Gut Feelings That Actually Saved Someone's Life
Reddit user guywhousesreddit09: 'What was the “Gut Feeling” that you listened too that saved your life?'
We've all heard of intuition or premonitions or "seeing the future," and a lot of us have laughed at it at some point.
It's easy to disregard these images or feelings as a symptom of anxiety about something coming up.
But for some people, by listening to a gut feeling they had, they were able to save someone's life, possibly even their own.
Redditor guywhousesreddit09 asked:
"What was the 'gut feeling' that you listened to that saved your life?"
The Kiddie Pool
"My mom and grandpa were putting out a kiddie pool for my siblings and me in our backyard when we were little."
"My grandpa had set it up, and my mom kept insisting that for some reason, she felt like they should move it to a different spot."
"Thankfully they did, because while we were all playing in the pool, a huge branch from a tree in our yard snapped and came crashing down exactly where the pool had originally been."
- WaitWut7
A Questionable Passer-by
"When I was around 13, I was walking to the bus stop in the morning. A car was going through my neighborhood very slowly, which made alarm bells go off in my head."
"When it passed me, I glanced over my shoulder to keep an eye on it and saw it was doing an immediate U-turn."
"I noped right out and dove through the bushes, crossed a bunch of driveways, and found a neighbor who was washing his car."
"I looked back to where I had been standing. The strange car had stopped, a seriously scary-looking dude had gotten out, and was looking in the bushes."
"I don't know if I would've died exactly, but I would not have had a good time."
- Symnestra
'Final Destination,' Who?
"I was driving uphill behind a flatbed truck carrying I-beams and I envisioned them sliding off the truck and hitting my windshield."
"I changed lanes so I wasn’t behind the truck and two seconds later, the I-beams were sliding off onto the road where my car would’ve been, sparking and gouging the pavement. Terrifying."
"To this day, I won’t stay behind a truck with anything that’s 'strapped down.'"
- Infj-kc
Thank Goodness for That Lock
"In middle school, I was up late one night. My mom and my brother were asleep, and my dad had gone on business. I had let the dog out, and when I went to go get him, I got a bad feeling like someone was out there."
"There wasn't really a reason to feel this way, it was just dark, and I got spooked, so I put the chain lock up on the back door when we got back inside. Back then, we never locked our doors."
"A few minutes later, the dog is drinking by the back door, and he suddenly stops and starts growling (like a low grumble) at the door."
"I was sitting where I could see the dog but not the door. Then I hear the door pull open and the chain lock catch."
"The dog started barking like crazy and I ran upstairs to wake my brother up. He went out and looked around, but no one was there."
"I think the dog's barking scared them away, but I don't know who it was or what would have happened if I hadn't locked the door."
- monaforever
A Mom's Close Encounters
"My grandmother accidentally saved my mom's life by not allowing her to go to a sleepover when she was young. During the night, the father murdered his entire family and would likely have killed my mother had she been there."
"Another amazing coincidence that I'm alive, is when my mother was in high school, she and her best friend were arguing over who was going to take a ride on the back of their guy friends' new motorcycle."
"My mom lost the argument and her friend got on the back of the motorcycle and rode away. She never saw them again because her friend and the guy were both killed in an accident during that ride."
- ekyrt
Wait a Second
"It was very late driving and there were minimal cars on the road, I came up to a red light, and as it turned green, something inside me said, 'Don’t go yet,' and a van blew through their red light."
- imbribecca
"Similar situation, but there were four of us in the car. My friend was driving and our friend in the back yelled to stop the car immediately even though we had a green light we were coming up on. A semi blew through a red light. He later said he felt like it wasn’t even him saying it and he had no idea why he yelled it other than a bad feeling."
- harlow2088
Mother Knows Best
"Not my life but my son's. I was 33 weeks pregnant and I noticed my son wasn't moving as much as usual. I waited a day and nothing changed."
"Despite advice by doctors and family saying I should just stay home and he wasn't moving as much because he was just running out of room to move, I went into the ER and had my son that night due to fetal distress."
"He had his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck eight times and weighed just three pounds. He spent 30 days in the NICU and now is a happy two-year-old."
- Goatintree
An Insistent Friend
"A friend's feeling saved me from my gut."
"I had just finished hosting a meeting (I swear it was productive) and a friend said, 'You don't look so good.'"
"I had just come off a weekend boat diving in the Red Sea and figured I was just tired. My friend said, 'Nah man, I'm taking you to the doctor.'"
"The doctor at our clinic poked me a few times and said, 'Take him to the ER and tell them it's his appendix.'"
"I was in surgery less than 90 minutes later. My surgeon said I was two to three hours from it blowing up. I lived alone and no one would have missed me until the next day."
- ksuwildkat
A Night Walk
"About two years ago, my dad and I loved going on night walks, It was something we’ve always done more or less every night."
"One night, however, as we were about halfway through our daily route, we got to an alleyway. Now normally, I’ve never thought anything of it, but something this night just told me not to walk through, I had a really bad feeling and I urged my dad to just go back home."
"He kept brushing it off and saying I was just scared of the dark and nothing was going to happen. After a couple of minutes of arguing, we finally turned back and walked home."
"Turns out about 20 minutes after we left, there was a completely random attack in that exact alleyway that left a poor young girl stabbed, thankfully not to death, but with life-changing injuries. I still dread to think what would have happened if we didn’t walk back."
- No_Project6675
Definitely Not a Black Bear
"Up in Northern Pennsylvania, I had a gut feeling I needed to turn around and walk out of the woods I was hiking."
"That turned out to be a good idea because I saw the big cat that was tracking me on my way back out."
"I was hiking a stream up around Emlenton, PA, checking it out to see if it's wadeable for fishing. I didn't know y'all had any wild cats around there; I was just worried about black bears."
- abspencer22
Protecting Her Own
"Years ago, I went into my garden at night, after my husband had left for a road trip minutes before, and saw a pair of sneakers in the dark, in the gap between the fence and our house."
"I didn’t think, I just said very loudly, 'What are you doing there?' When he didn’t reply, I shouted, 'GET OUT OF MY GARDEN!'"
"He muttered, 'Yes, ma’am,' and scuttled off. Also not thinking, I picked up a BBQ knife that happened to be right there, went through the house to the front windows, and saw him crouched by my car in the driveway."
"I called the cops, they arrived, and we discovered that someone, probably the same dude, had just broken into our neighbor’s house and stolen a gun."
"The cops gave me a condescending talking-to about the ‘risks’ of confronting a criminal, but I am convinced to this day that my instincts saved me from a life-altering and horrible experience. We humans are animals and one animal knows when another will fight like h**l."
"We got an alarm system after that. And the guy came back several weeks later. I looked up to see him on our porch, about twenty feet from the sidewalk. Called the cops again. They sent a SWAT team this time. And a helicopter."
"They got the guy."
- Fair_Leadership76
Medicinal Negligence
"I was pregnant in the very early weeks (five or six weeks), and started getting these intense pains on the right side of my abdomen. Like so extremely painful that I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t make noise or move."
"I went to my doctor the next day, and he said I was being hysterical and it’s completely normal to be in pain when you’re pregnant. He refused to get me to an OB-GYN, and said I could go private if it was such a big deal."
"I went to a private scan, and my pregnancy was ectopic (stuck in my fallopian tube), and my tube had ruptured and I was bleeding internally. I was rushed to the hospital and had surgery to remove my tube that night."
"If I hadn’t booked that scan, I would have died in my sleep that night due to internal bleeding."
""I reported him for negligence."
- Murky_Conclusion4210
Potential Robbery
"A guy asked me for help with bus fare and offered to take me to an ATM. I got a bad feeling and dipped. Then I saw him on the news a week later for robbing somebody at gunpoint."
- BurghFinsFan
A Chillingly Close Call
"My wife was going to go on a road trip with friends down to a bigger city for a concert. She had done this several times before."
"Friends were close friends of ours but for some reason, I felt off about it that one day. I said to her, 'Babe, I don’t know why and you can ignore me if you’d like, but I don’t think you should go. I don’t know why, but I feel like something is going to happen.'"
"She knows I’d never tell her not to do anything she wanted. It was out of the blue and out of character for me. So she decided to stay home and watch movies with me."
"About two hours later after the rest of the crew left, we got a phone call that they had gotten into a severe accident. Two friends were in the hospital and someone from the other vehicle died on the scene. Had she gone along, she would have been sitting in the seat where they had been hit by the other driver and most likely killed."
"Someone, somewhere, somehow was warning me. And I’m glad we both listened to it."
- Sperryxd
Always Stop to Look at the Rainbow
"I was driving along a rough mountain road heading home from work. The mountain pass ends at a lake, and you drive around the lake to meet up with the main road."
"I got to the bottom of the mountain and started down the lake road, and saw this stunning bright rainbow over the lake."
"I had this weird gut feeling and urge to stop and look at it, with the way the sun was shining, it didn’t make sense that there would be a rainbow, but it was mesmerizing. So I stopped and stared at it in awe."
"A couple of seconds later, as soon as I looked back at the road, a massive boulder came barreling down off the cliff above about 20 meters in front of me, hit the road, and smoked all of the concrete barriers as it went into the lake. I 100% would have been killed if I hadn’t stopped."
- Epantz
These accounts gave us absolute chills as we read about other people's close calls.
We never know when our time will be up, so we absolutely have to be careful with the time that we have.
People Who Have Actually Saved A Life Explain What Happened
I'm no hero... well maybe a little.
I need a hero. That's what Bonnie Tyler sings. And heroes are everywhere. Saving a life is a blessing bestowed upon many... the people who survive and the ones who make survival happen. The adrenaline is what you run on and the pure human tenacity; unless of course you're trained to save people, that's brains as well. No matter what, it's still a blessing.
Redditor u/TheAdventureInsider wanted everyone who has saved a life to speak out and rejoice by asking.... People who once literally saved a life, what happened?
When I was seven.....
GiphyWhen I was seven I was playing on the busiest road in town, trucks and buses constantly thundering past, inches from pedestrians. A young mother, deep in conversation with her friend, let go of the pushchair in which her baby was fast asleep. The pushchair rolled into the road, I dashed out and pulled the baby out of the path of huge truck.
The mother, oblivious to the drama that had just taken place, snatched the child from me and without acknowledgement turned away to continue her chin wagging. No one but the truck driver and myself had an inkling of what had taken place. mykylodge
"I'm scared. I messed up."
When I was 16, my younger sister attempted suicide while we were home alone. I was doing spanish homework, she was in her room by herself.
She had been going through a rough time and my whole family knew it. My parents are divorced and my mom treats our mental health very differently than my dad does. My mom knew that our mental health is just as important as physical health, my dad never took us seriously. Just our luck, we were at my dads house the night that everything happened.
I heard her crying in her room from the kitchen, but decided not to intrude for the first few minutes, knowing she liked her alone time. I heard her talking, so I assumed she was on the phone with my mom. Finally, after about 20 minutes of sobbing coming from my sister, I decided to check on her (wish I did sooner). She was laying on her bed crying, didn't even move when I walked inside. All she said was "I'm scared. I messed up." My eyes scanned the room and I saw empty bottles of her medication. They were all empty. I calmly asked her how many she took, she said all of them.
I picked her up and ran her to the bathroom, calling 911 as I got her to throw up the pills. I stayed surprisingly very calm throughout the whole ordeal, up until the ambulance and police finally got there. That was when I started having a full blown panic attack. One of the police officers had to go retrieve my inhaler.
Turns out, she was concealing the side effects of her medication from my family and from her doctors. She was developing schizophrenia and severe depression, solely from her meds. She told us that there were voices in her head telling her to do it, and she was so tired of hearing them (she had insomnia because of the voices). It's been 4 years since, and she's doing much better. She's basically a new person and loves the life she's living. I'm so proud of the progress she has made. upperslide8
Foaming....
I was at a party and a girl overdosed and no one was doing anything helpful. she was foaming at the mouth and choking so I put her in recovery position and she coughed up a lot of stuff that would have blocked her airway completely. goldfishspagetti
Trippy....
Gf (when we were 15) started choking on a chicken wing bone. Didn't know what was up at first, then she stood up and grabbed her neck and looked pale blue. I did the Heimlich maneuver and the bone popped out and she began coughing and gasping for air. After a min or two she settled down and was breathing normally. She was creeped out the rest of the night and was afraid to sleep. She told me just as I started the maneuver everything was starting to go black from the outside of her field of vision, inwards. That was a trippy night. _CattleRustler_
I'm Getting this Kid!
GiphyI was once leaving a restaurant and walking to my car when I heard a child crying and screaming. It sounded terrible and I felt something was off so I started tracking the noise through the parking lot. I eventually found a mini-van, all windows up in the middle of July. Mini-van was turned off with no adults inside. I waited for about a minute, called 911 and told them what was happening, they said they would send someone. I told the dispatcher I didn't think it could wait. I remember being worried about being accused of kidnapping so I told the dispatcher something along the lines of, "I'm breaking into the car to get this child, I'm not taking the child or going anywhere, I'll wait for the police to arrive but I'm getting the kid out of this car."
Got into the vehicle to find a 3 year old strapped into the car seat in the very back. He was screaming bloody murder, all of his clothes were dripping in sweat. Pulled him out of the car and held him until he calmed down and police/firemen arrived. He was a foster child. Dad and Uncle had been drinking inside for over an hour. Temperature on the dashboard read at over 130 degrees Fahrenheit (I don't remember the exact temp).
Kid went to the hospital to get checked out, my wife and I rode with as he had taken to us. He ended up being fine. I called the DCFS case worker afterwards to make sure the kid was removed from that family. Local news came out and interviewed my wife and I and the fire department gave us a citizen service or hero award or something. My work made a big deal about it and played the news segment at one of our meetings. I just remember thanking God the kid was ok. Everyone kept calling us hero's etc. It seemed strange the whole time since we didn't risk our lives or anything, just broke into a car and waited for the cops. In my mind, real heroes make sacrifices or take risks for the benefit/good of others. We were just right place, right time, and did what a reasonable person would do. Doc_Goldberg
Don't Panic.
When I was 10 my 3 year old sister tried running in front of the bus that was supposed to pick us up. I grabbed her by her jacket at the last minute. All I remember after that was everyone panicking. i-feed-on-dead-memes
Off Duty......
Was off duty walking around town and saw a massive issue happening at the river, man with MS had had a seizure and collapsed into the water, was lifeless and drowning.
I wasn't in any kit but have a history of water rescue in my previous job so forget it. I got in after him and yeah, he was about 6ft 5, very heavy, I'm very big myself but this dude started to regain use of his body and lashing out in panic, punching me, dragging me under with him.
Honestly one of the only times I thought I'd screwed up and main the wrong choice of going in after him.
Managed to kick out from him and get behind him so he couldn't hit me, Swam him back to land and yeah he was ok.
On the plus side his mum (his care) brought me some amazing biscuits and cookies into the station the following days and the lad was so appreciative, we are now good friends. OnlyBiceps
Staying Alive...
This guy collapsed in front of Walmart a few years ago and vomited so much blood I thought he'd die of exsanguination. I got my phone out, put 911 on speaker and di chest compressions on the man while the 911 operator sang Staying Alive by The Bee Gees. Staying Alive has the perfect rhythm for chest compressions and is on the NY Presbyterian CPR Spotify playlist. The hospital was only three miles up the road so the rescue squad got there super quick. Because I gave my information to 911 and First responders the man's wife was able to call me a few weeks later and let me know her husband was doing much better.
He'd had a cardiac episode followed by a tension pneumothorax. They airlifted him to Duke Hospital and he was released after quadruple bypass. He died this year, aged 81 of natural causes, according to his obituary. He lived an additional seven and a half years. His wife asked me to pick something so she could say thank you, I didn't want anything. I was just some 17 year old kid who happened to come out of the store at the right time. I can't imagine asking someone for payment for saving their life. Besides, I did small potatoes compared to EMS and hospital staff. carmelacorleon
3000 pounds of hydraulic pressure ......
I was running ground observation during a main landing gear retract operation when our production superintendent not only walked into the coned off area without being cleared to do so, but he walked under the aircraft and started looking at a beacon light near one of the main gear doors.
Because it was so loud, he couldn't hear me scream at him, and because I wasn't keying my microphone, but I was screaming, the guys upstairs thought my microphone died. So they proceeded to cycle the landing gear without verifying that it was clear (they thought it was clear because they though I was yelling to them that it was).
I had to run and shove my pro sup out of the way of a moving door that was under 3000 pounds of hydraulic pressure and would have easily severed an arm or leg. deuteranopia
help the kid.
GiphySaw a single mother try to get her baby carriage with a new born in it off the train while her 1-2 year old toddler was trying to get off herself. Unfortunate the gap between the train and the platform was too big for that little girl's short legs and I instinctively snatched her up and carried her onto the platform while the mom went from momentary amber alert to "oh okay this stranger helped my kid".
It's not particularly dramatic but I'm pretty sure crap could be ended REALLY bad for that little one if I or somebody else hadn't grabbed her. It was a long way down and it would've been hard to get her back up. As far as I know, with how much traffic there was in and out of that train I was the only person who kept an eye on that little girl in that moment and what would have happened if her accident wasn't noticed before the train started back up? It's a thought I never finish and I'm just happy I did what I did because forget that crap. 7hhffe