Near Traumatic Experiences

I was talking to my friend about this today at work, about things that could have gone horribly wrong, resulting in serious injury or death to yourself or someone else.

When I was 10 years old, I shot a BB gun at a plastic Dr. Pepper bottle and it (The BB) bounced off the hard plastic at the bottom and hit less than an inch below my eye. Had I been shorter, I would be blind in my right eye.

I came within a foot of hitting an old man with my car when I was 16. Had I hit him, I probably would have killed him (was going about 40 MPH).

Hopefully someone can beat my lame stories.

Edited by PaiNTbALLfReNzY - 29 October 2008 at 3:22pm

At least humor us with the story Benji

One of the many times my car has gone sideways around a corner or pretty much any time I was in a car with a friend driving.

I was almost kidnapped when I was younger, too. Some guy parked outside my house when I was outside playing and sped off when he saw my dad. I coulda been raped.

Nevermind, it was traumatic.

 

Edited by oldpbnoob - 29 October 2008 at 3:53pm

One time I ran across the Eisenhower in Chicago, jumped the fence onto the El tracks, tripped and almost fell onto the third rail (the one with thousands of volts of electricity flowing through it). Needless to say, I would have been fried pretty fast.

If anyone is wondering why the hell I did it in the first place, I was drunk and didn't have money for the train, and my friends and I needed (yes, NEEDED) to get to this party at DePaul. We ended up not going because this other guy we were with who DID pay busted his head open trying to skateboard. He was already out-of-this-world drunk and was trying to board down the ramp to the platform and just faceplanted into the metal railing. There was a TON of blood on him and the platform, and it was there for a week they said.

Yeah, so, I almost got cooked.

Edit: I just re-read the title, and it's "Near Traumatic experiences." This wasn't really traumatizing at all, for anyone (except maybe for the person who found blood stains all over the ground...maybe)

Edited by Destruction - 29 October 2008 at 3:59pm

I had a friend bring a rifle to a reenactment once that he had hunted with and forgot to unload first. It went off during the safety inspection blasting a hole in the road right next to me. Had we not done the inspection, he could have killed someone rather easily.

As for myself, I was shooting .22s behind my grandmother's place one year, and a dumbass neighbor decided he didn't like that, so he came down to yell at me.....by cutting through the woods downrange. He came out of the woods yelling only a few yards from my target. He was stupid for crossing there, but it rattled the living hell out of me and I didn't shoot for a while.

I've had a few near death experiences, but nothing that really warrants a story.

Benjichang wrote: I've had a BB stuck in my leg since I was 17.

?

I unwittingly wandered on to a lake during a winter exercise quite a few years ago and broke through the ice.  (Even through the deep snow I should have felt the difference in the surface, but I was separated from the rest of my team and had "target lock" on an enemy squad that I had somehow managed to accidentally flank.) I was lucky as the water was only chest deep where I broke through; had I gone much farther out it would have been much deeper.  (Which probably would have been bad with the 50+ pounds of gear I had on.)  As it was, with the snow on top of the ice, I disappeared completely from view.  I couldn't get back up on top of the ice so I worked my way to the shore breaking the ice as I went with my M16.  It was the coldest I have ever been in my life and I ended up being transported for hospitalization. 

As I am a poor swimmer, the experience probably qualifies as fairly traumatic.  I never panicked or floundered around or anything; as soon as I broke through I threw my arms away from my body to hopefully catch the edges of the hole.  They did too; right about the same time my feet hit the bottom.  I do remember very clearly thinking "I'm screwed" as it happened though.

TheDude wrote: In a situation like that, you could scream like a girl all you want. You're holding an m16 in your hand, I don't think anyone would judge you.

I was too cold to scream,*  I could barely breathe.

Edited addition:  As a gee-whiz fact, my pulse rate upon arrival at the hospital was still above 200.  (212 if I remember correctly.)


*Not that I wouldn't have screamed like an 11 year old girl meeting her teen idol in person had I been capable of doing so.


Edited by Mack - 29 October 2008 at 5:16pm

Mack's story reminds me of another.

I was helping my dad on a house he was building. He was on the second floor and I was down on the first. I was lifting a really long 2x4 up to him, walking backwards as I did. I don't know what it was for, but there was a hole in the floorboards which exposed the foundation, and I stepped right into it. It was a good 10 foot fall at least, but luckily I threw my arms out without even really thinking and caught myself on the sides of the hole. Besides some nasty scrapes and a killer back ache from hitting the edge of the hole, I was fine.

Later that day he accidentally dropped a pry bar on my head from the second floor, and I got a nice goose egg on my noggin for a week.

Edited by Destruction - 29 October 2008 at 5:26pm