It has to personally have happened to you. You can’t just have witnessed a mugging or something

26 comments

  1. Attacked by a seal at night in zero visability while scuba diving alone.

    2nd place goes to giving a speech at a wedding.

  2. Would have to be one of the occasions (I think this happens to all parents) where my children nearly managed to accidentally kill one of themselves or each other.

    Going before that were the occasions when I was a child and nearly managed to accidentally kill myself.

  3. Step father came in drunk one night (I was about 5/6) held a drill to me in bed and turned it on, luckily it just swirled up my duvet. Don’t remember much else other than the excuse “I thought you was your mum”

  4. Having the local anaesthetic not work when having a c-section and trying to tell the anaesthetist that I could still feel everything, but he told the surgeon I was wrong and to go ahead and start cutting.

    Thankfully the surgeon believed me when I told him it hurt.

  7. When I was a kid, I was walking past a parked van and I was certain the driver aimed a gun at me. I started crying and legged it back home. I remember the whole thing very clearly.

    I’d assume I probably didn’t have a gun aimed at me and it was a phone or something? but to this day I can remember how terrified I was.

  8. Turning around on an Australian beach and seeing my other half (a zoologist, who should have known better) holding a blue ringed octopus

  9. Skiing down an off piste section I really shouldn’t have been on, aged about 14. At that age you feel immortal, but I lost it, lost both skis, and slid down an icy 45 degree slope on my arse for about 100m that felt like several miles, before it levelled out enough to stop myself. I was rushing past exposed rock and bouncing off bumps all the way down, and felt like it was even chances I would get really hurt.

    When I stopped and realised I was only bruised, the adrenaline hit was amazing. I have genuinely never felt so alive.

    First thing my dad said when he skiied down to me with my lost skis was “Do not tell your mum about this”. Which was fair enough.

  10. Went on a hiking holiday, lost my footing and nearly fell into a crevasse on a glacier. If I hadn’t had a trekking pole to jam into the ice on the far side Id’ve been a goner.

  11. In terms of something I saw, not that happened to me, I saw a man jump under a tube train about 5m away from me). I had just walked past him on the platform and paid him no mind, and then as the train came in he took a couple of steps forward and jumped. I will never forget the sound of him bumping off the front of the train and then going under, or the moment of quiet shock before people on the platform started screaming.

    I didn’t feel in any danger myself at any point, but I was very shaken. Couldn’t get it out of my mind for quite a while and I still remember it every time I walk out onto a tube platform.

  12. Tossup between

    (a) slipping while transferring from a tug to a bigger ship, my leg getting between the closing hulls, and feeling it oh so very gently squeezed before the emergency manoevering by the skipper opened the gap again

    (b) losing traction on a sheet-ice covered mile-long increasingly steep straight slope with a ski-jump of a turn into a cliff at the bottom, spinning down, seatbelt off, door open, preparing to bale out and trying to time it for when I was uphill of the vehicle rather than downhill – then feeling a wheel dig into snow at the side of the road, swing the car round so both passenger side wheels bit, and trundling the rest of the way down that way, engine idling in first gear.

  13. Was on a two-lane bypass at night and had just overtaken another car, pulled back in, and at that same moment, a car shot past in the outside lane at what must have been 100mph. I’m convinced there was no way it could have stopped if I hadn’t happened to be pulling in at that moment. One of those weird moments where you become aware your life could just have become very different.

  14. Kind of lame by comparison to all your experiences but an allergic reaction to some meds.

    You know that bit in Deadpool where he is left in a tube that starves him of oxygen right to the point of near death then releases oxygen, then repeats etc.
    Like that, for about 12 hours.

  15. Going for a piss outside my riverside tent in the Okavango Delta, Botswana when a couple hippos came out of the water 10ish meters behind me. Never dove into a tent so fast.
    I doubt I was in any immediate danger but the sound of lions and hyenas all around already had me on high alert so having a couple of those bad boys appear behind me made me crap myself

  17. A few months ago the pool cover jammed. It is on a roller under the floor, so I dived down and yanked at the end and it wouldn’t budge. I found a soft foam ball was wedged in the crack, and using both hands I managed to pull it free, but the cover abruptly “snapped” against the wall and trapped my right hand. I had to use my left to prise the cover away from the wall, and those 5-10 seconds felt like an hour, time does appear to slow down when you are in grave danger..!

  18. Walking home drunk after a night out, which I did often when I was younger. This was immediately after September 11. On a deserted street at 4am, a guy I presume to be Muslim approached me, and put his arm around me and started talking about how now was the time to decide whose side I was on, stuff like that, then he put his hand inside his jacket and I thought he was gonna pull on a knife on me so I totally legged it.

  19. Taking the last of my stuff when moving out of a (finally empty) rented house when a bloke in a balaclava burst in wanting to know where the fucking money was.

    Scariest but was when I got a knee to the skull hard enough to break my cheekbone.

    Still a bit disapointed not to have been given a red glowing robot eye to go with the metal bits used to pin the bones back into place.

  20. I cut my wrist (by accident) on a razor sharp packaging and went COLD for the brief moment I waited to see if it had gone through the vein.

  21. I was victim of a home burglary / assault when I was 15. My mum had just poured her life savings into a new laptop for me – bear in mind this was the 90s, so laptops were expensive and fairly rare back then. I, being an idiot, living on a council estate, told friends about it, including perhaps some people I shouldn’t have.

    There’s a knock on the door, Christmas holidays, my mums at work and I’m off school, it’s freezing cold, there’s a man standing there in a big coat, gloves, hat, scarf. He says he’s there to read the meter. I let him in, cos I’m 15 and no one ever told me to ask for ID. Once he’s in I turn around to show him the meter and he punches me in the back of the head. I go down, and he tells me to tell him where the laptop is or he’ll beat the shit out of me. I tell him, he drags me to my feet and makes me show him, which I do, because I don’t want to die. He then asks where my mum keeps her jewellery, so he takes that too. He makes me walk ahead of him to the front door (this all takes place in a very small council flat), and he hits me over the head again, this time with an object we think, as I ended up bleeding, and knocking me out.

    He was gone when I came to about an hour later. I called my mum because I didn’t even think to call 999. She called 999, I ended up with a few stitches in the head and concussion.

    No fingerprints, no witnesses, an hour to get away, neighbour was already drunk as usual and didn’t hear or see anything, I couldn’t even give a description other than “white male somewhere between 18 and 30 and taller than me with a local accent”. They specifically knew I had a valuable laptop so it must have been someone I’d told – or they told someone. But the police never found anyone.

    On the plus side we were covered by insurance so my mum got the money back for the laptop and her jewellery, which wasn’t worth much.

    Really fucked me up and made me feel unsafe at home for a while. Still today I’m nervous about opening the door when I’m home alone and can see there’s a guy standing outside.

  22. Got attacked by 5 blokes on a night out.

    They’d followed me from a bar, in which one of them had approached me and accused me of staring at him (I was having a good night with a couple of friends and had never seen the guy before), when I left they followed me until I was alone before jumping me from behind.

    I was beaten, stamped on kicked and eventually stabbed by them when I was down and out.

  23. Hiking in Snowdonia on a very very very windy Autumnal day. Got about half way up a mountain when a gust of wind swept my off my feet, lifted me to a height of about 4 feet, blew me sideways a distance of about 25 feet and I landed about 6 inches short of a drop that would have almost certainly been fatal. We turned round after that!

  24. Bournemouth beach sat in a inflatable raft wave came in flipped me over launched me under started panicking and nearly drowned.

  26. Have a coil inserted. I was told it would be ‘uncomfortable’ yet it was excruciating awful. I’ve had 3 babies with only gas and air for pain relief and the coil was the sort of pain that just shocked my whole body. I couldn’t stand it.

    As I left my GP surgery I was shaking and felt really unsteady. I got to my car and sobbed with the shock of it all.

    Tell me why women are expected to put up with this sort of pain?!

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