Near Death Experiences/Near Death Inexperiences

So, Y Kers, got any stories where you almost died? or did die? could have died would apply as well here. If you are actually dead, share how that's like too, although I would recommend getting as far away from the computer as possible and seek out medical attention if that's the case.

Ever see anything on the other side? things/feelings you can't explain? You can also describe the lack of awareness and loss of time too if nothing happened, but that's boring.

Hoo.

Well, there have been a few times I was damned sure I was gone; scuba-diving accidents, really hairy landings in horrific weather, hypothermia, sickness and a couple incidents involving large numbers of angry people, with or without Jonesy-killing equipment to hand.

I remember a couple of times when I was physically in a really bad way, rather than perfectly healthy but about to slam into the ground at 75 knots. I never got as far as tunnels of light and harp music, but the first one... Well, what I do remember is lying on the ground and somebody shouting that I was down and to get help. I just lay there thinking how warm and comfy I was and how pretty the sky looked and how I wished people would stop dragging me about the place and let me go to sleep in the nice comfy place. Some bit of me that still had at least some marbles thought 'uh, oh...this isn't good' and I briefly worried about my family before suddenly 'knowing' that everything would be fine.

At which point I was stuffed into a sleeping bag and chucked in the back of a Landrover.

edited 5th Oct '14 1:51:20 PM by InverurieJones

I nearly died at birth if that counts. I even tried to take my mam out with me. We were both so messed up after birth that I'm still surprised to this day that she had the balls to have another kid

How the shell did that happen?

I don't know the exact circumstances were but it was a combination of tons of problems. I was the wrong way around in the womb, so I came out legs first which made my hip dislocate, I wasa born a few weeks early and was really underweight. My mother had Eclampsia (I think thats what its called) which meant that she starting having these seizure like things as I was being born and she lost a lot of blood. She actually couldn't see me for a day or two and started having panic attacks. She was closer the death than I was. I probably got a few facts wrong though, I've never really had a discussion about it with my her.

Eclampsia or pre-eclampsia? Nasty, either way.

edited 5th Oct '14 2:00:04 PM by InverurieJones

I'm terribly sorry to hear that. :(

No idea, sorry

Thanks, but don't worry about it! I'm fine now like! So is she!

Head on collision between me on my Raleigh racing push-bike, and an elderly couple in their silver Vauxhall (think GM) Cavalier hatchback. I had enough time to know that this was the last thing I was ever going to see before it hit me, and suddenly it wasn't. I never got over it, and I'm still living with the pain in the small of the back caused by plummeting off of the car after I had severely damaged IT and landing smack dab on my coccyx on the tarmac road.

I bounced back off and landed again heavily.

I've been told I nearly died when I was born, too. Umbilical cord around the neck, came out blue.

As far as being aware - I had a couple of close calls close together when I was working on a horse farm. Nothing mystical, I'm sad to say, just brushes.

The first was 2009. I'll tell you about that one.

I hate 2009. It is my nemesis. If that year were a person, it would be the arch-villain to my super-heroine. I swear, that year tried to kill me. My fiancee lost his job, the landlady at the place where we lived was not a compassionate person and kind of a slumlord and she decided kicking us out during the holidays wasn't bad karma because we were just a couple of worthless poor people. We scrambled to find a place we could afford to live in and finished moving into the place we're at now on Christmas Eve. One of the reasons why I don't like the holiday much - that year mocked us. There was so much stress for both of us I'm surprised that no heart attacks or suicides happened...

I'd just gotten a job as a stablehand and a few days after Christmas, I was working in the morning and had gone up with a bunch of the other people there to the hayloft to check out the fresh hay we'd gotten in and to be clear on what kinds of hay was stacked where, so I gave the right horses the right food. (Some horses needed rich diets for health reasons, others did not). Coming down the narrow stairwell from the hayloft...I was wearing my combat boots... a boot slipped on a step when I tried to close the door. The hayloft steps were located over the feed room, which had a floor of solid concrete.

There was also a broken cinder block someone had stored at the base of the stairs for the purposes of propping a door open.

As my foot slipped, I thought (all in a split-second, mind you, because the brain is amazing) "Can I recover? No, goin' down. BRACE! I could die slamming into that floor...image of myself with head cracked open, blood and brains everywhere. WHAT IF THERE'S NO HEAVEN AND IT REALLY IS JUST OBLIVION?! WHAT IF IT'S WORSE AND I SURVIVE AND AM RETARDED?! Oh, well, whatever happens, happens. I can't stop it now. Whatever happens, I must accept it." - and this weird gray feeling washed over me. It wasn't mystical, it was just this emotion of acceptance that I can only describe as "gray" even though I didn't actually see colors.

I bounced off the stairs, met the floor in excruciating pain, mostly in my right arm, but also in my head and back. My head had missed the cinder block BY A HAIR. I screamed until someone told me to stop screaming because I was spooking the horses, so I stuffed it down and made myself stop because I didn't want to panic the poor animals. After I got my bearings, I TRIED TO GET BACK UP to work, because work needed to be done and I thought I was fine, just bumped around. That's when I got screamed at to stay down because confessing to having my head hurt meant I had a head injury. Got a choice by my ambulance between two equidistant hospitals and chose the one nearest the new apartment. My fiancee and my boss met me there and we had to tone down our weirder and more morbid jokes because it was a Catholic hospital. My head was fine, I found out I can't pee laying down no matter how much I want to, and I had a hairline fracture in my right arm (radial neck. If you go to my Deviant Art page, you can find the painting I did of my X-ray).

Three days later, I went in to check out some pains in my side that were sending me to the floor. I debated with myself whether or not to go into Emergency, because I thought I was just a little banged up and was being a wimp and I had no insurance and my boss actually had to pay for the initial hospital visit out of her own pocket because, apparently, in the State of Pennsylvania, worker's compensation does not apply to agricultural workers. My guy convinced me, even though he also grumbled about money because he is a master of mixed messages sometimes... and it turned out to be a good thing I checked things out because I had apparently hit my kidney on a stair. It was failing and I had to spend three days on fluids getting sorted out. The one good thing about it, perhaps, is how my guy brougt my laptop in loaded with Firefly, which I'd been meaning to watch and I binged the series.

And, that, my friends and kiddos, is the story of "Why Shadsie does not like stairs."

I was about 7 or so. It was the town that my dad lived in at the time, and the town I live in now.

He was pulling off a side street onto the highway, but the way that the intersection is set up, you literally have to be on the train tracks if you're turning onto the highway. (Google Street View) His pickup was on the tracks, waiting for traffic on the highway to clear so he could turn onto it. And a train was coming. He couldn't back up, because another car was behind us. I was damn sure we were going to get hit by the train, but he managed to turn out onto the highway just in time.

Then when this happened only a few months later, I was literally terrified of trains for years. I think I was about 12 before I no longer felt scared hearing the train whistle go by every night, and this was when I lived a good two miles from the tracks!

I was maybe 13. So, 2 years ago. Long story long, my dad came home from a long day of work, we were at dinner, I somehow made him angry(he has a very short fuse. I think all I did was say "I don't want to talk about my day, I'll get upset."), he just pinned me down to the pew, started to slap me continuously and yell at me, calling me a filthy animal. I fought back, punching him in the stomach, for my own protection. My mom was crying and saying "Get off of her!" I got an adrenaline rush, and I was able to lift my dad off of me. I started to run out of the dining room, and my dad pulled me back in by my hair while holding his hand against my mouth and nose, cutting off all air supply for me. It was about 20 seconds before he let go. I scrambled out of the room only to have him chase after me. I got cornered in a matter of seconds and sunk down to the ground, in an effort to escape. My mom followed after him, yelling for us to stop. My dad's face was red and hot, and his breathing was heavy. My mom broke us up just before my dad was about to continue slapping me.

So yeah... That happened.

Wow. All I did was almost drown a couple times in St. Mary's Lake. I'm glad y'all are okay at least.

Holy shitsnacks. What happened afterwards???

I was just thinking about my most recent one: a little while ago a colleague and I got lost trying to pull out of a heavily smoke-logged building. The fire we'd been fighting had been too much for the hosereel we had with us and our air was running low, so when the fire rolled over (i.e. the smoke gathering in the ceiling caught fire) and the temperature at floor level went somewhere North of Gas Mark 5 we decided now was a good time for tea and biscuits. We closed the door on the fire compartment and left the hose there for the next team to follow. Unfortunately, we ourselves lost contact with it in the dark at some point and couldn't see anything to navigate by. It was only the sudden appearance of a familiar light fitting that made us realise we were actually very close to the door and stopped us turning around and heading deeper into the building.

I remember the heat starting to come through my gloves, my fingers were getting all stiff and puffy. I could feel the heat on my ears and the back of my head through the flash-hood, too. The thing that was really disturbing me, though, was that the temperature under my helmet was so high that I thought my hair was on fire.

I remember standing there in the dark, the other guy (who had been operating the branch, so had been between me and the direct radiated heat of the fire) starting to show signs of heat stress, our BA sets' low-pressure whistles sounding and thinking 'it's okay, the guys are right outside, they'll come and get us' before a voice in my head said 'Nice idea, but even you don't know where you are. How long will they take to find you? How long have you got? Get out of here or you're going to die.'

That was when we spotted the light fitting and realised we were about ten metres from the door, but round a corner.

By the time we got outside my gauge read empty, my whistle had stopped and my mask had collapsed onto my face. Some thoughtful individual brought over some buckets of water and I stuck my head in one.

...and that's what I think of whenever anyone says 'we get on like a house on fire'.

Back when I was 14 I slipped on some ice on the road and nearly got hit by a car.

Same here. The car, thankfully, had chained tires (and stopped). Would have been worse if those chained tires didn't help the traction.

Once had a car miss me by inches. Riding my bike home at dusk(I'll admit it wasn't a smart idea but I was like 14 at the time how else was I going to do it?) Coming up to an overpass of an expressway, this black sedan with no interior or exterior lights on comes off of the express way and immediately makes a right turn (neglecting the red light). I was crossing at this point, and this car hits my back tire and spun me onto a car in the middle lane. Luckily I caught myself and it was only a graze, but this car speeds off and neither me not the driver of the car I landed on, who, thankfully, was very sympathetic, caught the license plate. Had to walk my bike the rest of the way home becomes the tire wasn't straight.

Relevant.

When I was 2 years old my aunt ran me over with her car. I was in ICU for 3 weeks and almost died several times. This is my second memory. It's been 23 years and she's still an awful, awful person.

Pretty cool, Major Tom! Thanks!

The "fading awareness" part of it reminds me of studies I've read done on dreams. Some people think they "just don't dream," but science says that everybody does, but that not everybody has a good recall on their dreams and that we tend to forget most of what we dream most of the time.

I tend to dream vividly, sometimes lucidly and recall a few dreams I've had years after the fact. If this has any relation to the above, maybe dying is going to be really, really interesting for me.

I choked on some carrots a few weeks back. I don't think I was in any real danger, since I threw it all up before anybody had to Heimlich me, but it's still the first time I think I've ever really choked on something. Still hasn't slowed me down much in terms of how I eat.

It's odd, since I figured if I would choke on anything, it'd be corn. Every time I eat it, there's a bite or two in there where I feel like this.

I have almost been hit by a car?

There's a lot of that on this thread, isn't there? Don't you people have the Green Cross Code?

You know those travel bingo games with the little red sliding windows? The ones like this◊?

When my sister was a baby, she managed to pry one of the little red sliders out of one of those and swallow it. It got stuck in her windpipe, and mom was trying to get it out of her. Apparently what was happening was that it would rotate in her windpipe and allow her to breathe, then rotate again and choke her. My grandma was visiting at the time and she was yelling at my mom to call 911, but this was BFE in the early 90s, so we didn't have 911. We eventually called an ambulance, I think, and got it free.

A few months ago, my sister (who is now 21) bought another one of those travel bingo games just to see if she could pry the little red slider thingies out of it. She couldn't.

Almost drowned when I was a toddler, apparently I fell off a slide and cracked my skull open when I was a toddler (I still have the scar to this day), had some really bad infection here and there, and nearly worked (overexertion) myself to death.

edited 11th Oct '14 12:41:31 PM by Bleddyn