Back when I was a welder, I was trying to cut something with an angle grinder in an awkward position.

I guess my brain was turned off that day because I decided to grind with the sparks going directly away from me.

So of course, the disc binded, and sent the angle grinder directly at my face.

Thank god I was wearing a face shield, at least. In about 0.1 seconds, my face shield was cut entirely in half.

The fun didn’t stop there, though, because I had the trigger lock on (again, genius). So it was still spinning at full force after it jumped out of my hands.

Also, I was on a ladder, so here I am, trying to throw the grinder away from my with my arms, on top of a ladder, all the while the cutting disc is going absolutely out of control essentially in full contact with my face, neck, chest, and arms.

Finally I manage to push it off of me, it falls to the floor and the disc breaks. I finally get off the ladder and unplug the grinder.

At this point, I can see that my face shield is cut clean down the middle. I’m thinking 1000% I’m gonna be needing an urgent hospital visit. I take off the face shield, and carefully touch my face… No blood… I take out my phone and use it as a mirror, not a scratch… I meticulously check the rest of my body… nothing.

Turns out, after all that, the only damage was to the disc and the face shield.

I can’t even explain how I felt after that. I spent the rest of the day in an almost out-of-body experience, and was shaken for a few weeks at least. I beat myself up a lot for being so stupid, and I literally couldn’t believe how lucky I was. I still can’t believe it.

I was deployed to Iraq in 2007, at Kirkuk Regional Air Base. I served in the US Air Force and my job was essentially an IT technician, so I was maintaining our base’s computer servers.

Our base was half Air Force (Airmen) and half Army (Soldiers). About 90% of our ticket queue came from the Army side, because they didn’t respect equipment or security practices as much as we did, so they were always breaking our things.

One day, I got a ticket from a small Army supply depot. Someone’s computer wasn’t powering on. So I hopped in our truck and drove over to the Army side of base. The supply depot was literally a shack, maybe about 20x15 ft. I went inside and was greeted by 3 soldiers.

While troubleshooting the broken computer, I tipped it and sand poured out the back. This was common, as we had a lot of sand in Iraq. It collected like super-aggressive dust everywhere and we had to clean our offices at least weekly to keep it at bay. Soldiers rarely cleaned their offices, so there was always a layer of sand on everything. I told them I was going to grab a can of compressed air from my truck, so I could blow out all the sand and then see if there was anything else broken within the computer.

The shack was next to a larger building that had a parking lot in front of it. I had parked in the lot and was rummaging around in the bed of the truck for a can of compressed air…

…The next thing I know, I’m lying on my back on the pavement, staring at the blue sky. I’m thinking how beautiful and peaceful the sky looks, but I feel like something’s off. I’m trying to remember why I’m lying there, staring at the sky.

I tried to get up, but my whole body ached, like I had spent an entire day in the gym, beating up every muscle group. It was a struggle, but I eventually managed to sit up. My hearing suddenly came back to me and I heard a commotion going on in the direction of the shack. I struggled to stand up, using the tailgate of my truck, and I walked around the corner of the larger building to see what’s going on.

There was a small crater in the ground, next to the shack. One wall and its section of roof was almost completely blown off. A mortar had landed, just outside the shack. A bunch of people were scrambling around the wreckage.

I did a spot-check of myself and despite being full-body sore, I didn’t have any holes anywhere. No blood, I could move all my limbs and digits. Somehow, I seemed okay. I must have been hit by the shock wave from the impact while around the corner from the shack. Which was lucky, as this particular mortar seemed to have scattered little molten balls of metal everywhere when it exploded.

Emergency crews arrived and they started excavating the ruins of the shack. Two of the soldiers had died instantly; the third was rushed to the hospital with limbs barely attached. He died a few hours later on the operating table. If I had been responsible and brought all my tools inside; if I didn’t have to go back to my truck to grab supplies for the job, I would’ve been in that shack with those guys. That was the closest I ever came to dying.

Since I didn’t appear to be injured, I just went back to work. No sense in me being in the way of everyone else. But little did I know that I had suffered a mild concussion. I was kind of dazed for about a week, just staring blankly at my computer screen. I eventually snapped out of it and continued on with my life. Never went to the hospital about it because it never occured to me while I was dazed, and when I snapped out of it, I felt like I was all better anyway and there was no reason to be examined. I was young and dumb.

At the time of the incident, you could only earn a Purple Heart medal by being injured while in direct combat with OpFor (opposing forces; a.k.a the enemy). So I didn’t qualify, as they had just launched a random mortar at our base and I was unlucky enough to be in its vicinity when it blew up. I was a victim of circumstance, not in an actual battle.

A few years later, they expanded the award to cover any injury sustained indirectly from OpFor’s actions. Also, they included mental injuries. Used to be, only physical damage counted, but PTSD was starting to become more commonly recognized, so mental injuries became a qualifier for the Purple Heart. So I qualified for it, but when I applied, I realized I had no evidence of my injuries from OpFor specifically, because I never went to the hospital afterward. I went to get checked out, but the hospital said I had no residual trace of mental damage that they could see. Brain scans looked fine. So I never earned the Purple Heart, even though I technically qualified for it.

My parents sent me to Jesus camp when I was in high school. This particular camp was one where kids would go on week long excursions. I didn’t jive with the jesus stuff, but a week of camping and swimming in lakes was great.

This particular year I did a week of biking and climbing. We practiced at the rock wall and got our bearings and we were signed off by some climbing instructor. We then went on the road. Six days later, we arrived at the rock face we were to climb. We started at the top, dropped our gear, then half of us hiked down and our belays hung out on top to help us back up.

I did my climb. It was uneventful but fun. Then it was my turn to belay.

We did everything with just climbing ropes and carabiners. No additional equipment. We were to tie off onto a tree or boulder on the summit and make a particular kind of loop around ourselves that wouldn’t allow it to constrict and hurt us if we were hauling the person below up the face. Nbd I get it all set up and we move on.

Well, my climbing buddy was picked randomly and it was the fat girl with homesickness. She finally stopped moaning and decided to give it a shot. I was happy for her and got ready. She hiked down and got herself ready.

“On belay!” I check my stuff, see it’s good “Belay on!”

She starts climbing. But she couldn’t get past the first major rock and she decided to quit. Oh well.

Then I turned around and found my support rope wasn’t tied around the tree and I would’ve been yanked off of a 60 foot rock face the first time she slipped.

got a meningitis once. My mother is a doctor, so when I told her that my cheek felt weird, she had me do all sorts of weird movements with my face, then discovered that half of it was starting to get paralyzed and told the whole family (we were sitting in an italian restaurant) “The boy’s got a facial paralysis. Let’s all eat up so we can go to the hospital”. Since we did not really wait until the symptoms got any worse (what most people probably would have done since no normal person would have spotted the paralysis that early), I was “only” disabled with several neurological issues for about a month. Had I been to the hospital later… well… chances wouldn’t have been great.

15 year old me tried to drink a bottle of gin (because I tought it would make me even more cool). Woke up in the hospital the next day, was asked if it was an attempted suicide. I didn’t even know you could die from alcohol poisoning. One year later I crashed my friends car upside down into a canal (back then the minimum age where you learnt to drive was 18 years old in my country). I did some pretty dumb things as a kid.

For me it was while hiking. It got dark but I wanted to find some nice camping spot so just kept walking. At one point the path got really narrow and pitch black on both sides but I never saw anything remotely dangerous in those mountains so I just kept walking. After some time it got a bit more vertical but I still couldn’t see anything dangerous so I just kept traversing it. Then one hold broke off and I fell backwards, landed on a small ledge half a meter lower and just stopped. I decided it’s getting silly so I just found small flat surface and slept there. In the morning I saw were I was and the slope where I almost fell had like 50 meters and was almost vertical. I really don’t know but I think if I didn’t stick the first small fall I wouldn’t be able to stop until the very bottom. 50 m rolling down a rocky hill, alone, in the middle of no where. Yeah, I would probably be dead. So it was couple centimeters really.

Later I learned that this spot is pretty well known: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zGhS3-KVuo

When I was a kid, my family took a tour bus of many sights. I think this was near Stonehenge though it’s all kind of blurred together into so many various monuments and settlements.

The bus stopped for people to get out and stretch their legs but gave us just 5 min. I desperately, desperately needed to piss. I was like seconds away from wetting myself so I gladly took the opportunity to go pee.

It was open ground everywhere, the tourists from the bus were all around and I didn’t want to pee in front of everyone. There was a field nearby of tallish grass just about up to my waist. I thought that might offer some privacy but as I walked in I realised it was still pretty public so I began running further in since my bladder was about to explode. I ran and ran and ran until I decided it was enough and came to a sudden halt.

I looked down as I prepared to unzip and saw that the spot I’d randomly chosen to stop running was one footstep away from a deep, open concrete shaft full of some kind of agricultural slurry at the bottom. Completely impossible to see through the grass, no signage and no protective grating, no obvious way to have climbed out. At the distance I was from the tour group no one would have heard me yelling for help.

After recognising how close this stupid shaft had come to claiming my life, I duly pissed in it. The tour group were already getting in the bus after barely 3 min had passed and I had to run back. I couldn’t quite accurately describe what had happened or how close things had come so no one seemed that perturbed by my dice with death in a pit of slurry.

Probably five or six years ago when I was around 20 I went with my Uncle and his family to the beach. After we were finished and the sun began to go down, we washed off in our swimsuits in the outdoor showers.

Nearby they had some benches to sit on that were made out of the same concrete as the ground, smoothly sloping up out of it to form each bench. I was walking across one of these waiting for the rest of the family to finish rinsing off, and extremely stupidly walked down the end, down the slope, which, of course, was completely slick wet from being near the showers.

As soon as my first foot touches the slope, I slip backwards, with just enough time before impact to think “I really fucked up, this might not be good at all…”

The back of my head impacted the concrete slope of the bench, and it hurt like a mother fucker, but I didn’t lose consciousness or awareness. After gripping my head and cursing for a few seconds my Uncle arrived at me and found my head to be bleeding, but the cut was not so wide as to need stitches.

We returned to his house nearby and after my head clotted up, i realized I needed to drive myself home, 40 minutes away on the freeway, and I felt… a bit dazed after the impact. I didn’t feel sleepy at all, and after waiting for about half an hour, I decided I had to go home. I felt a little foggy until the next day, or maybe I’m just that foggy now and Im used to it.

There’s a scar where hair doesn’t grow, and sometimes I wonder if my universe forked to keep me alive somehow and I was supposed to just die instead, because it was entirely created by my idiocy and if seems silly I got that lucky. Sometimes I have dreams still where I’ll slip on something and relive the sequence of slipping, accepting the imminent possibility of death, and everything sort of slows down increasingly until I fade to white and wake up.

In 2018, I had an infection and I basically couldn’t eat or drink almost anything without throwing up, even a sip od water would make me sick for hours. The antibiotics made it even worse.

I lost over 15kg in 2 weeks, I legit thought I was going to die. It took almost 2 years before I could eat normally again.

Broken neck and back riding a bicycle (roadie/amateur racer) into two SUVs that were crashing in front of me. I took a 30mph hit directly to my head with nearly the entire force of my body into my forehead. As a reference, at sea level, a person diving from a ten story building would have a similar velocity hitting the ground head first. I was told I only survived because I was initially unconscious for 3 hours as the damage to C1 and the base of my skull would have been fatal if I had moved substantially before the swelling had time to build pressure.

I hit a deer while riding my motorcycle. I saw it crossing the road from my left, tried to evade it, heard the bang of my fairing hit it, and next thing I knew I was lying on my back looking up at the sky. I ended up with a shattered collarbone, broken ribs, and some road rash on my left side. I have absolutely no memory of falling or sliding at all (and I’m okay with that).

The most likely explanation for why I survived was that I was only going 30 mph (50 kph). That same day another rider wasn’t so lucky. There was a husband and wife in one of the cars behind me that were both EMTs and I got experienced care right away. Plus, I was wearing boots, gloves, a leather jacket, and a full-face helmet. The road rash was from my jeans wearing through during the slide.

Had the opportunity to fly in a small vintage airplane (not sure what kind). It was awesome but the following day we got information that the next flight crashed and all passengers died.

On April Fools Day 2006, I woke up to what I later found out was a spontaneously collapsed lung.

Anyone who’s experienced a collapsed lung can assure you the treatment is brutal. They basically cut open your chest between two of your ribs (on the affected side), insert a tube and sew it in place, then apply a light vacuum on that tube to suck out the air and fluid between your chest cavity and lung, causing your lung to re-inflate. You also go through a powerful round of antibiotics and are put on oxygen to make up for your 50% reduced lung function. The suction process takes about a week, and the pain is excruciating and immune to powerful pain killers.

I would have died from this without the emergency surgery and treatment, and if it had been just 60 years earlier, a collapsed lung would have been a death sentence.

My brother tore down old grain elevators when I was young. Where the trucks dump there is a pit about 15 feet deep with augers at the bottom. I was about 14 helping him and we had the grates off the pit. My brother had an older partner who happened to be on site that day. Anyhow I had my back turn to the pit and stupidly was stepping back to look at something. I had just placed my foot over the empty air when my brother’s partner grabbed me. I wasn’t even falling yet.

Anyhow at the moment I didn’t even think about it. Was bit dangerous work overall. We worked with dynamite and heavy equipment after all. Was not till a few days later I woke at night in a start and just realized how close I came to being dead or at best in a wheel chair.

This was about 30 years past. I had only in my life meet his partner maybe 4 times but he happened to be on site that day. I had never told anyone this story as it was a non event at the time but I thought about it lots. My brother had informed me few years back that he had died. Natural causes. Certainly brought back that day and fully explained to my brother how he had literally saved my life.

Ernie if you are reading this, I do not know how to thank you enough. Wish I had mentioned it to my brother while you were still alive as I am sure he would have brought it up in polite conversation.

What’s the closest you have ever been to actually dying?

There are a few stories. Since we are in public I’ll pick one that won’t freak out onlookers.

tldr

I was drawn down on by two soldiers from my own unit because I was unexpectedly left alone in a place where single actors were not allowed. Cold War stuff.

full version

I was working with a [redacted] which had a 2m “dead man zone” around it in this context, demarcated by a paint stripe. SOP was for the guards¹ to shoot anyone who entered the zone solo; the assumption being someone would only do that for sabotage.

When maintenance or other operations were required, we would

• team up with another person of equal knowledge of the operation
• coordinate to enter the zone simultaneously
• perform the operation. maintaining line of sight with them and their hands
• coordinate to exit simultaneously

I got assigned to do some maint with a squadmate who was both highly intelligent and also a fscking idiot. We entered together, started the task, and then he unexpectedly walked out.² I snapped my head around and saw him passing over the line. The idiot had left me alone in the Dead Man Zone and things were turning to shit. The guards chambered rounds and were yelling at me to get away from the [redacted].

I’d already put my arms up and had started backpedaling out. I don’t remember the immediate aftermath clearly because my stressmeter was pegged at aneurysm / this isn’t happening. Through some miracle I did not download into my drawers.

I never saw him working in the Zone again so I suppose he was blacklisted from that duty. And no one else ever got left alone in there AFAIK.

¹ our unit were also providing the guard rotation; no one else had the clearance required to be that close to the [redacted]. So the guards in this story were my buddies and were abso-fscking-lutely willing to shoot. We all were; it was part of the job. We did have infantry support on the outer perimeter but they were so far outside the razorwire fences we never saw them working. Perhaps it was just as well; they told us they hated us every chance they got. They thought we were [insert homophobic slur here] and [insert MOS-specific slur here] because we rarely carried rifles and did not engage in recreational fistfighting. But we were grateful for their protection, however begrudgingly provided.

² IIRC he walked out to get a torque wrench or similar