When I was about 12, we were at some relatives’ and all the cousins were in the pool. Several of my older cousins decided to shove me to the bottom of the 3 foot end and stand on me. Just as I was passing out they let me up. I surfaced, screaming obscenities. I got in trouble.

When I was about 19 we decided to cross a river on a train bridge. You can guess where this is going. Just as the oncoming train, horn blaring, brakes squealing, came abreast of us, I just stepped the edge of the bridge, about feet above the river, and it missed me.

A couple of years ago a friend of my daughter borrowed my truck. When I got it back he had left a candy bar in the cup holder, so I decided to eat it while I drove to the store. As I pulled into the lot, it jammed in my throat and I couldn’t breathe. I saw some people in the lot and decided to see if they’d give me the heimlich. I jumped out, and the impact cleared my throat. Those would-be lifesavers got to watch me puke up candy. 

Oh, and I was once hit by a speeding motorbike and then taken to hospital by ambulance with a neck brace. Never thought I was close to death though. My knee took the brunt, then my head hit the asphalt. The bike had to be towed away...

This is hard to top!

I worked as an electrician for about 15 years from the 70s to the 90s. Back around 1987 I was working with a small crew rewiring the 27th floor of Shell Centre in downtown Calgary. One day we were moving and reconnecting fluorescent fixtures, most commercial buildings lighting circuits are 3 phase 347 volt, although the circuit breaker for the fixture I was working on was off I was probably hit with the unbalanced load, anyway I was being electrocuted and I could not let go of the AC90 cable I was holding. I was 8 feet off the floor, my chest above the T-Bar ceiling and could not make a sound. I tried to yell but only made a "ack" sound, my muscles were constricting and could hear my elbows creaking seemingly on the verge of popping out of their sockets. The only way to get myself off the cable was to buckle my knees let myself drop to the concrete floor. Needless to say I was off work for a couple of days.

Just last night I was driving back from a restaurant along Hylan Boulevard in Staten Island, and a memory flashed by me that I was nearly killed in the same spot over 30 years ago. I was a new driver, and I used to like to take joyrides with friends. One night I was getting ready to head back to Brooklyn, and was on a side street approaching the Boulevard to make a left turn. I was creeping up into the intersection past the stop sign when one of the girls in the back seat screamed "LOOK OUT!". In the moment I didn't understand why she screamed, but I instinctively slammed on the brakes anyway. Good thing I did, because a garbage track sped by along the Boulevard, inches from the front of the car. What I didn't realize was that there was construction going on, and they turned the parking lane into an actual traffic lane. I have to think that I would not have survived a direct t-boned hit from a garbage truck like that had I kept going into the intersection.

Someone else commented about falling out of a moving vehicle, and I was reminded that the same thing happened to me when I was about 7 years old. We didn't have any money, and all my mom could afford were beat up cars. Well, this one was so beat up that the door hinge gave way while I was leaning on it (and this was the early 80s when people didn't take seatbelts seriously, so.....). Luckily my part of Brooklyn was relatively suburban, so there wasn't another car directly behind us when I hit the pavement at 25-30 MPH. I popped out so silently that it took my mom a few hundred feet to even realize that I had fallen out of the car, and she saw me splayed out on the road in her rear view mirror. She then u-turned to come get me. Maybe becuase I was relatively light, but I only had a few bumps and bruises.

The most recent was around 2018 in the middle of Lake George, NY. My now-wife and stepkids were on a motorboat being driven by a coworker friend of mine and he was dragging us on an inner tube in the middle of the lake. When it was my turn, I very stupidly listened to my friend when he said that I didn't really need a life vest. While pulling me on the tube he thought it would be funny to slam on the "brakes", causing the tube to pull underwater from the wake. I instinctively let go of the tube to prevent going under, but now I was completely untethered in the middle of the lake with no lifevest on. I'm not a great swimmer, and I can at least wade around and whatnot, but the fact that that portion of the lake is actually about 200 feet deep messed with my head, and I began to panic and flail about. I could have just gone on my back to float, but in my panic, I didn't think to do that. I was really starting to lose my stamina quickly from the flailing, but he turned the boat around and got the rope to me just in time. The thought did flash in my mind "great, they're all going to watch me drown".

Oh, and a more minor moment that felt like it belonged in STAND BY ME, at 15 my friend and I were walking along a trail in the park near his house during the the beginning of a thunderstorm. Well, a lightning bolt stuck the ground leterally about 3-4 feet away from us, so close that we heard the "ZZZZT" sound it made. We looked at each other and yelled "SHIT!!!" and ran back to his house.

In an alternate universe, we're all worm food...

Yeah, right!