Narrowly escaping death after being at the wrong place and time is something nobody takes for granted.
I still shudder when thinking about the time I drove home after rehearsing for a show in Los Angeles.
It was 9 p.m., and I was exhausted. My focus was not as keen as it should have been while driving on a busy street.
However, it's a good thing I had quick reflexes when I saw an 18 wheeler on the opposite side of the road swerving onto the wrong side of traffic and hurtling towards me at roughly 50 m.p.h.
With the brights blinding me, I made a sharp right, not knowing if I might hit parked cars along the street. In that instant, the semi clipped the back left of my vehicle and I did a 180.
The driver – clearly under the influence – kept going and doing who knows what else.
I walked away with my life and no injuries.
I continue to count my blessings.
Wanting to hear about scary life situations, Redditor LegitimateShift8 asked:
"What was the biggest bullet you dodged?"
Close Call
"A few years ago I had pneumonia, but my whole family insisted that it was just post nasal drip, (Which runs in the family) after a week or two I woke up in the middle of the night when I couldn't feel my arm. After I got to the ER the doctor said that it was the worst he'd ever seen and he was surprised I wasn't dead."
"I had 3 lbs of mucus cut out of my lungs and another two weeks in the hospital siphoning out the rest."
"For three months afterwards I could barely walk half a mile without starting to pass out and I still can't run for more than 200-300 yards without collapsing."
The Landing
"Many years ago, my flight had just landed at Chicago O'hare and the plane was taxiing when the pilot suddenly slammed on the brakes. People were literally thrown forward against the seat in front of them. A few seconds later, another plane (taking off I think) went screaming by right in front of us."
– khendron
City Bus
"Around 30,000 pounds."
"I was driving with my wife in town one snowy evening and we had pulled up to a stop light. I happened to glance up at the rear view mirror and saw a city bus heading towards us... and rotating sideways. I hit the gas and pulled ahead into the intersection and left into the turning lane, and less than a second later, the bus went sliding through right where our car was. It came to a stop on the other side of the intersection and fortunately didn't hit anything, but one second or two feet difference and we would've had some nice spinal injuries."
Was It Purgatory?
"As a kid, after running errands in town with my mom, I was climbing into the backseat of our family station wagon. A semi-truck hit a power line pole down the street causing the still-live wire to fall, bounce off the roof of the car and hang across the open door just a foot or two above my legs."
"Raised catholic, I wondered for a while after if I had actually died that day and that the rest of what I thought was my life was my purgatory."
Keeping The Job
"Not changing jobs in early 2020. Would have been a short lived promotion after early restructuring and layoffs."
The Con
"A friend had lost his job under suspicious circumstances. A few weeks later he asked me to take him to the bank, as I got near to pick him up I caught a train. He called to say never mind he would get someone else."
"A few days later a friend sent out a message to a large number of our friends, this guy lost his job and was running a check cashing con - Can you cash this check for me? I'll pay you $50 if you do. The check is $500, he has no backing funds, you eat the whole amount. He did this to several friends in a few day to amass a few grand and was about to skip town when the cops got him."
Don't Bypass Safety Lockouts
"Not me, but I had a field service engineer working on one of my big robotic liquid handlers. He decided to bypass the safety pin that prevents the heads from moving while the cover is open while he had a diagnostic program queued up on the computer. What he didn't know was that the instant he reinserted the safety pin the machine would execute the queued instructions and start moving, and he had a hand inside it right in the danger zone."
"I grabbed his shoulder and yanked his hand out an instant before it was crushed. He stopped ignoring me when I told him to stop bypassing safety lockouts to save a few minutes."
Hero Wife
"after i had a stroke, i was in a coma and it didn't look like i'd wake up. the drs asked my wife if they should let me go. i only exist because she said no. i didn't dodge a bullet so much as my wife blocked it for me."
– miked4o7
Dodging Flames
"Was going to move to a different apartment complex last month...got injured at work and lost hours; therefore, couldn't come up with the deposit money in time. Last week some a**hat was cooking meth and caught the building on fire."
My current apartment complex is notorious in my city for having elevator troubles, so in reality, username DOES check out! Also, you could say I dodged 2 bullets...1, the fire. 2, I know 'bad stuff happens everywhere blah blah blah' but the new place really didn't strike me as the kind of place where methheads live. So I guess avoiding those kind of people for neighbors was dodging a bullet in itself!"
The Newborn
"My newborn needed to be rushed to a super high level NICU to be put into a state of induced hypothermia, because he only had hours before he would suffer permanent brain damage. I live in a small town in the middle of no where."
"The small town next door just barely upgraded their hospital to have that hypothermia suite, one of only a few in Texas."
"He's doing great, no sign of any damage."
Thank You For Being A Friend
"I stayed up all night before a daytrip to Hong Kong. You know that daze when you haven't slept, you're just kinda robotic and doing the human stuff, nearly zero awareness of anything?"
"Well, I went to cross a street and my friend behind me SNATCHED my shoulder and yanked me backwards just in time to feel the WHOOSH of a doubledecker bus breezing past us. I just looked at him like 'oh, thanks man' and it took a whole extra minute for my brain to process I would be f'ken ded had he not grabbed me."
Involuntary Early Riser
"Freshman year of college I had a calc class. It was material I had learned before, but for various reasons they didn't give me transfer credit. So I skipped class quite frequently."
"Though I usually slept in, one morning I find myself awake at 8:30 and not really feeling like sleep. Might as well check in on the class and see what's going on."
"It was the midterm exam."
– mlahut
Alarm Setting Mistake
"Junior year of college I was planning to get up at 6:30am for an 8am economics final. I wanted to give myself enough time to come to, get a decent breakfast and do some last minute reviewing."
"Instead of my alarm clock, an ambulance siren instead ends up waking me up. I look at my clock, 6:35 am. I had done the classic 'set the alarm for PM instead of AM'. Even through I had a buffer of 90 minutes, I would have most certainly overslept as that whole semester the earliest I had a course normally was 10am."
The Stab
"Getting chased by someone with a knife across my apartment. I closed my door at the right moment so that person ended up stabbing my wooden door instead. The mark was there until I left the apartment a few years later as a constant reminder of what could have been."
A Smooth Criminal
"When I was in middle school I wanted to buy a fedora, but none could fit my head."
Got Married
"At 17 y/o I met and married a sweet little North Carolina daddy's girl."
"had I not I would have still been hanging with my friends that just discovered heroin."
"of the 3 friends, 2 are dead and one did 10 years in prison."