When I was 6, I was in a boating accident.
My family and I were waterskiing and camping off this little island on the lake. We did it all the time, since my uncle had a speedboat.
My mom was about to take her turn, and I was sitting in the boat behind my uncles seat, facing the back to watch her ski. When my uncle tried to start the boat, it faltered. Made a rut-rut-rut noise but wouldn’t start. After try three or four, I smelled something awful, and pinched my nose. The last thing I remember is my mom asking me if I smelled something bad, and I nodded.
The engine exploded into a ball of fire and engulfed me.
The next thing I know, I’m under water and bobbing to the surface (wear your life-vests, kids). My mom is screaming and my cousin is swimming to me and drags me to shore. My uncle (just outside the blast radius) had reached into the fire to grab me and thrown me into the water.
I was… calm. I felt nothing. We had to hail a passing boat to take us off the island to get to a hospital. I remember my mom asking me if I hurt, and shaking my head.
If i looked at my arms and legs and saw what I looked like at that point, I can’t remember at all, but I was covered in third-degree burns. I was in the hospital for a while, and then was in a wheelchair for a bit while my legs were wrapped. I had to have water therapy for my burns. I do remember the oblong, black boils that developed over my burns in the months that followed. For a long period of time, I couldn’t be in the sun, and had to wear a bonnet when I went to school.
My skin healed beautifully though. I’ve only got one long-lasting scar from it on my shoulder. The doctor said that my uncle throwing me into the cold lake water is what most-likely saved my skin from being permanently damaged. I’m sure being 6 years old helped immensely, too.
I don’t know if it’s the kind of story shared on that show, but I once had to be wheeled into an ER with hypothermia on a warm day (dry, properly clothed, etc).
How? Why?
Central dysautonomia. Basically, my autonomic nervous system can’t regulate my body temperature (among other things) all the time.
What triggers it being unable to? Like it decides to just not work sometimes, or is it like a battery percentage?
Physical stress seems to do it the most. For example, if I get sick or injured (such as have surgery), everything starts to go haywire.
Often it’s more random seeming but with less extreme impacts.
But also, as you said, it can be like a battery percentage. Like, I get more and more and more worn down over a handful of hours or days or weeks, and then that causes a bunch of other symptoms. I’ve learned to pace myself to avoid that.
While I can obviously guess what kind of stories it has, I’ve never heard of Untold Stories of the ER. Where is this shown? Sounds ripe for entertainment.
In the US, it’s in the first thirteen TV channels. It’s one of those basic cable shows like Law and Order that seems to never die (and unlike Law and Order remains fresh).
Ah. I just just streaming platforms and physical media.
It’s on streaming too, depending on the service.
Otherwise the high seas are also an option…
When my mother was pregnant with me, it was said that I had an opposite gender twin, but then comes my birth and such a twin is nowhere to be found.
You likely absorbed them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanishing_twin
That used to be a theory, but it was looked into and it doesn’t seem to be what happened (also didn’t know that doesn’t just happen to identical twins).
So like merged into your mother then? How does/would that work?
By imagining it more like stillbirth with a minimized trace.
Sounds like something a neonatal cannibal would say ;)
I had the opposite: they didn’t know my bro was coming until I was already here and - look! - it’s another one!
Having worked on ze ambulance when I was younger, here are a few favorites:
The guy who lit his wheelchair on fire and rode it across his house to unlock the front door.
The navy boxer who came up swinging after being cardioverted.
The two teen brothers that tried stabbing each other to death over how to divide up some puppies.
The woman who stabbed her boyfriend 15 times (including one in the scrotum) for refusing to take her to the movies the night before.
The woman being arrested who offered us all the money in her purse (probably close to $30) to “wreck the ambulance so she could escape in the confusion.”
The last one got me good lmao, I’m so curious, what’s her story?
She was under arrest with medical problems, so the cruiser followed us to the hospital. She was quite chatty and at the end of the trip said “I haven’t had sex in toooo long,” and then looked at my partner. You could see all three brain cells put it together and she smiled at him and said “heyyyyy.”
We did not wreck the ambulance and she went to jail from the hospital.
My stepdad had a hauling business. Huge stakebody diesel truck he called Big Blue, you’d call him and he’d bring us kids over and we would load the truck. He’d take it to the dump or wherever they wanted.
Usually us kids rode in the open back of the truck with whatever we were hauling, which was usually old furniture and trash.
One day we were moving a TON of furniture and the whole truck was packed. So packed that there wasn’t much room for us but there was like a littke pocket in the middle.
Being stupid kids, we decided to start clambering around on top of the furniture, never mind that the truck is barreling down the state highway.
Well i was climbing up on some dressers towards the back of the truck, but they had been covered with moving blanket.
When all of my weight got up on top of the dresser, the wind pressure started sliding me and the goddamn moving blanket backwards, and since the dressers were taller than the stake walls of the truck that meant me and the moving pad were headed directly off the back of the truck, going 60+mph
I of course tried to scramble back to safety but all my effort just pulled the damn furniture pad towards me and I kept sliding.
My feet went off the back of the dressers, dangling over the highway, when one of the kids with me heard my terror screams over the wind, realized what was happening and jumped and caught the edge of the moving blanket ending my rearward progress.
We kept riding in the back on hauling jobs but I learned to be more careful.
bonus: That same stepdad, one of his own natural kids was real wild. He stowed away on the roof of their Winnebago before the mom drove it over the Maryland Bay Bridge. She said she couldn’t figure out why everyone was honking and pointing but it’s not like she could pull over on the bridge!
The 80’s was wild.
80’s
'80s
I work security at a casino and one night a guest overdosed in his car, crashed into a snow berm and had his foot still on the peddle, completely shredding the tires. I drove out there with our medic and the cops were out there too. I then had to leave temporarily to pick someone up so we could issue him barring paperwork and ban him from the property.
When we got back to the scene, the cops had let him walk back into the casino to look for his friends so he could figure out transportation so we drove back to the casino, and found him on the ground, overdosing again. Called the medic over, called AMR, and administered Narcan so he wouldn’t die. Luckily he came to and got transported to the hospital.
Don’t fuck with fentanyl.
Don’t know if this is fitting, but I was once on our downstairs toilet which had a sink in front of it.
I sneezed and my head bolted forward and I knocked off half my tooth.
Maybe the centipede that took up residence in my ear canal, or the narrowly survived rattlesnake bite?
Definitely the centipede.
Welp, that’s enough discussion for me today.
