Death Defiying Experises

Val,

That is scary:eek: . I have also often thought of this. “If I wasnt delayed for a few seconds, I would have been in that accendent” “The nail gun discharged ‘by accident’ and missed my head by a fraction” ….. all these things have happened to me as I’m sure to all of us, and I’m sure we dont even know the half of it.

Well, I’m glad you are ok, I take it that you were carrying your band equipment?

Dear Jules:

That is a pretty sobering experience.

I was in three helicopter crashes in a period of about 3 months. I never got a scratch and no one in the helicopters were hurt at all which is pretty amazing when you consider that two of the helicopters came almost completely apart. They were finding bits of rotor blades and engine turbines a half a mile away. People didn’t want me in their helicopters afterwards because they thought I was a jinx. I thought I was a good luck charm because nobody got hurt.

Lee

Lee,

I know things are renowned for happening in threes, but do us a favour – stay away for helicopters.

Jules, I’ve had the occasional ‘what if’ situation. I slipped getting on a train once – my foot went under the platform thingy – it ws scary but it was a ‘what if’ more than a near-death experience.

Chances are that you have met what-if situations before – and never known it There are people around where I live who have definitely been there but don’t know it. They walk on a country road in the dark, and I come driving along. The first one knows he was lucky – it was dusk and he saw me swerve. The next two times people had reflector vests on and the only thing I saw were the vests, glowing – and it was really strange to see in my headlights. Without those vests I do believe that they would be injured or dead. All they saw was a car overtaking them. But I, as a driver, saw a dark night and a hedge. Absolutely nothing else until their reflector vests glowed eerily in the dark.

I wonder if you have realised just how fortunate you were? I now you have met fear but wh not look for a moment at your fortune?

God bless

Hi,
I remember a time when my husband and I were on vacation, no destination in mind, just traveling. We were quite lost and ran into pea soup fog, couldn’t even see your hand in front of your face. We were almost out of gas, car was sputtering, but we made it through to a motel we could stay in for the night. The next day, we retraced our steps and GASP GASP, the road we had been on followed steep cliffs of a big lake. We could have easily gone over.

yeah, plucking my 3 year old son from frigid february back yard pool. he was blue and lifeless. thank god he’s almost 12 now. cpr training got him back, as did great meds and prayer.

i could not have gone on otherwise,
ferenc
on a smaller note, crashing a couple of times at 60mph, once in full gear on a highway, and once in a tshirt and shorts …

I’ve just about run out of my 9 lives……

Over the years I have been incredibly lucky…..although I maintain that if I were really lucky I would not have nearly “bought the farm” a few times.
So let me jump back a few decades to before I was a cop. (I retired as a captain, after nearly 30 years.)

When I was 6½ years old my parents took me and my 8½ year old brother to Florida one winter, leaving the two youngest at home. We had a poolside cabana at the Versailles Hotel on Miami Beach but I had not yet learned to swim.

One day my brother and I were playing in the pool using kick-boards and wearing goggles. My parents were in the cabana, probably arguing over something (as usual)…..

I was holding on to that shiny yellow kick-board with both hands and kicking myself along very nicely. I had gone nearly the entire length of the pool and was now under the diving board at the far end. By the time I got to that point, with the wall just ahead of me, my goggles had become fogged and had some water sloshing around the bottom because they were just those silly Kiddie goggles and not made too well anyway.

So, keeping one hand on the kick-board I reached up with the other and started to pull off the goggles. As I started to remove them with my free hand the kick-board slipped right out from under my other arm. The wall only an arms length away. I still remember this event with absolute clarity. I can see the blurry image of that wall in front of me. I can feel the smooth roughness of the painted concrete pool side as my fingers clawed at it for a handhold, trying desperately to reverse my now sinking body.

There wasn’t much else going through my mind as I fought that wall, sank and lost consciousness.

Some minutes later a woman dove from the diving board and came up screaming that there was a body at the bottom of the pool. Someone jumped in and brought me out. My brother, attracted to the commotion, went to see what was happening and when he saw it was me, ran to my parents.

My father had been a lifeguard in his youth, and was a New York City policeman. When he got to the pool I was completely cyanotic and lifeless. He began using one of the “old fashioned” resuscitation methods on me because mouth-to-mouth and CPR were not used in those days. It’s hard to say how long he labored over me before the ambulance arrived and the crew got all the way to the pool area. In those days they had doctors riding in the ambulances.

After checking me, the doctor announced that I was gone, and told my father to stop working on me so they could remove the body. My father told them that if they tried to take me he would kill them, and continued working on me. My father was a [U]very[/U] tough guy, and in addition to being a cop had been a star varsity wrestler on the Cornell University team. They let him continue.

After some time passed the doctor saw that the tip of one of my fingers had some pink on it and was twitching. Soon after that I started throwing up water, then coughing, and I began to breathe! My eyes opened and I looked up to see my father over me, covered in sweat and a wild look in his face, and as I sank back into unconsciousness I said, “Where were you daddy?”

I spent three days in an oxygen tent at Mt. Sinai Hospital, and a few more days recuperating. My father came down with shingles all over his body as an after effect.

I later became a varsity swimmer, scuba diver, lifeguard and went on to train the Red Cross Water Safety Instructors that trained lifeguards.
Oh, this wasn’t my first brush with death….that came when I was only 6 months old…..but that’s another story.

This is me in my Gene Autry sweater in 1951 just after getting out of the hospital.

[IMG]http://farm1.static.flickr.com/175/399573357_b0f02cbcf3.jpg[/IMG]

Last summer my husband and I were ship hosts for the Rose Festival fleet week in Portland, OR. On their last day in port we took the captain of the USS Prebble on a tour up the Columbia Gorge to see the natural beauty of the area, see the really BIG sturgeon (Herman) at Bonneville Dam and have lunch at Multnomah Falls. On the way home, we crossed the Columbia and were heading west on HWY 14, which is a 2 curvy two land road, but offers magnificent views of the Gorge. At we were climbing up Capr Horn a semi rounded the curve in front of us. He was going too fast and had lost control. The trailer was in my lane. There was a ditch on my side and a 600 drop to the river on the other side. I got to the right as tight as I could and punched it, to speed out of the curve. My husband was in the back seat, and as he looked up out the back window, the semi trailer was tipped over his head. It missed us by millimeters. Fortunately, we didn’t kill a US Navy captain. That would not have been a good thing. The truck driver was shaken and scared (as he should have been) but otherwise unhurt.