Driving along a 70mph section of highway in the early AM hours and thinking ‘those headlights look way too close to the median…’ only to realize some drunk had turn onto am exit ramp thinking it was an entrance, so they where going the wrong way down the highway.

This was before the time of cell phones being common so ended up tracking down a local officer at a gas station I knew them to frequent at night, hoping they somehow caught them before anyone got killed.

I have this hazy, memory from when I was about 8. I was exploring a peat bog, which was fun because everything was soft and squishy and I could just run around. I saw some weird looking bushes, and decided to go check them out. But, as I ran up, it turned out there were growing over this sort of wet hole, where maybe there was a spring or something. I suddenly fell about 8 feet, and was in this mud pit slowly sinking. Luckily, I managed to grab some of those bushes I’d seen, and pull myself out. But it was very hard, because the mud was pulling me down like quicksand. Eventually, I crawled back out on the bog, covered in mud.

Nobody I was with remembers this, and honestly it might not be real. Childhood experiences are super weird.

I forget how old I was, but at some point as a kid I had this really big marble, and as dumb kids sometimes do, I kept sticking it in my mouth for no reason. Eventually I accidentally half-swallowed it and it was big enough to completely block my throat. I couldn’t breathe or make a sound, and I don’t think anyone else was even home at the time anyway. I legit thought I was gonna die, as much as I could process that as a kid, but I somehow managed to cough the marble up after a few seconds. I distinctly remember thinking to myself “okay don’t do that again,” and then absently sticking the marble back in mouth a minute later anyway.

waited until it was almost too late to get checked for appendicitis

to be fair the symptoms weren’t very clear cut

As a kid (maybe 6-8) at the beach. My dad was on the shore and I waded out and kept going further and further, until the sand bank fell off and I dropped what felt like 5m underwater and couldn’t find my way back. I wasn’t a bad swimmer but panic set in and I got disoriented. Felt like I was treading water for 15 minutes but it was more like 3 until a family friend saw what was happening and made it out to me to pull me back to the shore.

Hiking mountain, misty/rainy midday. Summit didn’t look like a summit to me, and I’m not an experienced hiker. Had forgotten my hiking boots so was hiking in flat-bottom running shoes.

Arrive at summit, of course, want to walk to edge to enjoy my hard-earned view. Begin walking down incline to my “perceived summit” (mistakes intensify). Realize it sure is a steep path. Total path from arrival to “perceived summit” was ~10 meters. 5 meters from edge I slip, ow, that hurt. Oh, I’m sliding. Time ceases to exist, this all feels like forever. Quickly flatten body such that backpack grabs surface.

Where am I? How far did I slide? 2-3m, panic, I am more than halfway towards the edge in an ever increasing steepness summit. Everything is wet. I launch myself to my feet and rush away from the ledge, processing what just happened. Oh. I see.

Strangers freaked out, friends freaked out, everyone has adrenaline. Sit and consider what occurred, try to calm myself but the panic of existential dread was persistent for the next six hours or so.

Good hike.

Felt close to dying last year from covid + pneumonia (possibly comorbid RSV as well). Still not 100% over my long-covid symptoms.

I was shot at in the woods as a kid by an old man with a shotgun and a big greyhound. My niece and nephew were with me, and I literally drug them behind me as we ran back to our family’s camp site. Have no idea why he fired at us, but he most certainly did… I was so afraid he was going to release his dog… No way we would’ve gotten away from it. Our family didn’t believe us about this event until the 3 of us reminisced about it as young adults at Thanksgiving years later.

I also was chased by a farmer known for shooting trespassers with rock salt, when we snuck on his farm for shrooming. Some other highlights from that shrooming trip were almost stepping on a pygmie rattlesnake, and my brother getting stuck in quicksand and loosing his boot while we fled from the pursuing farmer thru the woods.

A buddy of mine and I were chased by a strange car for miles late at night. Should’ve called the police, but we were dumb teenagers. No idea what they wanted, but they pursued us for miles. We drove into a large neighborhood that was being developed, sped around the grid of empty streets with our lights off being chased by that car going crazy speeds on those residential streets, and we managed to slip out of the developing neighborhood and hid in a driveway on a side street until we saw the car go flying past looking for us. Still have no clue who that was or what their motivation/end goal was…

Had a close call with my wife and human traffickers… At least I’m 99% sure. I have had multiple training seminars from my former employer (mental health organization) due to the extremely elevated rate of human trafficking in this region and along Route 66 which pases thru. As a caseworker for the adult population, I worked with individuals who had been trafficked…

My wife is very petite and adorable, and was clearly being stalked and targeted by a man in Walmart while we were shopping one night. We were split up shopping, and apparently this man had been following my wife down every aisle, staring at her, and was coordinating with someone on the phone. This was unknown to me when I was heading to meet back up with my wife.

I finally spotted her down an aisle, but saw this guy peaking around the end of the aisle at my wife, who was the only person in that aisle… He was speaking quietly and I couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying, but it was clear he was staring at my wife and relaying information to someone on the phone.

I’m muscular and I don’t fuck around. I’m from Jersey and will admit I can be a bit of a hothead. I wanted to do more, but I walked right in front of this guy while he was staring at my wife down the aisle, postured up feet in front of him while giving him a deathstare until that bastard broke my stare, looking like he’d seen a ghost. I walked down the aisle towards my wife, turning back and maintaining eye-contact with the creep the whole time, especially as I put my arm around her.

I could tell I shook the guy, because he went out of his way to circle by my wife and I a few times with totally different body language, speaking in an entirely different cadence, volume, and tone. It was clear he was speaking loudly and in a manner aimed at us overhearing his now seemingly innocuous conversation. But it was clearly a rouse. He was stammering over his words all nervously and clearly wasn’t really asking the person on the phone about shopping items.

After I got back to my wife, she told me how this creep was following her down aisles for the last 15 minutes or more, staring at her while on the phone. Some people reading this may believe I jumped to conclusions, but this tripped human trafficking warning signs and sent alarm bells ringing in my gut. Better safe than sorry. Dude was a creek regardless.

I can’t think of any other close calls right now, but I know there’s other stories somewhere in my memory bank…

Bunch of failed suicides, an accident in a school swimming pool, and the time my neighbour accidentally diverted a fuck tonne of carbon monoxide fumes into my house. All the times I’ve been close to death don’t make for particularly interesting reading.

How about a brush with serious injury instead?

1st year of uni. I’m in the labs for the first time and I am hyped to do some microbiological analysis. We were given a bunch of techniques to try and I’d decided to start by doing gram staining and then observing a slide. Most of my class mates had less experience on the microscopes than me and I was feeling great about how quickly I’d calibrated everything. Cocky enough that I hadn’t noticed just how coated in immersion oil my gloves were, until my hand accidentally passed through a Bunsen burner and went up in flames.

Thankfully I’d picked a bench close to the sinks and was able to wrap some damp towels around the hand quickly to try to smother the flame before I got seriously burnt. But the scars on my hand are a reminder to me to be aware of my surroundings in the lab at all times.

Posted this recently on a similar but different question, may as well include it here because it fits:

Exploring an easy cave with a friend. Nothing tricky at all, just one way through, standing room all the way, about 1m wide, ankle deep water flowing through the whole way (walking against the flow).

As we went, the water very slowly became harder to press forwards against. The change was so gradual we were second-guessing it the entire time until it got really strong. We figured it was better to walk against it than with it - at this point it was rushing against our legs, and the thought of slipping and being swept through, bouncing off of the walls, was not great. It felt much easier to keep our footing facing the flow, and also it seemed like we were much closer to the end than the beginning (the cave had an exit at both ends, it was basically a small fork of a river that cut through a hill).

So we pressed on, until we got to a point that should have been a small scramble up a few bits of rock - except now there was a massive flow of water hitting us at chest level as we tried to climb it. We were both completely unable to push against it and get up. We were also now convinced that the cave was filling up with water so we had to get out - which now meant turning around and doing the whole length again but with the water hitting the back of our legs the whole way.

Oh and the water was freezing, coming off of some snowy mountains. So for about an hour, we held onto the sides of the cave and slowly tried to move steadily through, while by this point I had almost no feeling in my frozen feet to help with keeping my footing. It was like guesswork every step.

By the time we got out, the water had risen by almost a metre I’d say. Not much but the extra force was insane, and the feeling of a cave filling up with water behind you was not easily ignored. Anyway, turns out there was heavy rainfall way up river from us, always check the forecast and think beyond where you are when dealing with rivers and caves!

The first time I got hit by a car as a child

I once slipped on a bar of soap in the shower. I got up and slipped again a couple of minutes later.

I also almost drowned at a water park when I was like 3 or 4. I was on an inner tube on a water slide and fell off into a pool that was in the middle of the slide. The lifeguard didn’t see me and kept sending my family down the slide. Luckily someone else saw me and rescued me.

I was hiking in late winter/early spring when I stepped onto a deep pile of wet leaves that gave out. Ended up sliding a good 25 ft downhill, and the only thing that stopped me from falling 100 feet onto the rocks below was a small tree that went dead center between my legs. I sat there for a bit with my feet dangling over the ledge until the pain diminished and continued on.

Still enjoy hiking to this day, just a little more careful on where I step.

Back when I smoked and was an unexperienced driver, I was having a cig in my car. I stuck it out of the window to tap off the ash and I drifted off of the road with my right side tires. Instead of slowly moving back I jamked the wheel and almost had a head to head collision with traffic in the oncomming lane. Escaped death by half a meter.

• Two separate close calls with paedophiles as a kid. Yes, out alone, I’m genX.
• Fell asleep at the beach once with the waves splashing back and forth over my legs, woke up to find out the tide had come in and I’d been carried out in a rip. Well, fuck.
• Crossed the road while talking on the phone, and a bus zoomed past doing 50, three inches past my nose - real final-destination stuff. If I’d stepped out even half a second earlier, I’d have been a long greasy stain on the asphalt.
• Lying on the grass reading my book; my then-7yo son sprinted up to me with a chunk of concrete as big as my head, and bounced it off the grass right next to my ear. I’m sure it was just a coordination failure, but damn.
• Trying to extract an electrical cord plugged in really awkwardly behind a desk, stretched out on the floor with my arm snaked into the gap, only fingertips able to reach. Got it halfway out, caught myself really trying to wrap my fingers around the pins to get some leverage. Very calmly and carefully extracted my hand, sat up, and went to pieces for a bit.
• Visting my uncle on a tiny flyspeck of an island in the English Channel. Went to check out the pine forest there, spent a while tromping through the blanket of pine needles, lots of fun. Hit a really steep hill, the others took the stairs cut into the hillside, I decided to run down the slope. The hill got a lot steeper than I expected, my feet were barely even keeping up as I hurtled downwards… and through a gap in the trees, I saw I was heading to a cliff edge, with jagged rocks and crawling sea far below. Absolutely no chance of stopping in time, my turning circle was bigger than the remaining distance… only one thing for it. Stuck my arms out wide, veered as hard as I could, and just barely managed to catch a pine tree. Those things are not cuddly; I ended up with full-body carpet elbow, and hurt like hell for the rest of the trip. Beats being seagull food, though.

But if you want stupid ways I’ve hurt myself that weren’t actually life-threatening…

• Walking along the top of a maze (made of treated pine poles) as a teenager; fell off and just clipped an eyebrow on the corner of a pole; another inch and I’d have lost an eye at the very least. I still have a lump on the bone on the corner of my eye socket.
• As a 10yo, moving house and packing stuff into storage; I was carrying a metal pole-on-feet (part of a dressmaker’s dummy), so naturally I hefted it like a trident and chased my dad with it. Down a long corridor lined with doorways, at the storage facility. One of the feet caught a doorway, the pole stopped dead, I kept going and smashed my teeth into the end of the pole, breaking three of them.
• Pulling a big saucepan out of the cupboard under the stove, while cooking. The kitchen construction was terrible; the galvanized-iron base of the stove was jammed into a splintery hole in the chipboard counter, making a nasty, jagged narrowing gap. I got my hand caught and obviously badly cut so I carefully pushed up and backwards as I slid my hand out, to avoid ripping hell out of it by jerking it free. Except that no, I’d just brushed my hand against the hot part of the stove, and proceeded to burn it much, much worse by squeezing up against it and dragging slowly backwards.
• Doing the dusting when I was 12, stupidely squirted glass cleaner right onto an (incandescent) light bulb, which promptly shattered. I was very responsible, unplugged the lamp, picked up the glass, vacuumed the floor to get any splinters, then proceeded to attempt to removed the jagged stump of the lightbulb, barehanded. Still got a doozy of a scar.
• When I was a toddler, swinging on the garden gate. Held on too close to the hinge end, mashed the end of my pinky to absolute hamburger. They just kind of tacked it together and wrapped it up, best they could do - amazingly, I only have two hairline scars from it, and the fingerprint even lines up.
• Went jogging on slightly damp concrete, tripped and dislocated my ankle (mildly distressing injury pic)
• In my early 30s, playing ‘boo’ with a friend’s toddler, leaping out of hiding places and snarling hideously. Best game, toddlers love it. Leapt through a doorway that was about a foot lower than I expected, in a concrete wall. Skull made a noise skulls shouldn’t ever make, I made a very impressive scream indeed. Toddler was highly entertained, I was out of commission for the rest of the day.
• Taking my then-4yo son to the aquarium, he was almost-but-not-quite too big to carry on my shoulders. Two-stage lift, hoik up to chest height, then hnnngh up to shoulders. Easy. Except that when he was at chest height, his heels were exactly at ball-height, and after swinging him up for the first-stage lift… yeah. The thing about it, though, was that I did the same damn thing TWICE that day, and if you think getting kicked in the balls hurts, wait until you get kicked in already sore and swollen balls. Mother of god.
• Speaking of which, be 14, playing impromptu game of pingpong on a picnic table, with a tennis ball and the flat of our hands as paddles. I have a lazy eye, and no 3d vision, and so missed about 20 return in a row. Being 14 and in the throes of puberty, I proceeded to absolutely fucking lose my shit. At the tennis ball. Decide on the spot to teach the fucking thing a fucking lesson it would never fucking forget. Leap into the air anime style, fucking SLAM the ball down in a serve directly to the god damn moon. As mentioned, I have a lazy eye and no 3d vision, so instead of hitting the tabletop, the ball hit the leading edge of the table. It got me right in the nuts, with all the force a truly enraged 14yo could muster, and my sister stood over me laughing her head off as I lay there curled up in agony.
• And then of course there was my wedding night. We checked into the hotel, went for a walk around the city, then went for a swim in the hotel pool. I was showing off a little bit, swooshing around underwater around my wife like a seal, y’know how it is. Swum down a bit too deep, and stubbed my nose on the bottom of the pool. Fucking meow. Yanked the tip down so hard the skin tore right across the bridge. Blood absolutely fucking everywhere. Got back up to the room, rang room service for bandaids. Same bellhop arrived as checked us into the honeymoon suite, sees us both in towels, me looking like a slasher movie, and my wife on the floor heaving with laughter. He pretty much threw the bandaids at me and fled. I think we traumatised him for life, it was awesome :D

Don’t even have a limp or anything. But I did pull glass out of my face for like 3 years