“What’s A Time Where Trusting Your Gut Quite Literally Saved Your Life?”: 30 People Share

I realized in my 39th week of pregnancy that my baby hadn't been moving as much for the past 36 hours. I decided it was best to make sure everything was all right, so we went to the ER. Turns out I was having preeclampsia, and he had the umbilical cord around his neck and was swimming in meconium. They put me on magnesium sulfate to bring my blood pressure down, and they gave me an emergency C-section. I and my son needed a few days to recover, but we're alive and well now. If I had decided to keep waiting and seeing, both of us might be dead.

I started showing symptoms of having problems. Serious health problems; passing out, seizures etc. Went to a neurologist who sent me to one single MRI and deemed the mass in my brain to be 'nothing'.

My gut told me to not trust it. So I went to my doctor and asked for a second opinion, got sent to a neurosurgeon who put me through a bunch of tests and procedures. I just found out a couple days ago that not only is it a brain tumour, but it's turning into something dangerous. It has the same mutation cells found only in cancer cells and in the big brain cancer that has a low survival rate. I don't know if my gut feeling saved my life because I could very well die from this in the end, but my gut feeling has given me a chance.

Not my gut feeling but my ex-girlfriends.

Years ago I was in between houses. Had a new place lined up but it wasn't ready for about 6 weeks. My little sister lives in the area so I decided to crash on her couch for the time.

My ex and I have been broken up for about 6 months at this point. Decently amicable breakup; We were still in the same friend group and got along. Then one night she calls me up crying saying she just has a feeling something bad is going to happen and will I please come spend the night with her. So at like midnight on a weekday I get in my car drive over calm her down and spend the night. No sexy times were had; We fell asleep watching The princess Bride

The next morning I drive back over to my little sister's house and find the're cops all up and down the street. Some idiot had gone cruising randomly shooting at people's houses. My sister was fine; her room was in the back of the house. But the couch I stayed on backed up against the front wall right next to the front door.

Sure enough, there were three bullet holes in the couch. Knowing how I like to sleep I think all three of them would have hit me.

A few years ago I had a (rare) day off work and decided to get some Christmas shopping done. It was late November and the mall near me was having some really good sales. But as I was driving there I started having this weird anxious feeling. Like the closer I got the more anxious and uneasy I felt. So instead of going right to the mall I stopped at Dunkin Donuts for a drink and snack. I couldn’t shake the anxiety so I sat in the parking lot for a bit while I ate and drank. I opened up the news on my phone and the first thing that pops up is a shooting at the mall I was headed to. Obviously I went straight home. Did all of my Christmas shopping online that year.

When I was 10, I was walking to my friends house. A van stopped me to ask for directions to the park. A man was driving and a woman was passenger and she's the one who spoke to me. We had been taught in school (and by my parents) that adults should never ask kids for directions. In school, they told us if anyone ever stops you, take a giant step back before running away (so they can't grab you). So I take a step back and tell them I don't know where the park is. The lady said "I can't hear you, come closer" and I knew in my gut something was wrong. Out of fear, I almost listened to her but then the sliding door on the van started to open and I took off running faster than I've ever ran in my life. Ran all the way to my friends house.
I told her parents everything and they called my parents and the police. The police came to her house and talked to me and said that 2 other kids in our neighbourhood reported the same van stopping and trying to talk to them.
It was weird because before the van even stopped beside me, I had this sick feeling in my gut. As soon as it started rolling down the street, I knew something bad was about to happen. It was a couple of months before I had the guts to walk to my friends house again.

When Ted Bundy asked me & my gal pal in 1975 to help him get his VW out of a ditch about mile down the road.
Seriously! He was early 30ish. This was at a rural county fair in WA State when we’re both 15-16 years old. It made no sense a well-dressed man of that age would ask young girls when male police officers & guys older than us were all over. We didn’t know who he was then. But that made no sense —so we told him to get lost & went to tell a police officer this guy was asking this of us of teenagers.

I later discovered who he was when at 21, I went to work for the same county’s Sheriff’s Dept & Bundy’s picture was posted everywhere. By then, they also know he tracked a local Nurse from the UW to her home town where this fair was located. Not a single doubt in my mind it was him! I see that clear as day every day in my mind’s eye memory.
I’m 64. I can only tell you, predators are everywhere! You must pay attention! Watch Dateline if you think it’s rare. It’s not. It’s an endemic! Pay f*****g attention young ones!
-signed Mim!

One time I was hiking after a storm and my intuition told me to freeze. I listened and a large tree just fell down across the trail in front of me, right where I would have been if I didn't stop.

Well, not my life, but my husband's. It was after a long day about an hour from home Halloween night. It was late when we finally got home, I was exhausted, fell asleep immediately, a few hours later, my husband woke me up, having intense stomach pain. I ruled out food poisoning because we had eaten the same thing that day, so I took him to the hospital because I knew him, this wasn't something simple. We sat in ER for hours, the just kept us waiting. I kept going up to the desk and said please. My husband us doubled over in intense pain! Finally they took him back, ran tests, including ct scan. Found nothing said we should go home until it "passes" . I said NO! SOMETHING IS DESPERATELY WRONG! They rolled their eyes, I said call his primary, he knows my husband us not an alarmist. My husband's primary ordered a surgeon to go in and see the problem. They took him in, came out and said his gall bladder was gangrenous and it would have burst and he would have died from sepsis. The surgeon clamped it off and removed it, said he would not have seen the morning had I not insisted something be done. Needless to say, I scratched that hospital off my list to EVER step foot in again.

I had a sense something was wrong in my house but no reason why. I went around looking but couldn’t find anything wrong or anyone in there. Felt so freaked I stayed at a friends place. Ended up being a carbon monoxide leak—could’ve saved my life.

I was casually walking home and then a drop of water fell on my head.

My first thought was “Is it raining?”

And my gut was all like, “Run.”

So, naturally, I ran, and a whole f*****g air conditioner crashed down at the exact spot where I was standing.

Back in 2012 I was living in Spain with my best friend whilst we studied spanish.
One evening, we were feeling sluggish and a bit off after eating dinner. We barely made it through half a movie before we looked at each other and discussed wether we were becoming sick, and should just call it an early evening and head to bed.
We quickly got ready for bed, feeling sickish, and I was turning off the lights in the living room when I had a lightbulb moment of checking out the gas, but we were using a gas stove where you had to turn the gas thingy on and off upon using the stove itself (we never use this in our home country so we were just getting used to it). Turns out the gas was still on after we turned the stove off after cooking, and it was leaking gas into the small appartment we lived in, the entire evening.
If we would have gone to sleep, we would have never woken up again.

I almost drove through a big patch of tall grass on my dirt bike just for fun, but at the last second hit the brakes and turned around. Didn't know why. Next time I went there, turns out there's a 75 foot cliff over a river right behind it that I would have just flew off at top speed. Because of the scenery, you couldn't tell at all looking head on to it. I still don't know what made me stop back then.

Not my life but my brothers, when I was younger our family went to the local swimming hole and we were unpacking I was facing the tables while my little brother was by the edge, and he fell in he was about 2 so wasn’t very good at swimming I had feeling to turn around at that moment and saw my brother fall into the swimming hole I yelled for my parents and my dad dived I. And managed to save him. A couple of years later we were at the river and I saw a little girl stand on a large rock in the river and I had a feeling to jump into the river and I did, she slipped and started to go down stream and couldn’t get up, but because I jumped in when I did I managed to save her.

I was 9 at my brothers ultimate frisbee game where my dad was a coach of the team. (If this changes the story at all I was born a girl and since I was 9 at the time still presented and identified as a girl) I was with my dog and for context this was a large field with a fence around it so I was standing on the outside of the fence. My dog is a black lab and quite possibly the most friendly dog in the world like I have never even seen her growl so not a very good dog for protection. I was alone waiting for the game to start with my dog while the team was warming up on the field. A man comes up to me and starts petting my dog and asking me questions about me and her. He asked if my parents were here and I said my mom wasn’t but didn’t mention my dad was on the field. Since there were a lot of parents around watching their kids I didn’t think much of it and kept talking to him and answering the questions. He eventually asked if me and him could walk around the park for a bit while giving the excuse that he wanted to show me a good area for dogs. To a nine year old this was a perfectly reasonable explanation but something felt off about the man. He kept insisting that I follow him to a relatively secluded area of the park and I kept saying I wasn’t sure. He kept pushing harder and harder for me to follow him and I remembered my dad was on the field and told him I’d ask my dad. He got an oh s**t look on his face as I guess he hadn’t realized that my parents were here at all and so I went to my dad and my dad ran at him but couldn’t catch up. I stayed on the field for the rest of the game. A few months later I saw his mugshot on tv for kidnapping and murdering a child he abducted at that same park. So yeah I almost got kidnapped and would have almost certainly died if it weren’t for my weird gut feeling of something that wouldn’t normally set off alarms for me

Offshore fishing, wanted to jump in to cool off but felt something...off. Just then the shark fin surfaced, and a nice-sized great white circled the boat a couple times and disappeared.

To be fair, I'd probably be fine, but I was done with the water for a day.

My ex and I were snorkelling. We were on holidays and spent most days at the beach snorkelling without incident. But this day was different, we were snorkelling along a rocky area near a drop off. I had this horrible feeling that we were being watched and felt really uneasy. I signalled to my ex to surface and I told him I felt weird and we needed to go back to the beach. He protested because he was having fun, but I was adamant. Low and behold, we get to the beach and everyone is standing and pointing to the water. We look back to see a large bull shark coming close to the shore. Not long after a helicopter was seen tracking it down the coast. My ex never questioned my intuition again!

I was supposed to be going into a friends home (also a neighbor) daily when they were on vacation to put in their mail, etc. I just felt weird going in there for some reason, which was odd because I’ve spent tons of time in there. So I just put it off for a few days. On like the third day we caught someone moving stuff out of the front door in the middle of the night - turns out someone was watching the house, broke a back window and was squatting in the house. By the state of the house, I’d say he was in there as soon as they left. Local police rolled up and caught him in the front yard, as he ran from them he chucked a gun. Safe to say I was really glad I put off putting the mail on the counter.

I was working in the sales office at an engineering company. I was asked to record the serial numbers off a stack of large steel plates on the shop floor. I had to get someone with crane operating experience to lift the top plate so I could read the one underneath. The guy lifted it directly upwards about 6ft. I was just about to lean underneath the plate when a little voice inside my head said "don't do that mate, get him to move the overhead plate to one side". Just as I thought that, the clamp holding the plate failed and it fell to the ground, just in front of me. It must've weighed about a tonne. If it'd fallen on my head, I'd have been killed instantly.

I was in high school and visiting my grandparents. My grandmother had a standard transmission pickup truck she was driving at the time. She said something was wrong with it and told my grandfather to take it to get looked at. He drove it and said nothing was wrong but he was mostly deaf so I was elected to ride with him and listen to if there were any weird sounds there was a really loud sound from under the hood and it freaked me out. I got the feeling something bad was going to happen so I begged my grandfather not to drive the two last feet to the mechanic shop. He obliged and the mechanic came over and drove the truck the last little way. Just as he pulled into the parking lot something broke lose and flew up through the hood and into the passenger side of the truck seat right where I had been sitting no doubt it would have killed me if I had still been sitting there. According to the mechanic it was a 1 in a million occurrence

I had my gallbladder removed and it didn’t feel quite right afterwards. I was told that I was overreacting to normal pain at the hospital but was still uneasy and went to another afterwards against my surgeon’s recommendation (he also thought I was overreacting.) I ended up having an extra bile duct that wasn’t closed and was emptying into my abdomen. I was admitted for a while while they fixed it and then dealt with pancreatic issues that popped up from the damage.