctor, I said yes, Dr.xx a couple years ago for a check up. They said that doctor and another one was there in the cath lab this morning for some school.
They told me they thought I might need some work and kept me, I was in the ER, gown, plugged into the monitors, IV, everything, waiting for a room, called my wife and said I would be there at least overnight, she said she would bring me some car magazines.
I was laying there and started feeling real bad, a doctor asked if I was OK, I said no, I feel like sht, worse than when I got there, he looked at the monitors, said someting and all of a sudden it was like TV. People everywhere, hands everywhere, they rolled me to the Cath Lab, banging into the corners of the hallway, the dr. said "you didn't know you would be on Toads wild ride today" I said I bet this is the most fun I will have today.
My wife showed up with the magazines a few housrs later but I was already in ICU. She and the Dr came in about the same time. I had %99 blockage while in the ER. The Dr said, well, you had all your cards and ducks in a row this time, anyplace else and you would probably be dead.
It helped that the Dr.s were ready to go and the lab was already set up, nobody in there.
I accused them of initiating a heart attack to pay for their Sunday morning.
Almost no scaring to the heart because everything was taken care of so quick.
Right place at the right time with the right doctors.

In Cambodia, middle of the night, no one around and two guys walk out of the bush with AK-47's and proceed towards me...that was a fairly intense moment. They weren't real pleasant, but after a couple of minutes of us staring at each other at point blank range, my ride rode up, I jumped on the back and was gone. Not sure if it was really dangerous, but it sure didn't feel good.

First time I dove with sharks my instructor told me not to worry, it was safe. The sharks were real close, real big and hungry...so we get out of the water and the instructor tells me he was scared *****less, that we were in danger, but all the while I was having a great time because he said not to worry!

Too many motorcycle stories to relate, which is why I limit myself to the old car...

1. Decompression dive in a Boeing 757. They're designed to do this safely, but I didn't know this at the time, and it scared the ****e out of me.

2. We surprised a group of heavily armed Khmer Rouge temple robbers at Angkor Wat, who were busy chiselling Buddha heads out of one of the remoter temples. Having two screaming Cambodian thugs hold their AK 47's to your head is a very frightening thing. That could have gone very wrong, very quickly.

3. Long ago, when I was truly stupid, I drove a Citroen DS 21 from Beirut to Paris with a trunk full of black Lebanese hash. I had so many close calls on that trip, that I have to shake my head every time I think about it.

I dont know how close I've come. That's what's so scary about it.

8 y/o, shooting unsupervised, lacked a proper backstop, ricochet came back at me and hit wall behind me, later measurement showed had come w/in a few inches of my head.

Many, many times.

Fell asleep returning from a concert. Woke up when a backseat passenger yelled. I was in the oncoming lane, about to hit a car.

Did two 360-degree spins on ice on the way up the hill to Schweitzer Ski Bowl in an old VW Beetle and ended with the front axle hanging off the cliff while the car teetered. Looking down, the car would have fell 40 feet onto several 10" stumps cut six feet high because of the steepness. Woullda died. Wasn't driving. Skied all day, got clothes wet, Beetle did not have heat, ended up in the infirmary the next day.

Ran a red light on a Honda 750. Crumpled the front fender of a Dodge Dart with the bike, broke the windshield with my helmet and woke up sixty feet away.

Those are just the first three the come to mind. The one that really sticks out is the Beetle thing with the front axle hanging off the cliff, looking down at those stumps. 5 mph faster and we woulda died, fer sher.