Having abrush with deathcauses a profound change in a person. It gives them an entirely new outlook on life, for better or worse. For those who lived to tell the tale, you can guarantee that their stories are nothing short of gripping, which may also make you ponder on your own mortality.These responses to a Reddit question are excellent examples. Someone posted ashort yet loadedquery: “How have you cheated death?” Replies came flooding in with personal accounts about early cancer detections, car accidents, and narrowly escaping septic shock.We’ve collected some of thebest storiesfor you. Make sure you have enough time to kill because you’ll likely be here for a while.This post may includeaffiliate links.
Having abrush with deathcauses a profound change in a person. It gives them an entirely new outlook on life, for better or worse. For those who lived to tell the tale, you can guarantee that their stories are nothing short of gripping, which may also make you ponder on your own mortality.
These responses to a Reddit question are excellent examples. Someone posted ashort yet loadedquery: “How have you cheated death?” Replies came flooding in with personal accounts about early cancer detections, car accidents, and narrowly escaping septic shock.
We’ve collected some of thebest storiesfor you. Make sure you have enough time to kill because you’ll likely be here for a while.
This post may includeaffiliate links.
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We were holidaying in the Lake District, I was only very young. I was on the top of a grassy hill and thought it’d be great to run down it really fast! My dumb a*s didn’t understand momentum and I could not stop I was running and running and running. I saw a little wire fence with old wooden posts and BOOM some guy leaped on me and bear hugged me and we stopped. My parents utterly panicked caught up and came rushing to me. My parents lost their s**t and I was just in like shock, came very very close to tumbling over a high cliff and turning into strawberry jam.Thank you stranger whoever and wherever the hell you are ❤️.
My mums cat saved my life. Was sleeping on my mums couch after a break up. The cat got sick and the vet determined it was carbon monoxide poisoning from the frontroom gas fireplace.
When I was still a fetus, my mother suffered a heavy injury to her stomach, causing the death of my twin, but I survived somehow.The doctors basically told her she must stay bedridden for the rest of the pregnancy or else she would lose me too. So my grandma got her a SNES, and she just played video games all day. I still have that SNES.
My bio father punched my mom in the stomach 9 weeks before I was due. A few days later she was feeling just “a little” off and called her doctor who told her to go to the hospital. It turns out the placenta had ruptured and the surgeon said we both would’ve died that day had she just decided to sleep it off instead. One very emergency C section later and we both made it, if not a little undercooked.
Remembered to put on my seat belt.Got into a bad car wreck. Survived with bumps and bruises.Seat belts save lives.
My high school school resource officers (SRO) stopped a school shooting with literally less than seconds to spare. I was walking past the kid as he was at his locker pulling the gun. I saw the student get tackled. If the SRO had not stopped the student I would likely have been first since we were the only students in that hallway.
I got in an accident with a drunk driver. Everyone that saw the car afterwards said the same thing, “how are you alive?".The roof where I was sitting was damn near touching the seat. I couldn’t have fit back in there if I tried.I got pretty f****d up, for sure… but thankfully I didn’t die.
Getting my bloods done regularly and the doctor says come back in 3 months PSA is high. I do as I’m told and it’s gone higher, biopsy shows that I have an aggressive form of cancer and I’m told if it’s not removed I’ll be dead within 5 years. That’s 9 years ago. No symptoms, nothing out of the ordinary. Get your bloods checked on a regular basis.
Congenital heart heart defect (WPW) completely unknown until 35 years old. I was playing board games with a small group- vision narrowed until I came to looking up at EMT’s. They had taken turns doing CPR for 14 minutes until medical arrived and shocked me 3x to bring me back. One surgery and defib install later and everything is pretty much normal with a cheap med. Had I been driving or at home alone that would have been it. Those 4 guys dont pay for beers ever when we go out. edit - Grammer* Grammar, and now spelling.
I was in a brutal car accident, my son was 5 at the time in the back seat.Our vehicle was hit 3 times like a ping pong ball during rush hour, pushed over 3 lanes into oncoming traffic. When we finally stopped, we had narrowly evaded being sandwiched between two transport trucks.My right arm was crushed and is now all titanium, but otherwise we made it out alive; my son without a scratch thanks to a properly installed car seat.Hours later I went into another portal hopped up on a cocktail of ketamine, morphine, etc. I am convinced I entered the edge of life/death as it was a surreal experience.
I had a screening for something else and my Doctor found very early stage cancer at age 34. It was removed painlessly and completely in an afternoon. It’s a cancer that usually affects people over 60 and doesn’t have symptoms until it’s too late. If I didn’t have this other screening, I likely would have died a painful death from it in 10ish years. When the doctor first called to give me the results he said it was divine intervention, and never gave me the results of the test I came in for.
In 2019, I had an ex boyfriend hire a hitman to kill me. He emptied his entire clip out on me and I was shot once behind my back & it punctured my lung. I was rushed to the ER, I was set on a table while the nurses and doctors tried to revive me. I remember at one point everything stopped hurting and I was just feeling really at peace & slowly drifting off. They kept putting warm blankets on me because my body was getting cold, but I wasn’t cold, my body was simply shutting down! When they realized that one of the doctors stabbed me with a giant needle and that s**t hurt so much. I started feeling all the pain from the shooting again. A couple more minutes and I would have been completely gone.
Had a friend who hit a puddle going 80 and lost control. He rolled his car 4 times. He crawled out of the car and called 911. Fire rescue arrived and pulled out the jaws of life. They didn’t believe that he had survived and escaped. He only had one visible bruise of his arm from it, so he declined treatment.A few months later he started exhibiting signs of schizophrenia. Within a year he was completely dissociated from reality. About 7 years later they did an MRI and found very old brain trauma. They suspect that the car accident caused a TBI, which triggered/created his schizophrenia.
Went in for bloody stool in my mid-20s. Turns out, it was just blood in the bowl from popping a hemorrhoid during pooping. Doc suggested a colonoscopy just to play it safe. Found a pre-cancerous polyp that would have 100% turned into cancer within the next few years. No way I would have gotten a colonoscopy in ever the next 10 years had that hemorrhoid not popped. I get a colonoscopy every three years now and will continue to do so for life. Saved my life. Could save yours. Get your colonoscopies, people.
I was riding a motorbike at 60mph (national speed limit road). An oncoming car overtook a car on a blind bend and forced me off the road. The moment my bike hit the grass, I decided to jump off it as I was heading for a stone wall and knew that I would never be able to get control of the bike once it was off a tarmac road. The bike pummeled into the wall, and I hit the floor with force. My leathers and helmet saved me from a much worse fate but I think if I’d have hit the oncoming car or the wall, I’d have been dead instantly. I was on my way to stay with friends and my aerosol deodorant exploded in my rucksack, and my visor completely detached from my helmet.
Was supposed to be the passenger in my mom’s little car when it was t-boned &that side flattened.Ran directly off a cliff in the night in a snowstorm, flipped in the air while falling and land 25 ft below in deep soft snow, face up, head point downslope, not knowing what happened.The forgotten timer set on my phone, for a COVID test, went off in my pocket as I was about to make a turn….the sound so startled me that I slammed on the brakes, just as a large truck ran the light and cut thru my lane where it would have hit me head on.
Not sure if this counts but..Many years ago I was riding home from our local dirt jumps on my BMX. Behind my house is a quarry which has a really rocky bridleway running down the hill. This is the route I would usually take to get home from the jumps.Anyway, I was heading home while the sun was setting and was absolutely blasting it down this rocky path. I jumped off of one of the rocks and while I was in the air, I watched my front wheel drop out from my forks and before I knew it, they had pummelled stright into the ground sending me straight over the handlebars. I flew a good 20-30ft and landed on a big rock, right on my spine. I wasn’t wearing a helmet at the time but fortunately I was wearing my backpack which cushioned my landing.I walked away in shock but completely unscathed apart from a small graze on my knuckles. I have never felt so lucky to be wearing a backpack in my life, without it I’d certainly have been paralysed or worse..
I (unkowlingly) had a UTI, never really had one before but I was always told the symptoms were things like dark urine, pissing blood, being itchy, I had NONE of them. I was trying to “tough guy” it out but I had pain in my stomach for at least 5 days and I decided to go to Urgent Care because I couldn’t eat or walk anymore. They thought my appendix had f*****g blown so they sent me to the ER but it was a UTI abt ~24 hrs away from going septic and infecting other organs. I felt pretty f****n stupid but at the same time I had no symptoms other than pain. Shits scary.
My cousin and I were sitting on the back of a houseboat when we were little. All the adults were inside, as adults were in the 80’s. After a while we stumbled inside instead of falling asleep at the back of the boat. We had carbon monoxide poisoning. Had to be rushed to the hospital. Grandpa bought a new boat motor the next day.
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I was born into a life with every reason, incentive, and all the motivation to kill myself.Yet I didn’t.And on top of that, I survived all the countless absurd stuff that should have killed me.
No S*** there I was, Afghanistan. 15 minutes till midnight. Me and another guy were standing outside on guard duty. Every 2 hours you’re supposed to get in the humvee and run the engine so the battery didn’t die due to the onboard computer that was always on. 2 minutes after we get in, are doing the radio checks etc and BOOM, rpg hits exactly where we were standing (Im sure they were aiming for the humvee). Oh what a night….
Survived a bear attack, survived being lost at sea for 4 days (on a fishing boat, ra out of gas, no land in sight), walked away from falling out of a two story window when I was like 4 or 5, walked away from crashing my motorcycle into a guardrail, walked away from my friends 300zx TT crashing though trees and splitting in half….think that’s about it.
Went into a coma from pneumonia that turned my blood septic and woke up 2 days later. The doctors didn’t think I would wake up.I was hung with a rope and ripped my ear off to get out(when they execute you they use a hangmans noose for a reason).Put in a cd at a stoplight and the stereo kept spitting it back out. In my focus to get it to work I didn’t see the light turn green. Just as the guy behind me honked a car ran the red light at full speed and hit the cars that went beside me when the light turned green. The guy behind me didn’t move, even when the traffic cleared.
I know a gentleman that had colon cancer found like this.At his semestral check-up he says to his doctor that his stool hasn’t been “the same” for a couple days. His dad and his grandad both had gastrointestinal problems, so his doctor decides to do further testing.It’s colon cancer, but it’s found so so early that they got it out with a small surgery and that was it.
I had a tumor removed before it progressed to colon cancer, which it likely would have done if I hadn’t gone to the doctor.
I passed out while drunk/high after going to the bathroom and broke a toilet with the back of my head. Woke up in a pool of blood and ended up with ~30 staples in the back of my head. I showed a doctor a picture of the bathroom scene once and he looked visibly shook.
I was on a mountain trail in South Dakota. I’m not sure if we took a wrong turn or the trail just ended, but along a mountainside the rope just ended, and the next bit was very sloped and covered in fine gravel.12-year-old me clambered across but barely, and my parents asked me to come back.Only later did I realize that the drop was many tens of feet, and a slip was very likely.This is not a climactic or crazy story, but the slow, creeping reality of death haunts me whenever I think of it.
6 yo and I drowned, was pulled out of the pool and resuscitated. I firmly believe I experienced NDE similar to that of people who have described psychedelic experiences but it was so long ago it’s hard to know for sure. In any case with those types of experiences I think it’s each to their own.
Dont know if this is cheating, but I was born dead umblical cord twice around my neck and have tried suicide 3 times. Still here.
A bullet was an inch from my face.
Horrible car accident. Car flipped a ton of times. No seat belt, flew out the window. Walked away.
I was at a stop sign and saw a car swerve to miss another car and head straight for me. Seatbelt laws weren’t a thing yet and I jumped across the center console and grabbed the passenger door handle just as he hit my car’s driver side door. I flew back across the car and into the drivers side door which had been pushed in halfway across the drivers seat.
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