Hey Pandas, What Was Your Closest Brush With Death? (Closed)

When a crazy person set fire to our house, I thought I would never find my way to the back door through the smoke. Luckily nobody else was inside.

I was walking down a street when a guy with a dog came towards us. The man did some kind of sign and the pitbull attacked me. It bit my leg and didn't let go despite my many attempts to shake it off. My BorderCollie, Loki though was fighting really hard while the guy watched with a smile (don't know what was wrong with him, I think he trained the dog to attack people). Eventually Loki fought it off somehow and I could have died from loss of blood or something like that. I am so grateful to my dog

PS. Not all pitbull are bad, it's just that the owner was bad

Had a head-on collision with a lorry (not my fault - the lorry driver's). Genuinely thought 'I'm dead' as the front end of the lorry filled my windscreen seconds before impact.

My first pregnancy almost killed me. I had an unbelievable first and second trimester - no morning sickness, not too much fatigue, etc. Then the third trimester hit and suddenly my blood pressure went all wonky. It wasn't too bad, at first, until one day I started to get a headache that just wouldn't quit. Too make a long story short, by my thirtieth week it was through the roof, despite bp meds. I was put in a dark hospital room to prevent a seizure and hooked up to a magnesium drip that eventually caused my bp to plummet to almost nothing. I coded, they brought me back and immediately scheduled a c-section for two days later (I wasn't stable enough for anesthesia, or it would've happened that day). The morning of the scheduled c-section, I woke up to what I thought was a bad chest cold. It was actually the start of heart failure. Once again they stabilized me and my doctor had to strong-arm an OR from another doctor because I was scheduled for a later time. I actually heard a nurse questioning my chances. Amazingly, I woke up in the ICU and my son was, miracle of miracles, holding his tough little own in the NICU. He's fourteen now and despite a few hiccups early on, healthy and happy as a teenager can be.

I was 11 and had been taking swimming lessons at a nearby school, and then while swimming in a lake, I got tired and stopped swimming just as I would have done at the pool, and immediately began going under. If it hadn’t been for my cousin, I would have drowned.

I've faced death a few times. Here's the best one. I was 15 years old, riding my bike to meet up with my parents for a Father's Day lunch. Woke up days later in the hospital with half of my head shaved and a massive scar across the bare side.

My mother filled in the blanks for me later. A neighbour found me on the side of the road, called for an ambulance using his CB radio (this was the '70s), and my Mum pulled up soon afterwards. I was talking and looked fine. If he hadn't called for the ambulance, we would have gone about our day. And I'd have been dead before dessert!

Long story short, a doctor (who was there as a visiting trainer, he was knighted in India and the first doc in the world called when JFK was shot; not too shabby, eh?) didn't like the shaded area in the x-rays near the base of my brain. The other docs didn't think it was important. He did and wanted to shave my head and open me up to make sure.

Hours later, he emerged from the operating room with a teeny tiny smile on his face. "Glad we did that. Found a blood clot the size of a fried egg right near her brain. It was hours away from either killing her or putting her on life support for the rest of her life."

Speculation was a bump to the beano years ago had triggered the blood clot. No warning as I left the house on my bike ride, I just blacked out and hit the ground.

My Mum had a ball shaving the rest of my head at home. Luckily, she was the lead singer in a band with my Dad and had a bunch of wigs I could use for school. The kids loved my new look, lol!

They had to remove a bone to get to the clot, leaving the area above my ear tender and susceptible to damage. Went back one year later to see the doc. He proclaimed it the best work he'd ever done.

They put me under again to fill in the area with a metallic mesh. I got a lot of mileage out of telling people I had a metal plate in my head and they enjoyed asking if I made the metal detectors at the airport go off. Sadly, that never happened, but I'm still here some 40 years later, baby. God bless that doctor and CB radio!

Honestly? Although this may sound stupid... I was under a pool float that was hollow. This was an inflatable slide in the water, and there was air in the middle. I swam out from the part that had air, and the heavy float was on top of me. If I just swam forward, the friction from the slide was too much, and I barely moved. I was panicking, but I had enough brains to swim to the bottom of the pool, forward, and then up. I survived, but i am actually kind of scared of pools to this day.

Was on my home from work at night. Driving a divided highway, the kind where there's a good 300 feet of trees between each side. As I'm driving I see headlights coming towards me and they're swerving. I shouldn't be able to see headlights as it's summer, the trees that divide the highway block the headlights from the other side. Some drunk driver had somehow gotten into the exit ramp going the wrong way and was now driving against traffic. Fun times

Gee, there's been so many, my family says I have 9 lives. Here's one: New Year's Day 1996 I was driving to work during almost blizzard conditions. I was on a mountain pass and hit black ice. My car spun around 3 times, then left the road. I was soaring in the air for a bout 3 seconds, then I hit the ground, bumping down the steep hill (I was told it was a 40 foot drop), landing in the creek below. The car hit a large boulder on the opposite bank. Luckily the water was only 2 feet deep, so I was able to safely wade to the shore. When I got out of the car, 2 men were scrambling down the hill to help. When I walked away from the wreck, they couldn't believe it. They helped me up the hill, and there was a lady calling for help on her cell phone (not common then). I was okay, and I was even featured on the evening news. My husband taped it and I still have it on VHS. I was in bed with whole body pain for a week. I had a minor head injury and I still get headaches and have some cognitive/ short term memory issues. The car was totaled, but I wasn't.

After several days of horrific pain in the whole right side of my face (turned out to be trigeminal neuralgia - a neurological condition where the trigeminal nerve that controls your facial nerves constantly fires sending stabbing/electric pain so intense that you can't do things like eat, drink or even talk), so I went to the ER.
Once there, they tossed me in for a CAT scan and after ER doc said to me, "Soooo...we can't find anything on the scan that would be triggering this neuralgia...but we DID find something else & Neuro Surgery is coming down to talk to you about it."
Turns out they found an unruptured arteriovenous malformation (when one of the veins in your brain twist on itself causing it to balloon and eventually pop causing a stroke.)
A week later I had 14 hour brain surgery to have it removed. This is the part of the story where we all find out I'm a chemical lightweight & the anesthetics that were supposed to wear off a few hours after surgery...didn't. And then I was in a coma for 3 days.
Fortunately, as you may have guessed by now, I did wake up.
A long healing and rehab process later and I'm about 99.5% back to normal (the muscles in the left side of my forehead/eyebrow don't work, so I can't look surprised, I can only look skeptical

Bought a giant aviary and some cockatiels. Yay fun! Fell sick a few weeks later, then suddenly woke up in intensive care unit, preliminary diagnosis: lung failure by sepsis an pneumonia. Back home after 4 weeks, then gone again 3 weeks for rehab. Then finally my family doctor (NOT the hospital!) found out it was a "Bird fancier's lung", meaning I am severely allergic to my birds.

Once when I was in 2nd grade in february, one of my classmates fell into a frozen lake and the ice cracked.
i went in after him to save him and then the ice cracked too
my classmate died, but i survived

I have another story, about a Brush with Death. This one is less scary, but definitely closer to death. I was watching fireworks on the Fourth of July, and one of the fireworks fell over as it was going off. And it only missed me and the people I was sitting with by 10 feet. I actually though I was going to die at that moment.

I nearly died when my kidneys failed. I was 11 years old. I'd been sick for a year when the GP finally did a blood test. My parents had a phone call telling them to take me directly to the hospital where there was a team waiting for me. I had only 9% kidney function! My kidneys actually improved after then but only got up to about 30%. The last 2-3 years before I got a transplant was the fastest slow descent into death I've experienced. But I do have a transplant now so yay!

Additional: I've had sepsis twice, the first time they didn't give me a good percentage to live. The second time I felt so awful I knew what it was and got to the hospital in time so there was no damage to my internal organs. Little tip: If you have an infection and feel like crap but painkillers don't make you feel a better, at all, get to the hospital because it might be sepsis. They've been working on getting sepsis incidents down in the UK for a while now because it can maim and kill.

And there was the time I had pylonephritis for the first and hopefully last time in my life. It nearly killed me because my kidneys were so poorly already. I was in hospital for a week and it was freaking paaainful.

At this point it's ChimeraBubbles 3, Death nil.

I went water tubing with my fam, was overconfident, sat on the edge of the tube with no lifejacket, fell backwards into the water, and after like 5 seconds swam up. And wouldnt let go of a stick.
My dad was sleeping.
I also choked on a candy ball. I legit could not breathe, and I had to shake my mom to get her to notice. It was funny tho, cuz the waiter was just staring at me with his mouth open. We were in a restraunt

Almost shark attack! Years ago my husband and I went to the beach with a married couple we were friends with. The beach was New Smyrna Beach in Florida, which has unofficially been dubbed "Shark bite capital of the world". (We didn't know this at the time) So my friend and I went swimming while our husbands stayed behind on the beach. We went so far out into the water that we could just barely touch the bottom. We just stayed there treading water and chatting. Playing in the waves that kept coming. Well, a big wave came and it separated us a little bit. I suddenly saw a huge dark shadow right by my head and I felt something brush my shoulder. It gave me chills but I just assumed it was the wave or some seaweed and I brushed it off. Well, I turned around to find my friend but I noticed on shore our husbands were waving for us and shouting something. I couldn't hear what they were saying so I swam back to shore...my friend was doing the same. When we got back to our husbands, they told us a huge shark was literally in arms reach of us. They saw it clear as day in that huge wave. I have never been in the ocean since

This isn't exactly a brush with death. But it was definitely terrifying, and something could have gone very, very wrong. So me and my friend had decided to go on a night walk. And we walked up to a park near her house, and were then walking back. And that was when this car drove past us super slowly with all of the windows down. We thought it was a little creepy and decided to cross the street to be by the houses. That was when the car drove past us again, so we ran into a bush until we thought it had gone. We assumed it had made a wrong turn and their was nothing that could go wrong, but were still a little on edge. But anyways, we started walking down the street again, when the car drove past us again. At which point we deducted that it was following us. So we sprinted down the street into this person's yard who was outside working on his porch. And we just stood their in shock until we saw the car drive off. And then we told the person what happened, and he was very kind about it and offered to escort us home. So that is my terrifying experience.

Sitting at a stoplight in a little Chevy Vega with my oldest son, who was about 10 or so at the time, waiting for it to change. I hesitated when it went green because he dropped something and a fucking huge ass dump truck barreled through a red stoplight on the cross street, didn't even slow down, going at least 40-45 miles per hour. I had to sit through a couple of light changes before I could go.

Fell asleep at the wheel. Hit a guard rail on an open bridge. I was very lucky that it woke me and I didn't plunge into the water. Heed my warning: DO NOT DRIVE WHEN YOU ARE SLEEPY/DROWSY. You will NOT realize that your brain just shuts off. It's treacherous.

I am 8 years old. On a small wooden boat upon the Ohio River. Took a perfect #10 dive off the side into the muddy water. Must have thought a person learned to swim when hitting the water as I certainly did not know how to swim beforehand. Thankfully, my father pulled me out of the water by my ponytail. Never did learn to swim.