QotD: Death
Posted June 30th, 2005 @ 03:12pm by Erik J. Barzeski
Question: What's the nearest you've ever come to your own death?
My Answer: I've never tried to kill myself, so that rules that out. I've been in one car accident, but the guy who was driving avoided the oncoming car well enough that nobody was hurt at all. I once fell through some ice, but only up to my armpits. I split my head wide open when I was 6, but 18 (very big) stitches later I was fine. I've never been in a natural disaster… I can't say that I've ever been very close to death. If I had to choose, I'd go with the car accident, because if Matt hadn't steered hard to the left, the car would have smacked directly into my side of the truck.
You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.
Donate Life
Posted 01 Jul 2005 at 4:57pm #
I've almost met my end via rattlesnakes. Several times in my life, I've almost stepped on the things (while being hundreds of yards away from any medical help or phones) . They never bit me, though, so I have great respect for the creatures.
Posted 01 Jul 2005 at 5:05pm #
Answering Erik’s QOTD
Here are two moments that came pretty close to my demise.
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Posted 01 Jul 2005 at 5:14pm #
I once rode my motorcycle from Brawdy, Wales to Stuttgart, Germany all in once shot. It 18 hours on the bike, with a break on the Dover Ferry.
At the tail end of the trip, I was on the AUTOBAHN, doing 80 mph or so, and the road "hypnotized" me and I momentarily feel asleep on the bike.
A Mercedes Benz that I was drifting into honked it's horn, which woke me up. Had it not been there, I would have been a 300 foot smudge on the autobahn.
I stopped at the next gasthaus, got some coffee and had to sit a bit to calm the nerves.
(Why did I do it all on one-shot? I wanted to see a girl... of course)
Posted 01 Jul 2005 at 5:38pm #
Girls are way worth it, dude.
Yesterday I walked into traffic. They put a new light up on my street, and I totally forgot about it. After being almost-hit like, ten times, I got to the other side and wondered why nobody stopped at the sign like usual, and then remembered the light and felt like an ass.
Aw well. Nobody lives forever.
Posted 01 Jul 2005 at 7:13pm #
When I was 9 my family went camping. My cousin and I were playing tag or somesuch in the campsite and, while running away, I tripped a few feet away from the metal ring around the firepit. My head landed 3-4" away from the inside of the ring, which surely would've knocked me unconscious had I hit it. There was a hearty fire blazing at the time.Early in high school, I was trying to catch up with some friends while walking to a concert in downtown Dallas. In my haste, I neglected to look both ways before crossing a light rail line... of course there was an electric (nearly silent) train ~10 feet away.While jogging two summers ago, I blacked out, collapsed, and woke up in an ambulance. After a couple of days of testing, the docs found that I had a congenital malformed coronary artery. I probably had a greater likelihood of dying than living that night.
Posted 01 Jul 2005 at 8:42pm #
This past (nasty) winter I was driving home from work, on slushy, snowy, icy roads, doing about 15 in a 35. It was a Saturday, and I was in downtown Cleveland, when a drunken idiot pulls out of a parking lot as I'm about 100 feet away. I can't stop the car because of all the snow, and I plow right into him. My car gets pushed into the other lane of traffic where they, luckily, were able to stop, because if they didn't that would've screwed me up somethin awful.
Posted 01 Jul 2005 at 11:47pm #
Blame NSLog() for this one
When I say it here, in reference to thebelow incident, I mean that for probably the longest 45 seconds of my life,I truly believed that I was about to check out.I was at *funeral* of all places, sitting in the corner with the morbidpeople, drinking som...
Posted 01 Jul 2005 at 11:48pm #
Here's my story. It's a little long for comments I think...