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?
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.
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.
You were knocked out for a day?
No, I was knocked out for an unknown amount of time but definitely less than a day and possibly not even that long. The passage of time wasn’t extremely clear. I was awake for most of it but immobile. I was in a lot of pain and the entire event feels like looking back on a really bad dream. I have been told it was a unlikely that I should have survived.
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.
Heart stopped beating? That’s a thing? Jesus
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.
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).
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.
I fell out on fent twice, both times I ended up in the ICU. I experienced the exact same shit I felt from a MeO-DMT trip. And both times a clockwork elf literally put their long weird arm on me and said “it’s not your time yet friend.” Then I felt felt extreme whiplash and despite not being fully conscious I distinctly remember hearing the pulse monitor beeping and knew I wasn’t dead.
Glad you’re alive and hope you got off that shit
Sober from all drugs except weed and nicotine. Literally turned down opiates in the hospital after I got stabbed repeatedly.
I was around 21-22 years old. My step-dad got a boat and we had a big family picnic at the bay. We went tubing and started with the youngest sibling up to the oldest, me. Each of us got a progressively more intense ride. I knew I was up for a crazy ride, so I sat cross-legged IN the tube. That was a huge mistake and very dangerous, always lay on top of the tube in case what I’m about to tell you ever happens to you.
It was fine for a few minutes, despite the intensity. Suddenly, the way the boat turned combined with the wake and position I was sitting, the actual tube launched out from the cover/rope that attaches to the boat and that wrapped around my neck and luckily, one of my arms. I was pulled behind the boat for a few minutes, slowly blacking out, as I finally came to, floating naked in the bay. Luckily my step-brother noticed the tube was gone and told him to stop the boat. No idea when my bathing suit got ripped off but luckily it was floating nearby. I had a huge rope-burnrash across my chest, under my arm, and around my neck. Pretty sure if it wouldn’t have went under my arm, it would have snapped my neck.
That was well over a decade ago and I haven’t been in the ocean since.
That was really reckless from your stepfather. You must always have someone watching the tube at all times.
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
A bunch.
Two while snowboarding. First time I hit some rocks that were hidden in fresh snow. When I checked my helmet, a rock had pierced it in the back of my head. It was easily a fatal hit had I not had my helmet on. The second time I accidentally rode off a cliff (took the wrong line). I landed on my back in powder but a snapped branch was sticking up two inches below my left arm pit. Had I fallen four inches to the left, it would have impaled me through the heart.
I lost count how many while surfing. Lost a surfer I was trying to rescue and almost drowned myself.
Oddly, never while downhill skateboard racing.
Twice while riding a motorcycle.
Once in a car. A pickup hydroplaned on the interstate right ahead of me. It went in the ditch, overcorrected and came right at my door at speed. I turned my wheel into it so it wouldn’t t-bone me but instead I missed it entirely and all I got was mud on my car and in my underware.
Blockage in three of my four main heart arteries. Two were 99% blocked. It required four emergency stents in my heart. I should be dead for sure from that one but a little voice in my head told me to skip the boat trip and go to the ER because I felt “funny”.
Stage 3 cancer. Beat it but lost my singing voice. Fuck cancer.
Damn someone has been dancing with the devil.
When they say “live life to the fullest” they never mention that doing so will absolutely put you at greater risk of an untimely death. Worth it though.
Lol, god damn, dude has 9 lives
Not anymore he hasn’t
I count 8 lives used. Next hole punch gets a free death.
That was a wild read. Glad you’re still around.
. Exit wound
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.
You can accidentally double dose on Trazadone like I did and have it feel like life is slipping away as yoy fight with every ounce to keep your eyes open while everything goes dark.
But really you just sleep extra hard.
Thrice, all a long time ago:
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Driving back alone from a group camping trip. Got stuck in a freak snowstorm in the mountains, without chains. Stalled and started sliding back towards a really deep ravine. Hit the brakes, but it kept skidding through the sleet. Had the car door open, ready to bail. The car came to a stop, barely inches from the edge.
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Walked out of the shower in a towel. Faced a tweaker with a gun standing in my apartment. Demanded my wallet. Took out the cash. Wasn’t much. He paused, trying to decide what to do next. I really wasn’t sure which way it would go. He left.
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Flight instructor had checked off on doing a solo, then left town. Was nervous, but he had told me to put in the flight hours in his absence. Practicing short take-off/landings and go-arounds. Little single-engine trainer. On the first touch-and-go, I forgot to take off full flaps, which meant maximum drag on the wings. Got barely 1000 ft above ground, then the engine began to sputter. The plane stalled, and started a slow-mo, nose-down spin toward the ground. I remember stopping breathing. Then the brain kicked in. Figured it out. Recovered from the spin way too close to the ground. The most sphincter-clenching, stupidest moment of my life.
I have next to no experience but from the few times I went on those planes I can say the G forces are much more then you expect. It’s not just “oh cool I feel lighter”, it’s " oh god I’m falling to my inevitable death"
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A couple of heart attacks. Only sad when thinking how sad my mom and dog would be if I died. Otherwise, pretty chill. Once the morphine kicked in I didn’t care about anything.
Everyone I have met who rode motorcycles has a story like this. Then they lift up their pant leg or shirt to show you ghastly huge scars.
