IGX

That last fat chance row blog got me thinking.

Though i wouldn't characterize their rowing as a near-death experience, I'm sure it has tested them to the extreme, both physically and mentally. It seems that a cocky, crossfitting, entrepreneur has been thoroughly humbled by this experience, and why not!

Who here has been to the extremes or even cheated death?

For me, I've had 4 absolute near death experiences in the jet. Each time, we landed nearly scratch-free but these were definitely "coulda shoulda died" scenarios that are etched in my mind.

How bout you?

You mean close calls? Not "I was out and felt myself moving toward the light" stuff? Because I have a lot of close calls but no "I was on the operating table and they told me I flatlined," kinda stories.

As a kid, I nearly died in wisdom tooth surgery.
As an adult, I nearly augered in on a parachute jump (collision with other jumper), and had a few close calls in structure fires.*

And I'm convinced that someone else was in my spot on the raid on Calvigny Barracks, in Grenada. He was KIA.


*Today, firefighting is much safer, IMO. We have learned a lot.

seeahill wrote:You mean close calls? Not "I was out and felt myself moving toward the light" stuff? Because I have a lot of close calls but no "I was on the operating table and they told me I flatlined," kinda stories.

Either would be cool to hear about.

I didn't term mine as "close calls" just because that's too loose in aviation-speak. I've probably had 100 close calls, technically - but i see your point

johno wrote: As an adult, I nearly augered in on a parachute jump (collision with other jumper).

Moar

Around five years ago I went white water rafting. Rapids were particularly rough. At one point we were all messing around and pushing each other out the raft. I got pushed out the front of the raft, and the raft went over me.

The current was too strong to swim backwards, so it carried me downstream under the raft. I hadn't taken a breath because I was expecting to come back up straight away, so at this point my lungs were already burning. Suddenly I hit a tree root in the water in front of me, and couldn't go downstream any further. The only way I could go was up.

I started swimming up, but raft after raft kept sliding over me. The current was too strong to swim backwards or sideways, so I was essentially trapped underwater while 6-10 rafts slid over the top of me. For the 15 or 20 seconds I was under, I honestly thought I was going to die. I've never experienced panic like that in my life. I've heard people say that when you know or think you're going to die you feel calm, but I just felt pure terror. If I had been thinking straight I would have just stayed calm until the last raft passed over and I could swim up, but I was terrified.

Weirdly, it didn't affect me after at all. I got back in one of the rafts, and was fine after that.

OK. Long one:

I was on the South Island of the Queen Charlotte Islands, Canada's answer to the Galapagos. My job was to write about it and I'd been kayaking with pals. The kayaking was terrific. But I had to find some endemic birds and flowers that I wanted to see and write about. No one wanted to waste a day of kayaking to come with me. So I went alone. (Yeah, you can see it coming from here.)

I took a trail out of the beach kayak camp but it petered out in a mile, so I climbed up the spine of the island bushwhacking in a very thick temperate zone rain forest. I made it to the other side of the island, started back, and decided to climb a 15 foot wall, rather than to go half a mile around.

The wall was covered with moss maybe a foot deep. I had to plunge my hand in, find a hold and move up, kicking my feet in to find a toe hold. It was an easy climb and I could see a small tree at the top. I made a sweeping grab for it, but something slid out from under my foot and I found myself falling, face first, about 12 feet. Landed in moss and got my hands out in front of my face, but I felt my legs come up over my back and I heard an awful crunching sound in my back.

I got up and started moving right away, before the pain and stiffness set in. I was in a rain forest, off any known trail, wearing green rain gear and black irrigation boots. I was, essentially, the same color as the forest and I knew I'd never be found if I didn't keep moving.

I made it down to the beach and walked, then crawled, for a while until I came to a point of rocks that I couldn't climb. This is right up near the border of Alaska and Canada. Water's cold. But I had to swim around those rocks. And I figured I was screwed completely if I lost my boots. So I carried them in one arm, swam out beyond the breakers, and came back into the beach. I swam three times that day. Realizing that I didn't have anymore left and that it was getting dark, I found a point on the beach and started building a fire. (Yes, a soaked Bic lighter will dry out and light). My kayak buddies who'd been searching the beaches for me found me then. Got me into a kayak and back to camp. I was medivaced out the next day. Got my face stitched up for free (Ah, Canada.) Three months later I could only walk six steps at a time my back was so bad. A month later I got an operation and learned to stand upright again.

That was a bit of a close call.

Reading Timmah's self-obsessed posts is a bit like dying, very, very slowly.

Got a story FC?

When we had my kid I tallied up my close calls between Iraq and Afghanistan and it was eight.

I then sought employment elsewhere. Somewhere that didn't require travel to the badlands. I figured I had one life left of my nine and wanted to spend it with my wife and kid.

At my going away party my partner from Afghanistan showed up and I told him my count was eight. He then said "Oh hell no Stan what about this and that and that."

Final tally was like 13 or so. I spend a lot of time trying to forget all of it.



-Stan

seeahill wrote:Got a story FC?

Death can post about a near Fat Cat experience.

I've had to pull my reserve parachute once when I thought my main was cigarette rolling.

I was in a blackhawk at White Sand testing range when we lost power and crash landed. Any time you hear the aircrew scream out "we're going down" things are serious. If we hadn't been sling roped in a lot of us would have thrown from the BH. We hit so hard the BH landing gear got Fucked up.

Then there was the time the Chinook my platoon was crammed into blew and engine over the Caribbean. We just barely made it to St. Thomas airport and were preparing to ditch into the ocean. I was crammed into the back up against a fuel bladder. If we had gone down, I would have died for sure. The 48 hours stuck on the St. Thomas airport run way made me wish we had gone down in the ocean.

Then there was fight in which I got stabbed in the back shoulder.

buckethead wrote:

johno wrote: As an adult, I nearly augered in on a parachute jump (collision with other jumper).

Moar

We were doing a Mass Tactical parachute jump where the object is to get many Rangers out of the plane & on the ground ASAP. We jumped out of a C-141, IIRC, and were simultaneously going out of the left & right doors at around 1,000 feet. Another Ranger went out the opposite side door about a second before me, so he was just a little lower in the air. Just as in sailing, when one boat steals the other boat's wind, his chute "stole my air" and my chute lost lift. My first clue was a face-full of his parachute, as my parachute closed. I dropped through his chute, looked up at my chute and saw it was closed like a clamshell and I was falling fast. I popped my reserve chute & vigorously threw it out to catch some air. But it was too late and I died.


Oh, wait. No, I survived even though my reserve chute didn't open 'cause I was too close to the ground. But the Big Ranger in The Sky opened my main chute at the last minute, braked my descent, and I landed not much harder than usual. My reserve chute was strung out on the ground, unopened.

It must have been a close thing, because the Rangers on the Drop Zone rushed to my spot, expecting to see me dead.

Fat Cat wrote:

seeahill wrote:Got a story FC?

Death can post about a near Fat Cat experience.

I doubt anyone who had a Fat Cat experience would ever admit it.

Having a gun pulled on you makes all the colors around you get brighter for sure. Same with major injury.. it's a vivid thing.

I was young and had a fast motorcycle. I was heading from Flint to Detroit at about 150mph. I passed another guy on a bike and he accelerated to keep up with me. We passed a cop going the other direction and he pulled through the median and hit his lights. We accelerated and and the other guy must have had a bigger bike because he passed me then went for an exit, locked up his rear brake and smashed into a stopped car...he must have been going about 30 because I heard the smash, looked back, and the just kept going. The cop pulled into the exit.

I pulled off the next exit and went down the road and ended up sitting and shaking in an Arby's.

Being stupid, that was not the last 20 minute run to Detroit I made, but it did sow the seeds for me selling that bike and getting something more comfortable and slower

Had a gun pointed at me twice by people of color.

Didn't like it much.

Guy tried to rob me in a drug deal. He pulled a gun and I grabbed it. We wrestled for half a second and it went off, hitting me in the leg. It was several inches away from blowing off my penis.

Had another gun pulled on me. I was drunk, came out of a black out wandering around north Philadelphia. The guy stole my jacket. He could've ended my life.

I used to drink and drive all the time.

I used to drive on acid and mushrooms all the time as well. Dust too. Very scary now that I look back on it.

Drinking and drugs cost me a lot. There were times when I'd be on the verge of passing out and not being certain that I would wake up the following day. There's been plenty of times I could've died or killed someone else.

I have a close call story. Absolutely should have died.

Senior in HS, so of course I was immortal. There was a little pig path of a road right near the school that had a hill that simply dropped off the face of the earth if you came over it in the "down" direction. If you hit 70mph or so you could catch some air and have a pretty soft landing. Two carloads of us decided we needed to do just that. Myself, my friend who owned a VW GTI, and two other guys piled into his car. He was driving, I was in the passenger seat; no seat belt for either of us. Another guy was in the back seat with his belt buckled. Fourth guy was sitting cross-ways in the hatch area so he could shoot the super soaker out the back.

We're first of the two cars and we're hauling ass. Way faster than we'd ever been over the hill before. We come over the top of the hill and get a little air. And there's a huge land yacht of a car coming up the other side of the hill. My friend jerks the wheel to the right to avoid the car, but pulls to hard and ends us straight in to the ditch on the right side. He manages to get us out of that ditch, but a combination of over correcting and brakes grabbing on the left side on the asphalt and right side not grabbing on dirt, we're now in a clockwise spin across the road into the left side ditch. We come in sliding pretty much perpendicular to the road and clip a tree with the right front fender. This spins us backwards into next tree in line.

I was thrown backwards into my seat so hard it bent the frame back into the back seat. I had bruises in the shape of the seat frame on my back for weeks. Driver got a face full of metal when the pull-out radio launched straight in to his mouth. Cost him a few dozen stitches and a front tooth. He ended up swallowing the tooth and the volume knob off the radio. The guy in the back seat hit his head on the side window and got a bunch of stitches. All three of us walked away.

The only serious casualty was our friend in the back seat. The tree came in right on his thighs and wrapped them around its trunk. Never knew you could lose that much blood and survive. He had surgery to put Ti rods in his femurs that afternoon and they seriously had him take his first steps the next day.

No way a car full of dumb teenagers should have been able to run a car into a tree at an impact speed of over 60, one seat belt worn in the entire car, all four come out alive.

When I was 21 I had a mugger sneak up behind me and smash his forearm into my larynx. I don't know if he tightened I to a choke because I was out immediately. I was then kicked and stomped on. My face looked like Freddie Krueger's when I woke up. I spent three days in the hospital with a concussion and smashed larynx. I also suffered a broken rib, but that wasn't noticed for a while. I spent the next month or so being scanned and examined by specialists who were trying to decide if my larynx needed to be stapled back together or not.

I just had one, about 20 minutes go. OK, not quite as bad as everyone else's but this thread is timely.

Unloaded bike from car post-vacation and reassembled it yesterday. This morning, loaded it up with work stuff and head off to work. Out of my neighborhood is a steep descent that ends in a T intersection with a very busy road. In the winter I don't drive my car down it when its snowy, its that steep. Starting down the descent already with some speed, I apply some brakes and OH FUCK I FORGOT TO RECONNECT MY BRAKES WHEN I PUT THE WHEELS BACK ON. Staring at an endless stream of traffic passing in front of me at the bottom of the hill.

So I popped the left foot out of the clips and dragged it for a micro-second, but no joy. Metal clip on shoe has no friction on pavement. In that same micro-second, I spy a split in the neighbor's hedges, cut hard across the road, quasi-bunny hop over the curb with one foot in the clips, pass through a gap in the hedges, and blow up in their yard. My left shoulder is going to be sore tonight.

Lessons learned?
- Made a smart decision while flooded with a instant bucket load of adrenalin
- Another reason to use disc brakes, one less thing to forget
- This reconfirms the aviation adage that the superior pilot uses superior headwork to avoid the need for superior airwork

wouldn't peter sagan have driven up onto a car in that situation?

I've been married 35 years.

Pinky wrote:When I was 21 I had a mugger sneak up behind me and smash his forearm into my larynx. I don't know if he tightened I to a choke because I was out immediately. I was then kicked and stomped on. My face looked like Freddie Krueger's when I woke up. I spent three days in the hospital with a concussion and smashed larynx. I also suffered a broken rib, but that wasn't noticed for a while. I spent the next month or so being scanned and examined by specialists who were trying to decide if my larynx needed to be stapled back together or not.

Where were you? Bad part of town? College campus?