How many times did you almost die?

[Ligurian]

Ever have any near death experiences that you look back on, and wonder how you weren't permanently injured or dead?
Do you think you're accident prone? Or that someone is out to get you?
How old were you the first time it happened?

 

[Tuur]

An odd question. I don't know if I could correctly state all the times. I don't know if any of us know all the times. I should have died in a farm accident as a child, but wasn't scratched. I should have died in a traffic accident, but didn't. It gave me a funny feeling when the electrically insulated gloves I use at work failed an electrical test. Have had electrical equipment burn up in my face. Have had a transformer spew hot oil soon after I'd been standing under it. Used a multimeter one Saturday to determine if equipment was de-energized, then had to turn it in on Monday because they'd been recalled. Just some times that come to mind.

 

[Soyeong]

I entered into cardiac arrest a few weeks ago. Thankfully, my wife heard me fall and the police were there within five minutes. It took seven shocks with a defibrillator to get my heart started.

 

[Junkyarder]

I've been riding motorcycles for 19 years regularly. Despite my defensive driving and training, plenty of "That could have ended very badly" moments.

 

[MehGuy]

Never to my recollection. There was a speaker at school who dressed up like an early 19th century Louis and Clarkesque explorer. During the end of his talk, he pulled out a musket or whatever and aimed it at the crowd of us kids and fired a blank... honestly it was terrifying. The gun moved in slow motion, and everyone was screaming... probably the closet to thinking maybe I would die. This was only a few years after Columbine too... so I'm not sure why or if that speaker got in trouble for that little stunt, lol.

 

[MissRowy]

I nearly drowned in a wave pool when I was younger. My mum was trying to get the lifeguards to help but they just stood there looking stupid. Mum eventually got me to shallower water

 

[jayem]

I'm not sure if this qualifies as a near death experience. But it was the biggest scare I've ever had. Years ago, I was returning home after attending a conference. The plane was approaching the runway and had descended to about treetop level. Suddenly and without any warning, it immediately jerked upward. and banked sharply to the left. Of course, my seat belt was on, but for a moment it felt like my body was being launched out of my seat, while all my internal organs were hitting the floor. Several seconds later, the pilot was on the intercom saying that another plane was on the runway to which we were directed. I'll never forget how nonchalant he sounded. All of us passengers were stunned. I know we were all thinking "what the ---- just happened?"

 

[Pommer]

I got stuck in an olden-days refrigerator (they latched tight kids!) for about twenty minutes.

 

[Bob Crowley]

I think the OP was hinting at "near death experiences". I can't claim to have had one of those, but like everybody else I've had close shaves from time to time. I remember my old Presbyterian pastor saying in one of his sermons that "Every parent knows that it's only by the grace of God that their children get to live to twenty one".

As for life after death, I don't have a problem with that. I've claimed for years that the night my father died he turned up in my room, and we talked and argued. At the very end he gave one almighty scream and disappeared. A psychiatrist I used to go to said that when he was in a (Catholic) Church they announed one of the parishioners had died that morning. She'd also been one of his patients.

He said "She was in the church!". He could see her and she seemed to be trying to make contact with him. He said she then moved to the other side of the church where he thought she might have had some family members. He was probably the only one who was allowed to see her. I sometimes wonder if that happened because I'd regularly told him about my father turning up, and God decided he should have his own experience to confirm my story.

A lady I met during my last job said that her husband turned up the night he died, sat on the foot of the bed and apologised for the way he'd treated her. Apparently he'd been very abusive. To make it more interesting, her eldest daughter had the very same experience. Of all the kids, he'd been most abusive to her. So he apologised to her as well.

That's three people in my limited social circle who have had "visits" from someone they knew after that person died, including myself. I think that if someone went through the community and asked everybody if they'd experienced something like this, there'd be a lot of people who qualify.

But in our atheist, humanist society which doesn't want to admit God exists, any statement along these lines gets the arrogant, know-it-all response that "You're off your meds!"

They'll find out just how wrong they are in due course.

 

[HowRU?]

Hello. Three times come to mind, but there were others.
1. I was on a golf course walking and golfing and talking to a friend. We turned a corner a bit to the right. About 10 seconds after we turned the corner, a huge (I mean HUGE) dead tree on the edge of the fairway fell into the fairway from that corner. Both of us looked at each other with our faces gone white. If that tree had hit either of us, there would have been just a smudge left.
2. I was driving my car, with pregnant wife next to me and came up a free way turn onto another freeway. God uploaded a lane change maneuver into my head that I had done on my motorcycle previously. Ten seconds later the situation presented itself again. I changed lanes without thinking or looking beside me and avoided a rear end collision. There was no time to think. This vision kept me from slamming on the brakes in vane.
3. I was riding my motorcycle one rainy Halloween night. I approached an unexpected Stop sign after riding over a little hill. The Stop sign approached a larger road at an angle so as to get on it going in one direction, or you could turn hard right and go the other. As I approached the surprise Stop sign, I realized I was going too fast to stop, and barreling right at me was vehicle headlights. I didn’t want to fishtail in front of the vehicle and possibly go down, so I aimed for getting on the road and closed me eyes as the headlights got bigger. I honestly don’t know if I passed in front or behind it, but I ended up on the road near the shoulder and pulled over to let my heartbeat slow down.

Then there’s the bear incident, but that’s another story.

 

[ecumeni]

I served in combat in the middle east so....I voted more than a dozen times.

 

[Ligurian]

Yup, Voting is a near-death experience... oh, you mean the poll...