What's the closest you've been to death?

Yay cancer!

I was about as close to dead as you can get. 13 years old, I was curry combing a horse I was breaking. He was getting pretty gentle and I was combing his tail when I reached for another stroke, not realizing his hair was caught in the curry comb. The last thing I remember is realizing I had jerked a wad of hair backwards out of his tail and seeing his haunches tightened up and hearing a loud WAP. I woke up in my dad's pickup with a huge horseshoe shaped knot dead centered on my chest. I peeked out of the window to see my dad beating the horse over the head with a grubbing hoe handle. He came over to me and kissed me (the only time I can remember this happening). He said for two or three minutes I lay there with no pulse, no breathing and my eyes rolled back in my head. He said he was afraid to do chest compressions because he thought my ribs where shattered so right as he went to try mouth to mouth I gasped and came back from the brink.

Another 8 inches higher and I would have caught it in the face.

Another 8 inches to the side and I wouldn't have this story to tell.

There were too many close calls in cars to even remember. Somehow though, I have never been in any kind of serious wreck.
 
My aunt's horse kicked my Dad in the forehead when they were young. Almost killed him. Never existing in the first place is about as close as I can get.

That and the stupid car stuff we did in high school. Fallen asleep on the interstate a couple of times.
 
I've had five prominent ones:

1. At about ten I had an anaphalactic reaction to a penicillin shot. Everything stopped. The doctor was fortunate to revive me.

2. At about fourteen I got trapped in a barn hallway feeding cows which freaked out and almost crushed me.

3. At fifteen I got my foot tangled in a rope which was also around a year old heifer's neck. She drug me almost a quarter mile at a speed faster than two men could run. I narrowly avoided rocks, farm machinery and some other things in the field. I had on coveralls and the grass was wet with dew which also saved me.

4. At thirty-four I fell on a ski run in Austria when I went out of bright sun into shadows and couldn't see. I was going fast, broke a shoulder and tore a rotator cuff. When I came to a stop and gained my sight after sliding a few hundred feet I was only about five feet from the edge of a cliff which was certain death.

5. At forty-five I fell down a double diamond ski run beginning at the top and ending at almost the bottom. It was about 1000 vertical feet (two lifts) and over a mile overall. Much of it was sliding head first at a high rate of speed (no helmet) and narrowly missing rocks. I broke my other shoulder and tore my other rotator cuff on that one.

You can add, of course, car mishaps like many have had.
 
I can echo the ocean stuff, and it's especially unpleasant for someone who can barely swim.

The sanctuary at my church has about a 45-foot ceiling, and going up there to mess around with lighting and stuff is always a little freaky when half of your body is hanging off a catwalk. However, there are some sections of the building that don't have catwalks above them, so you're left to perform a balancing act on wooden or steel beams. One of those areas is behind the stage, where we have 20-foot stained glass windows that are backlit with fluorescent lights. The chamber behind the windows is very narrow, only a couple of feet deep.

One day I had to go above there to work on something. When you get off the ladder, you have to pull yourself up a couple feet and then turn and there's about a three foot drop to the top of those chambers. I had never gone up there before, and it was pretty dark without work lights, so I looked over the ledge and saw what I thought was plywood decking to walk on. I grabbed the beams on either side and lowered myself down, and both of my feet went through the sheetrock I thought was plywood. The whole panel caved in.

My first thought was, "Oh great, I just punched a hole in the ceiling of the church." Fortunately, it was behind the windows, so no one would notice. Relieved of that concern, my second thought was, "If I let go with my hands, I'll fall 20 feet through a 2-foot-wide space." Fortunately, I was able to find footing on the 2x4s on the sides that the sheetrock was mounted on, and somehow climbed out. It wasn't until a couple hours later that it really hit me how bad that could've been. The fall may not have killed me, but I definitely would've broken a lot of bones.
 
Guiding in Winnie, Texas in 1989. I had just starting hunting for an outfitter who at the time was just starting his hunting operation, and having been bored and pissed off at my previous outfitter (a certain someone on the Bolivar Peninsula), I let the guy book me a hunt.

I go out the evening before to check out my set-up...it's a crawfish pond, about 200 dummies on the water, and a roost right across FM 1663. I was jacked.

I've got 3 hunters that morning....a grandfather, his son, and the son's son....3 generations of the same family. Cool, I thought. The old man was kind of feeble so I put him in the hole next to me so I could keep an eye on him and make sure he didn't hurt himself by slipping or whatever.

So we make small talk, etc. About 10 mins. until shooting time I go through "The Lecture"...."Do not shoot until I say so; if I hear a safety click prior to my saying take 'em I'm going to stand up and spook the birds; don't shoot over anyone's head, etc."

First crack out the box a huge ribbon of greenwing teal comes roaring through the ricefield headed right into the fakes. I tell my hunters that I'm going to shoot off to the side so the birds will go straight up (greenwing do it everytime it seems), and if they're patient they'll be able to pick 'em off one by one right over the blind.

In they come, I start to stand up and...

Flash/KA-BOOM!!!!

Next thing I know I look up and there's 6 eyes looking down at me, all of them had this look of horror. I shook off the webs, realized my ear was ringing irreparably, and start to take my hat off.

There's no bill. I'm talking no bill on the camp, and there are 3 little straight marks up the side of the dome right about where the temple was.

The old man had shot the bill of my hat off right where it joins the dome...and those 3 lines were made by the some of the shot. He missed blowing my head off by a fraction of an inch.

I didn't say a word other than my telling them to case up their guns. And I sat there and made them watch me kill 4 limits of ducks.

We get back to the camp, I go to the cleaning house and start picking the ducks, telling the other guides what happened, bitching about it, etc. Right about that time my outfitter shows up.

"Your hunters are raising all kinds of hell. What happened?"

So I told him exactly what happened, and exactly what I did. Keep in mind that he was just starting out and really needed the money.

He walked back over to the hunters and says "Get your **** and get the hell outta here. You're not welcome anymore if you're not going to follow our rules."

And I never hunted for another outfitter again. Stayed 9 years with the man, and he's still one of my best friends to this day.
 
Had an experience on a plane while working for a Big 12 football team in 2000 that scared me to death. I don't know how close I was, but I know how helpless I felt and had that same vision of my parents being told about my death. Later that same school year, the Oklahoma State tragedy occurred and really shook me up again.

I have no fear of flying, but I dread every Friday and Saturday night in the fall and still hope all those young men make it back safe.
 
You people scare me. I think I've been lucky. I've had one asthma attack in which I remember thinking "if I can't get this next breath, I'll wake up my wife", but I don't remember blacking out or anything. Another time I was on cruise control and got too close to a truck on the interstate, and when I hit his drag envelope, my car lurched forward towards his rear bumper, so I swerved off the highway and did a 30 foot Dukes of Hazzard jump, but the car didn't invert and I was fine (although shaken). Maybe I got lucky, but it didn't really feel "near death".
 
I've had a few scares, but my closest was when I was riding a motorcycle. I was hit by a car and thrown about 100 feet (her fault, small consolation). Lots of injuries, stopped breathing there for a while, had four surgeries, spent 7 weeks in the hospital. I don't ride anymore.
 
Summer between high school and college, I was playing tackle football with no pads. My teammate and I are both tackling this one guy, and my teammate decides to be a dumbass and leads with his head, which is illegal even when protected by helmets. This guy was actually going to play for a D2 school so out of everyone in the game he should have known. His forehead slammed into my head right above my ear and I was out cold. I don't even remember the hit - I was running to make the tackle and next thing I know I'm lying on the ground half-delirious with the most massive headache possibly imaginable. I had fractured my skull and there was bleeding in my ear. I easily could have died or ended up with permanent brain damage.

I also had a similar "swimming out to the second sand bar" experience as a couple of others here. I was in better shape than 2/3rd of the group I was with, but everyone was fine except me, partially because most of them were conserving energy by floating on their backs which I couldn't do, and partly b/c my swimming technique sucks and wastes tons of energy. I would have been fine just turning around and going back but I panicked and might have drowned in like 8 feet of water if my friend hadn't helped me. It was pretty embarrassing afterward.

In neither case though did I ever really get to stop and think about the possibility of my own death. In the first case I wasn't in danger of dying by the time the next day when I was finally coherent enough to spend time thinking about the fact that I might have died, and in the second case everything happened so fast. But just a couple of week ago 3 friends and I were stupid and spent the night camping in a cave when the forecast was 80% thunderstorms, and the exits were all near the bottom. So at like 5am our cave starts filling up with water and there's no sure way out. We were all standing together on a rock with the water swirling around us and just got to really think it over and dwell on the fact that we could be dead in just a few minutes. The really ironic thing is that the night before this, I had a conversation with a friend about how neither of us had ever really had to face our own mortality in any sort of profound way.
 
flaco...did you dad ******* beat the horse to death or somethng??
wtf.gif
 
No, he just taught him a lesson. Horse was fine and never kicked again. I never pulled any more tail hair either so I guess we both learned something that day.

I was kind of surprised he didn't kill him though. He is old school like that.
 
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